Divided we Fall: The Politics of Geography in Wales

Rural areas in Wales need facilities and entertainment of the sort typically associated with larger towns, if young people are to stay in the area and be attracted back, a new report, Divided We Fall, from the Institute of Welsh Affairs claims today.

The report believes such an approach can only come about as a result of a new strategy which identifies a small number - perhaps half a dozen - key urban centres and concentrates development on them. Other parts of rural Wales would form the hinterland for these centres and have special relationship with them. In some case the key centres will be interconnected but dispersed smaller settlements, and in other cases relatively large towns.

The report admits there could be opposition from centres not chosen as part of such a strategy, but says a growth pole approach would assist rural Wales as a whole. Locations with natural advantages tend to develop anyway, it says, while if unplanned they remain unfocused and do not develop to optimum advantage.

Other changes are also needed, the report by IWA director, John Osmond, claims, in the way the crisis in rural Wales is tackled, if much of what we now know as Wales is not simply to disappear.

"If small family farming is to be sustainable it will increasingly be a part-time activity. Many farmers and their partners already accrue a significant part of their income - certainly their cash income - from work undertaken off the farm in nearby urban environments," Mr Osmond concludes. This type of activity will inevitably have to increase.

The report argues, however,that a big problem in the way of developing new approaches is the division of responsibilities within the Assembly Cabinet. "The rural development portfolio is occupied by a Liberal Democrat, Deputy First Minister, Mike German. Economic development, environment, transport, and planning and education fall under separate Labour-held departments within the coalition. Somehow the Assembly Government needs to get a crosscutting grip on the rural crisis if an imaginative policy approach is to confront this central issue," the report states.

A change to more co-ordinated action across Assembly Government departments is also needed if another gap - that between rich and poor in Wales - is not to widen to unacceptable levels. The Communities First initiative, which has £83m to spend between 2002-2005 on the 142 poorest communities in Wales, will not achieve its fullest potential, the report claims, because it is seen simply as a programme to tackle poverty and social exclusion. Instead, it should be a mainstream part of the Assembly Government¹s economic development strategy.

This would enable the problem of low activity rates - the number of people of working age drawn into work - to be tackled. Inactivity now approaches 35 per cent in Merthyr Tydfil, the local authority with the most serious problem, and a further four counties have inactivity rates in excess of 30 per cent.

The report argues that the real division within Wales is not north versus south but a much more complex three-way split, first identified in the 1920 by the inaugural professor of international relations at University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Sir Alfred Zimmern. This was still evident in the voting patterns in the inaugural Assembly elections in 1999.

In modern terms the three areas are Y Fro Gymraeg, the Welsh-speaking heartlands; Welsh Wales - the south Wales valleys; and British Wales, the areas closest to England, plus Pembrokeshire. Significantly in this last area - the parts of Wales largely outside the Objective One status area - gross domestic product per head is 97 per cent of the EU average, compared with an all-Wales figure below 80 per cent.

The danger, according to the IWA is of these three regions moving in different directions, with growing divisions between rich and poor and rural and urban, accelerating this process. Unless these two divides start to be bridged with measures of the sort suggested, the hope of Wales becoming a genuine community of communities will retreat.