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The Budget

I am not giving way any more. There are now 3,500 jobs, including the Technium OpTIC, a £17 million research and incubation centre that works. It is the third biggest opto-electronic centre in the world. It works with 50 established opto-electronic companies in north Wales, which will turn out 100 new high-tech companies over a 10-year period. That is our record. The number of jobs created in my constituency since 1997 rose from 23,000 to 30,000, but has now gone down to 27,000. We created an extra 7,000 jobs over 13 years, and I am tremendously proud of that figure. The Government say that they hope to create private sector jobs in new high-tech, 21st-century industries to replace public sector jobs. In north Wales, 21st-century industries are in wind generation. Eight years ago, I opened North Hoyle wind farm and two years ago, my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath opened Rhyl Flats. They have 60 turbines. There will be 200 turbines behind them, off the north Wales coast, creating the largest body of wind turbines in the world. In The Guardian yesterday, it was revealed that in the space of one year the UK has slipped from the third-best performing country in the world in green technologies to 13th. That information is from the independent Pew Foundation in America. The Guardian report states: ““The news comes ahead of a crucial cabinet discussion today””— that is yesterday— ““of the UK’s climate change targets beyond 2020. There are still deep divisions between the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which is calling for tough targets to stimulate green growth, and the Treasury and the Department for Business, which argue that the current economic situation calls for less stringent targets in 10 years’ time…The Pew Foundation blamed the UK’s fall down the rankings on ‘a sharp decline in offshore wind energy investments and uncertainty surrounding government policy’.”” The Government’s policies are affecting private sector and public sector job opportunities in my constituency. They are wrecking the local economy in north Wales. The other big growth area for the private sector in north Wales is in solar panels. The Sharp factory in Wrexham is the biggest manufacturer of solar panels in the whole of western Europe. There is another one—Kingspan—in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn. Dysol, an Australian company at the cutting edge of solar electricity, travelled 12,000 miles to locate at the OpTIC research centre in St Asaph. Dysol is working on organic photocells—not crystal, organic. It has teamed up with Corus to take that work forward. Those are three excellent cutting-edge companies that have been denied the right to grow because of recent changes to the feed-in tariff—introduced by the Labour Government—made by the Tory Government so that they do not have solar farms in the south-west or in Dorset. Those are not national policies; they are aimed at pleasing Lib Dem and Tory constituencies in the south and the south-west, and against constituencies in north Wales. There we have it. Policies introduced by the Government parties in the Budget and before it are damaging job opportunities in my constituency. The parties on the opposite Benches are changing the rules on housing benefit. As Boris Johnson said, they want Kosovan-style clear-outs in London and the big cities. ““We’re not going to pay money to scroungers””, they say, but those are decent people, many of them in a difficult position. The Government are treating them like trash, moving them round the country. We know where they will go. The Government are finishing Lady Porter’s work, which was started 25 years ago. They will cleanse those areas to make them safe Tory seats, and droves of people will go to seaside towns—to Hastings, Margate or Jaywick, which yesterday was deemed the poorest ward in the UK. The top three poorest wards in the UK are in seaside towns. When people are driven out for political advantage and end up in seaside towns, the situation will be even worse. They will end up in houses of multiple occupation, with slum landlords—Rachman types. The charity, Shelter, has seen a 23% increase in complaints about landlords in the past year, according to an article in The Guardian today, which adds that last year, the Minister for Housing and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), ““rejected new regulations and a national register of landlords proposed by Labour on the grounds it would introduce too much ‘red tape and bureaucracy’.”” The consequence of that will be more money out of misery for slum landlords. The losers will be the tenants and the gainers will be slum landlords.