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Work Programme (Wales)

I thank the right hon. Lady for that positive contribution. She mentioned Rhyl market, which we set up last year in Rhyl town centre, and we are going to expand it and tie it in with Rhyl college, which has Wales’s first retail academy. People will get the theory at the academy, and they will get support from Rhyl city strategy to establish a stall. The skills that someone practices on a market are the skills that are needed to run a multinational. I have been informed that when George Soros fled Hungary in the 1950s, he started his new life selling peanuts on Rhyl promenade. Albert Gubay, the founder of Kwik Save, started in Rhyl high street in the 1960s. The frozen food company Iceland started in Rhyl in the 1960s. We were a hub of enterprise back in the 1960s. I agree with the Government that we need more private enterprise, but we need proper support for it. The enterprise clubs, which were much heralded, are an example of the Government’s gimmicks. I thought, ““This is great; I can establish one in my home town,”” but the budget across the whole of the UK for enterprise is £3 million, which is approximately £1 per person for those who are unemployed. We need help to make local initiatives succeed. We have the Dewi Sant centre, which works with people who have drug and alcohol problems by taking them out of the urban community to a farm six miles away where they produce honey in an apiary and grow local produce, which they sell to the Rhyl Taste restaurant, keeping all those pounds pinging around locally. We also have the Hub, which is a youth club in Rhyl with 1,000 people on its books. Private back-to-work companies want access to those young people. The Prince’s Trust, Want2Work, Working Links and Serco have paid for office space at the back of the Hub, so it is almost self-financing. That model could be copied across Wales and the UK. It is an excellent initiative, which has been visited by, among others, Irish Senators, Irish TDs, British Ministers, my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath and Carwyn Jones. It is such a good project that I think it should be copied. The Rhyl city strategy could not exist without the help of the college—a college that was built by a Labour Government. Until the 1990s, anyone in Rhyl who wanted to improve themselves had to make a journey of 40 miles a day to Deeside college or to Llandrillo college. Colleges have been set up in the middle of the poorest communities in Rhyl, in Denbigh and in Abergele, which is in the constituency of the Under-Secretary of State for Wales. In our organisation, we have maximised co-operation, minimised competition and almost eliminated ignorance. We have meetings three or four times a year, which are well attended with 50 or 60 people present. If a jobs initiative is happening in the area, at the end of the meeting the relevant person will stand up and explain what they will be doing over the next three months. People will meet afterwards to help that individual or organisation to improve the project that they are undertaking. The hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan mentioned objective 1, and I have some sympathy with what he has said. The Welsh Assembly Government believe in the devolution of objective 1, the implementation of which was devolved to county halls. In my constituency in Denbighshire, the money was pepper-potted up and down the county. I was only able to get objective 1 for my county and for the county of the Under-Secretary of State for Wales on the poverty that existed in the west and south-west ward of Rhyl. I pay tribute to the shadow Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath, because it was his decision that Denbighshire and Conwy had that money. So far, £250 million pounds has been spent in those two counties, and we hope that another £250 million will be spent in the period of convergence. In the first seven years under objective 1, that money was not spent wisely. I am pleased that the Welsh Assembly Government recognised that and brought the convergence funding back to Cardiff. That money is now being spent strategically as structural funds to alter the economic structure of specific areas in Wales. The areas that have suffered in Wales are mining, steel, rural and inner-city communities. Seaside communities have probably suffered more than any others however, and the Welsh Assembly Government have had the good sense to recognise that and to form a strategic regeneration area based around five seaside towns in Clwyd West and the Vale of Clwyd. That money is now being ring-fenced and spent exactly where it should be: in struggling towns.