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. What will be the benefits of this project?
5. Do you think it's far to spend this much money in this region of Wales?
   Why?

Definition

In the last edition of GITN we started to look at the importance of infrastructure within Wales and the UK. From the last issue you should know that infrastructure refers to structures, systems and facilities serving the economy of a business, industry, country, city, town, or area; including the services and facilities necessary for its economy to function. You were asked to think of the economy (how we make all of our money) as a cake; and the infrastructure as the ingredients. The more ingredients you have the bigger the cake. If certain ingredients are missing then the cake will not be as good as it could be. By spending more on infrastructure the cake gets bigger; the cake of course is a metaphor for the economy and the economy is how much money is made each year.

In Wales we tend to be very competitive with each other and sometimes we tend to suspect 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

Wales tends to be competitive and it seems normal to look at headlines of new infrastructure projects and think that other parts of Wales are getting a better deal especially when large projects of a billion pounds or more don’t come along very often.

It is helpful to use an analogy to better understand how we should look at investment in Wales; the analogy we are going to use is of thinking about Wales as a rugby team. Think of the 22 Local Authorities as being like the 23 players of a match day squad. Within that squad are specific groups of players that we can think of like the regions of Wales; there are the tight five in the forwards, the back row, the half backs, three quarters, back three 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 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.

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

The last multi billion pound infrastructure project in Wales was completed in 2012 and it was worth £3.25 billion; it was in Mid and West Wales where two new facilities were built to receive Liquified Natural Gas by ship, a pipeline was built across Wales to connect these facilities to England and a new gas fired powered station was built.

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.

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

The three South Wales regions are currently benefitting by over a billion pounds being spent as the Wales share of £5 billion being spent on the electrification of 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.

All of the billion plus pound projects already mentioned however 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 infrastructure spending it is worth also thinking about what is being spent on these projects based on the populations of each region. The three South Wales regions have much higher population numbers and much higher population densities.

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

If you think about the projects that were just discussed it is clear that despite there being several billion pound projects across the three South Wales regions the value of these per person is far lower than the recently completed projects in Mid and west Wales and far below what is proposed for North Wales.

Improving the economy of Wales is very important as it tends to have 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.