"Dear Minister
I have been involved in corporate finance in Wales for 13 years; the last two in my own limited company consultancy business. My experience has shown that targeted grant support (both ‘free’ and repayable) for the right businesses has been invaluable in allowing them to start/expand/locate to Wales and to create real, sustainable, well paid and highly skilled jobs. Both my clients (previous and current) and I have been shocked by the approach taken by the Welsh Assembly Government. My clients’ view is that Wales is now ‘closed for business’ – surely not the intention you hoped to portray, but genuine feedback nonetheless.
I have been lucky to work with some excellent businesses in my working career. Even in the last two years, projects for which I have helped to secure grant support will create and safeguard well in excess of 500 jobs in the next three years alone. I can tell you that the average basic salary across all of these jobs is just shy of £30k and will ultimately ‘cost’ the Welsh Assembly £5.5m (although almost £1.5m of this is subject to repayment). Importantly, this support has leveraged over £8.5m of commercial funding – most of which has been dependent upon grant support. Those jobs are also highly skilled (IT, manufacturing, environmental) with my clients committing considerable sums to further training and development. Several of the these clients have also created strong links with Academia with some even influencing the curriculum to tailor graduates’ skills. I can confirm that none of this would have been achieved without grant support.
I would be the first to agree that there were fundamental issues with the grant regime prior to the Single Investment Fund. However, the change of emphasis towards quality jobs, training, skills etc. within SIF was a great step forward. For financial constraint cases, none of my clients had issues with elements of the grant being repayable (why should they?) and this could have continued. The fundamental issue has actually been the WAG support infrastructure rather than grants themselves. Critical decisions should have been taken when the WDA was subsumed into WAG and, again, with the launch of SIF. However, for whatever reason this did not happen. It now appears that all businesses are to suffer for the failing of WAG to make difficult decisions at the time.
I was currently engaged by a number of companies with mobile projects and they were of a high quality with the proposed jobs having excellent skill levels and high salaries. These companies were only considering Wales as an option because of the potential grant support available. Given the absolute lack of information and guidance emanating from WAG since the announcement was made, all have chosen to pursue alternate options. This is a very poor state of affairs and reflects badly on Wales as a whole – reinforcing the stereotype of Wales being an inward looking and backward country. This hurts me considerably as I take great pride in this country and the potential that it has.
Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that anything I say will have any influence but it is important to me that I try. I would urge you to reconsider the swinging cuts you propose and to urgently make a decision on the treatment of mobile projects."
I am most disturbed by the statement about the lack of information and guidance from WAG which is clearly causing confusion amongst businesses and their advisers. It is not an isolated incident as I have heard similar complaints from others within Wales who work with businesses both large and small.
More concerning is the growing perception that Wales is 'closed for business'.
To a large extent, the blame for this must be laid firmly at the door of WAG as it has focused its communications strategy for ERP on the message "an end to the grants culture" rather than anything positive for business.
If you were a company, would such a headline make you think about relocating here to Wales? I very much doubt it.
