Infrastructure Overview

Infrastructure Overview

URL: https://youtu.be/DA06mwIKo_o 

1. As a class watch the video clip.
2. How much money will be spent?
3. Where will the money be spent?
4. Do you think it is fair to spend this much money in this region of Wales?
   Why?

Definitions

In the last edition of GITN we started to look at infrastructure within Wales and the UK.

Infrastructure is all of the things that are needed by the economy of a place.

The economy is how a place makes money.

Analogy

• Think of the economy as a cake
• The infrastructure is the ingredients.
• The more ingredients you have then the bigger the cake.
• If some ingredients are missing then the cake will not be as good as it could be.

Each region of Wales is normally very competitive with other regions.

Sometimes we think that other parts of Wales are getting a better deal than our part of Wales.

Officially Wales is divided into 22 Local Authority areas; these areas form 5 official regions in which local authorities increasingly cooperate to provide services.

Image: Wales Administrative Map 2009 - XrysD © Wikimedia Commons under GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2

Local Authority Populations

Sometimes different parts of Wales complain when another part is to get a lot of money to spend on a big project.

However we should want each part of Wales to do as well as possible as it will make the economy bigger. Sharing out a bigger cake means each person gets more cake!

It is helpful to use another analogy to understand this.

Think of the 22 Local Authorities as being like the 23 players of a rugby squad.Within that squad are specific groups of players like the forwards, the half backs, the backs and the bench/impact players.

The team will not do well if any player or group of players do not do well. The backs never think badly of the forwards for playing well and winning a lot of the ball. It is strange therefore for the different regions of Wales to get jealous when another part is lucky enough to get a large infrastructure project

Mostly in Wales when people in one region or another get jealous it is often because they forget when they had their turn or do not even realise that they will be next.

Projects

The last big infrastructure project in Wales was completed in 2012 and it was worth £3.25 billion:

• It was in Mid and West Wales
• Two new places were built to receive LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) by ship.
• A pipeline was built across Wales to connect these facilities to England.
• A new gas fired powered station was built.

Currently the £1.2 billion Cardiff City Region Deal covers the ten local Authorities of South Wales East, South Wales Central and Bridgend from South Wales Central West.

West Wales and South Wales West has put in plans for a ‘City Deal’ costing 1.3 billion pounds and a further billion pounds is planned to build a tidal lagoon in Swansea Bay.

The three South Wales regions are currently benefitting by a billion pounds being spent on the main railway line between London and Swansea.

It is proposed that £1-1.2 billion needs to be spent sorting out the bottleneck in the M4 motorway to the East of Newport.

However all of the billion plus pound projects already mentioned, even if added together, are less than the £12 billion proposed to be spent on a new Nuclear Power Station in North Wales

When looking at spending it is useful to look at how many people live in a region. A map showing population density is a good way to do this.

Image: Population density map in Wales from the 2011 census - SkateTier © Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

When you look at population density as well it is clear that the spending in South Wales is much less per person than spending in the rest of Wales.

It is important that we spend to get the most out of every part of Wales.

Improving the economy of Wales is very important because Wales faces the biggest challenges within the United Kingdom; check out the graphic from The ONS (Office For National Statistics).

Image: Profile of Wales - Office for National Statistics © Wikimedia Commons under the Open Government Licence v1.0

• Wales has the oldest population
• Wales makes up 5% of the UK population but just 4% of economic output.
• Wales has the highest proportion of the population disabled.
• Wales has the highest level of unemployment.
• Wales has the lowest earnings.

Faced with these issues we should all get behind any projects that could improve the economy of Wales and help us to catch up with the rest of the UK.