Future Skills and Sweet Nothings!

It’s been a ferociously busy week at the Assembly - hence my absence from the blog for a while……however …………………..

It is interesting to note Welsh Labour’s announcement of spending more money boosting the skills of Welsh workers which will involve funding for the Wales Trade Union Learning Fund.

I did a newspaper review for the programme AM/PM where this subject came up and the ‘take’ on it was that the Tories have attacked this policy because we are anti-union!

This is not the case at all. More money being spent on skills and training has been identified as being important, but it is only just one part of the picture.

I heard about this new Labour policy on the same day as I read that VAT registrations (which are used to determine the health of new business start-ups), have dropped by
10 % for the last two years and that small business start ups have significantly declined in rural areas like Ceredigion, Conwy and Pembrokeshire. Given the fact that outside of the public sector in Wales, small businesses often provide the only alternative for employment, this is particularly worrying.

There have been budget cuts in new business start-up programmes and practically nothing is being done to kick start entrepreneurship across Wales at all.
The Welsh Assembly Government just doesn’t seem to see this as a priority.
In so far as this new policy announcement is concerned, there are two things which spring to mind:

One is that Labour are offering this as an election ‘sweetener’ to the Unions with whom they have always enjoyed inextricable financial links (even if Blair wishes to distance himself from them!)

The second is that if this is a genuine attempt at reducing job losses in manufacturing in Wales, then Welsh Labour needs to be involving the private sector to make sure that any programmes of training are demand-led.

In so far as the latter is concerned they have thus far failed miserably.