Wes Streeting says overseas suppliers of defence contracts will need to spend the equivalent amount in the UK
Lee Waters, a former Labour minister in the Welsh government and a member of the Senedd until May this year, thinks it is a mistake for Andy Burnham to think Manchester-style devolution (greater powers for mayors) will help in Wales. Referring to posts earlier summarising Burnham’s thinking (see 9.11am, 9.33am and 12.05pm), Waters sent me this note.
Just a reminder that when it comes to Wales, we are not comparing like with like. The term ‘region’ in an English context typically refers to an area covering between 1.5 and 3 million people. In Wales, regions cover much less dense areas. The Swansea Bay city region captures some 700,000 people, and similarly North Wales around 690,000 people. In Mid-Wales sheep outnumber people by 7:1. Only the Cardiff city region is comparable to English tiers, and even then at the lower end: around 1.5 million people.
Transposing an English mayoral worldview onto a very different political geography just doesn’t work. Wales may be a similar population size to the PM’s old manor but that’s where the parallel ends.
Andy Burnham talks about the regions of England and Wales interchangeably but the role the new prime minister champions for metro mayors is, in many respects, already performed by the Welsh government. Powers over skills, employment support, economic development, housing investment and major spending programmes sit at an all-Wales strategic level (covering a similar population size to Greater Manchester.)
His argument for England is that powers should flow from Westminster to city regions because they operate at an economically meaningful scale. Yet when the PM turns to Wales, he seems to suggest that powers already devolved to Cardiff Bay should be dispersed further down the system.
But notably he is not calling on his successor as the mayor of Greater Manchester, Bev Craig, to fragment the powers of the Greater Manchester combined authority and redistribute them amongst its ten constituent councils. On the contrary, the whole logic of the Greater Manchester model rests on concentrating strategic authority at a regional level.
Yet the implication of his comments is that Wales should move in the opposite direction.
Burnham stressed that he wanted to be cooperative. He said:
What I want to do is set the tone which is one of positive offer to work with both the Scottish and Welsh governments, in terms of looking at a model of deeper devolution in Scotland and Wales.
He said that, while he wanted “deeper devolution” (see 9.11am), “obviously, it’s for the devolved governments to determine the shape and the structure of that”.
He suggested his experience as mayor of Greater Manchester had made him more inclined to see Westminster the way Scotland and Wales did. He said:
Obviously, speaking as a former mayor, I saw how Greater Manchester was able to go on a very different track to the one that we’d been on pre the arrival of devolved powers in Greater Manchester.
I’ll be honest, I looked at the world differently, and perhaps more from Scotland and Wales’ point of view, when we were making that case for a greater level of power.
He said he wanted Westminster to work “in a more collaborative way” with the devolved governments.
He said that Britain in the past had not been particularly good at handling “industrial transition” and that he wanted to change this. He recalled visiting the site of the Ravenscraig steelworks near Motherwell recently, saying:
I was on the site of Ravenscraig and … I used to hear that word in the news when I was growing up. I only then, when I was there, understood the scale of what that industry once was, and how the country didn’t help those communities through industrial transition.
He expressed regret that Northern Ireland’s first minister and deputy first minister weren’t at the meeting.
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