To wonder what can be done about ex mining towns in Wales?

[WelshDragon999]

I'm welsh, lived in Wales since I was born. Have lived in a variety of areas from Swansea to Cardiff and also abertillery, aberdare, Pontypridd, Blaina...
The cities do OK, and some of the small towns and parts of the valleys do ok if they're on a certain travel route, commutable or near a uni. But large areas of ex mining towns are suffering...
mental health issues, addiction issues, unemployment and a lack of amenities.
In one area (cwmbach, outskirts of aberdare) I was one of the only people in my block of flats that had a job - not for the lack of trying but there weren't many going. The local asda had over 1500 applicants for a temporary position and there wasn't much else going in the area. There still doesn't seem to be but I dearly hope things have improved.
I don't know if other areas are like this but Everyone seems wrapped up in London and the south of England because of how expensive it is
Aibu to wonder if anything can be done and if anyone ever really cares? Sadly I don't see many politicians giving much of a shit.

Xenophobia?! When did xenophobia come into it?? Who mentioned xenophobia? (Clue: you did.)

I think different areas do face different issues, though. Ex-mining towns in Wales may be more geographically inaccessible than some in other parts of the UK, for example. Some ex-industrial communities can turn to tourism, some can't. Some towns are commutable to big cities and some aren't. In Wales, you do also perhaps have the feeling of national identity which may make people more reluctant to leave to England.

I know it's not as simple as "just leave"- and obviously it is sad to see communities split up, but in general, I think young, ambitious people are a lot more mobile than they used to be. It is not uncommon for people I know from school/uni to move across the country to one city, and then maybe move to another area. If they're in a long term relationship, they want to be based near a city (not necessarily London) so that both partners can have opportunities to progress their career.

I really can't see how you can create that sort of set up in an area with lots of small/dispersed towns which don't necessarily have the best transport links between them. And tbf, if you do that for Wales, you probably do need to do it for areas of SW England and some areas in the north as well.

The problem with trying to attract businesses is that IMO you need all the infrastructure first, and if they just don't move, it's a lot of wasted investment.

However, I do agree that sometimes it doesn't actually take much to tip a community from being relatively economically depressed into being relatively prosperous. If you could attract in some big employers, and develop tourism perhaps, then more people would have more money- more money in the local area feeds into other local businesses, more shops and restaurants may spring up, large supermarkets may expand, small sole traders get more business. Over time, this feeds into people maybe being more likely to buy a house, with all the associated economic activity that brings, and therefore more house building etc too which can generate a lot of employment. This then brings a virtuous circle with an area appearing more economically attractive and more businesses setting up/moving to the area. And I do think this has happened in some northern cities etc. But I also think this is much easier to do in a city than in a cluster of small towns.

I’m at the claim that London faces entirely unique issues - what are those then?

The problem with the relocation arguments is that the UK already has pretty dense populations in the areas where the job markets are best. Most of them do not particularly need population transfers. Especially not the south east, where let's be honest a lot of those relocating would choose to go since a voluntary scheme is going to be used by the most ambitious. Even if the conditions attached to these relocation budgets precluded London, for example, it's not like reasonably economically successful regional cities like Manchester and Leeds are necessarily in a position to absorb the currently economically inactive population of the Welsh Valleys.

It would be better for all of our quality of life if more efforts were made to allow people who want to be able to live in more sparsely populated areas to stay and indeed move there. It's possible this would be most cheaply done via benefit payments, but I'd like to at least attempt to open up employment opportunities.

Ah right, not xenophobia then. Sorry.

Just "ignorance, insularity and petty nationalism". Still an utterly weird response.

If you (or anyone) had started a thread about the depressed former pit villages of Nottinghamshire, do you think anyone would have accused you of petty nationalism? Or is that just reserved for the OP because she's written a thread concerning Wales?

EastMidsMummy seems to have a particularly small brain.

I'm sorry for being obtuse but I don't understand the point about the 29 year old woman having a heart attack? Could someone explain?

It would be good if more truly remote working was available and the rush to cities and the SE of England reversed. But I suppose the people who could leave might not pick a depressed village as their home.

Better educational resources are needed in the valleys. Many children are on the poverty line and the schools under-perform substantially. The only way to improve this is to create industry and better the local education. Offer apprenticeships, business grants, improve infrastructure, more public spending. The valleys have been left for dead since the closure of the coal mines and something needs to change before they become ghettos!

If the depressed village had decent transport links to Swansea or Cardiff, some of the people leaving the area for London would be able to choose to stay there in the first place: after all, not all of them actually want to leave. I don't think it's realistic to expect jobs to be created in every village or anything, but it would be a game changer if people could at least reliably get to the nearest city. That's true of areas other than the Valleys too of course.

Not all schools in challenging areas is underperforming. So something wrong there maybe?

I lived up the valleys a few years ago, having moved there from Cardiff. I was right up the top of one of the big ones and used to get the valley lines trains into work.

I was able to take advantage of great property prices and have a 30 minute train commute into Cardiff.

My neighbours were appalled that i would travel that far for work. Appalled. They genuinely thought I was mad. But quite a few were unemployed and expected the government to make jobs in their communities.

The problems are multi-faceted, strong communities can become insular and reactionary to those prepared to break the mould in search of work, communities can become dependent on a single employer in a difficult location (as in there was one train line). Subsidies provided to firms often don't last or are beset by staffing issues - ie a medium firm may need a mix of skills - that are not available in an ex steel works community. And there is also poor education - too many false hopes and electioneering promises that are forgotten when they achieve power.

If people think however that the Corbyn would make a difference, the islington based metropolitan MP? No - fine words - until power is achieved i suspect.

I live by the coast near Swansea and people are aghast when I mention I am going to work in Merthyr...gosh how far away that is....40 mins drive! So it works the other way too. I love the fact that traffic is light except on the odd day.

tiny - that is my point. Hundreds of thousands of commuters in the SE would kill for a 40 min drive up the A465 in light traffic. But some are aghast at the horror

Kokeshi123 is right, most of these towns didn't exist 150 years ago, people moved into them from all over the country (UK) as there was plenty of work. The problem is the work was entirely related to the location and when (for whatever reasons) pits started closing there was no other employment available to take up the slack, the whole reason the town's existed had simply gone away.
There are two answers, either people do what their ancestors did and move away, or more jobs need to be created in the area. They've tried the latter, and even with EU money it hasn't been much of a success.
I suspect that many of these towns will just slowly die out and revert back to nature, in the same way many of the Cornish mining villages have.

Would it though? The people in the towns will have to go somewhere. If we're talking about them being able to stay in the still relatively sparsely populated South Wales region if they want to, but in places where it would be possible for them to commute into the city for work, I can see how that's a better solution. But if we're talking about them eventually moving to areas that are already densely populated and are not in need of population transfers (especially not of the primarily low skilled) that seems less clear.

I appreciate the points about many of these places not having existed 150 years ago, but we also face quite different population and overcentralisation issues now than we did then.

Princess The South Wales valleys account for 30% of the Welsh population, so slightly less than 1 million people, that equates to roughly 500k of working age. There are around 750k job vacancies in the UK, so there are jobs out there.

Rather than flogging a dead horse, wouldn't it be better in the long run to invest in the people who live there, by offering grants to move out, to help them find a job and training to prepare them?

Moving public sector departments is all very well but it means telling people who have homes, families, friends, children at school to uproot themselves and go to a distant part of the country. Why are they to be used like that?

I think the idea was to give public sector jobs to those in Wales, not ask those employed elsewhere to move. They already have a job.
They could move staff around to other depts and transfer all new positions to Wales.
Look how they moved finance out of London to Leeds, lots of people moved.

Rather than flogging a dead horse, wouldn't it be better in the long run to invest in the people who live there, by offering grants to move out, to help them find a job and training to prepare them?

Well that rather depends whether they actually want to and where they would be going. If, for example, the majority of those jobs were already in areas that are densely populated and where there are housing shortages then no, I'm not sure it's necessarily better. As someone pointed out upthread, there are questions to be asked about whether it's to our advantage as a society for us to squish higher percentages of our population into small areas. As I said earlier it's obviously not realistic to expect ample jobs in every valley, but a good starting point would be to ensure people wanting to remain in the area can live in towns with access to the local large cities.

This is true of areas other than South Wales too. I live in Manchester. Our jobs market here is ok but there are people in surrounding areas, often with much cheaper housing, who can't access the jobs in the city because the public transport doesn't allow it. Before assuming the best option is to support them to leave the area entirely and move somewhere more expensive, I'd rather see if it could be viable to allow them to access better job markets without having to move if they don't want to.

The thing with that argument Andrew is that people who want to work in particular public sector departments who don't live in the part of the country where they're situated, already have to do those things. Same with lots of private sector jobs too. We as a society are evidently already quite comfortable with that, as those of us not from the south east are probably more keenly aware than those of you who've lived there for decades. If people are arguing there isn't a right to have the job you want where you want it, that's as true for people working in the Civil Service in London as it is for people in depressed former pit towns. So it then turns to the question of what's better for us as a society.

A lot of departments were moved in the Sixties and trained knowledgeable staff had to move or resign. I remember a colleague who had had to break all his connections - and whose wife had had to quit her job and look for another - and whose 12yo had had to give up German to make way for Welsh, a language never heard where they were moved to and which she had no interest in learning. Not a way to treat people.

I could tell you a number of similar stories about people who had to move to London to work in/continue working in certain fields. Yet it seems that's very much a way to treat people.

In terms of history - the towns in the valleys developed very quickly around the mining and then steel industry. The coal that was easy to get went first, and by the early 20C the pits were being worked out and closed.

However - a lot of modern jobs can be worked remotely with the odd visit to HO. perhaps better broadband and encouraging remote work might spread the work to other areas? The idea of everyone trudging into an office for meetings and being seen at a desk is going the way of the adding machine.

Definitely. There are obviously a lot of jobs that have to be done in person, but there are also increasing numbers that can be done fully or partially remotely. But people who would otherwise like to go and live somewhere more sparsely populated, accessing cheap housing and spending their salary in the local area, are too often prevented. Sometimes by employers who could allow them to work remotely not doing, and sometimes by poor quality broadband locally. We need to fix both things.