Originally Posted by
Sean North
So who do you blame for the economy of Bristol and the surrounding areas growing and attracting businesses, and then the South Wales economy that does neither?
I have done some work on this because there is now a problem attracting passengers from Wales, who now prefer Bristol, to return to Cardiff but to do it through fair competition rather than subsidies to a publicly owned airport that Bristol rightly sees as unfair.
Incomes in Cardiff city and suburbs are sufficient for a high propensity to fly but the population isn’t that big.
The population of the Cardiff hinterland have low incomes and a low propensity to fly due to economic scarring. The old heavy industries had a short period of prosperity but were well past their best when Thatcher withdrew support.
What came next was an attempt to attract subsidy tarts, companies that moved around the world to attract the best subsidies but didn’t have much of their research and development here and could always be attracted away to the next good deal.
Money was spent on roads to support those industries either in decline or didn’t exist any more. A good public transport system that could have transported workers from areas in decline to good jobs elsewhere wasn’t developed until now. Much of the mistakes were made by the UK Government and not by the Welsh Government which had to deal with a poor model of devolution.
The answer to bring it back to Cardiff Airport is to raise the propensity to fly in the Cardiff hinterland and in the cities of Swansea and Newport, although any rising incomes in Newport is going to benefit Bristol equally with Cardiff.
To do this will take a radical overhaul of the support system for growing companies in Wales, providing premises, a trained workforce and cheap easy finance. If that sounds like the Wales Development Agency, that would probably be correct. It was abolished because politicians couldn’t control it but control by politicians is the last thing it needs.