---

Responding to the Downturn and Planning the Future Economy

We have had an excellent debate in all quarters. Speaking as a Barnsley Member, it is highly appropriate that we have our region’s first Grand Committee meeting in Barnsley, because over the years we have taken some hard knocks when depressions have affected this country. I am certainly proud to be a Barnsley Member. I remember the first meeting that I attended in this chamber on 26 September 1980, when I was 27 years old, to represent the area where I was brought up and in which I lived for the majority of my life. We have to look at history when we look at experiences during depressions. Mention has already been made of the Heseltine pit-closure programme in 1992. In Barnsley, thanks to Mr. Heseltine, we lost 30,000 jobs in 18 months. In effect, we had a generation that was abandoned—and I mean abandoned. The Labour Government are determined not to abandon a generation as the previous Government did. My hon. Friend the Member for Keighley mentioned the abolition of the West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire county councils in 1986. They performed a role in strategic economic regeneration in the sub-regions. The first thing that we did as a council in 1986 was to set up an economic development department and appoint a director of economic development. The Tory Government criticised us for doing that and said that we should not be wasting money on replacing jobs in Barnsley—that is an historical fact. I mention that is because a few weeks ago I went to the official opening, in Grimethorpe, of the Leggett and Platt centre for bed-spring manufacture. That American manufacturer has just invested $22 million in building its European headquarters in my constituency. That happened only because of the support that we received from Yorkshire Forward and Barnsley development agency. Going back to 1986, one thing that I forgot to mention was that it took us four years from when we set up the economic development department to bring in a foreign investor: Koyo Seiko, a high-quality engineering company that provides car component parts to Toyota and another Japanese company—I forget the name.