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Welsh Affairs

I shall come to those points in due course. Our Government and the Welsh Assembly Government have painstakingly secured a strong Welsh economic platform to build for the future. Until Spring 2008, Britain experienced an unprecedented period of continuous growth for more than 11 years under our Government, which saw the United Kingdom's gross domestic product grow by more than 32 per cent. since we came to power in 1997. However, the global financial implosion that followed has hit that enormous achievement for six, and the Government have had to respond, not by downing tools as Conservatives did in the 1980s and 1990s to disastrous effect in Wales, but by active intervention to fill the gap left by the collapse in private sector activity and investment. Fair-minded people now accept that our Government made the right choices. We saved the banking system, on which every business and household in this country depends—the Tories opposed that action, just as they opposed the fiscal stimulus package, which, among other things, has delivered a £1 billion future jobs fund. That has already created more than 9,900 job opportunities for young people across Wales, stopping them from being thrown on to the scrap heap as happened under the Tories in the 1980s and 1990s with most never to work again. The stimulus package has also delivered the car scrappage scheme. More than 347,000 orders have been taken since the start of the scheme, 17,350 of those in Wales, thus protecting jobs and companies in the automotive sector. It has also delivered the business support schemes, such as the time to pay arrangements, under which more than 11,100 businesses have deferred nearly £155 million of business taxes in Wales alone. That comes as a result of the action that we have taken as a Government—it is all action opposed by the Conservatives.