Minister for Enterprise, Connectivity and Energy, Adam Price, says his message to business and to the country is direct: Wales means business. Not as a slogan. As an instruction.
Adam Price.(Image: Senedd Cymru)
A country can possess many of the ingredients of prosperity and still fail to turn them into prosperity itself. Wales knows that lesson too well.
Welsh productivity sits just above four-fifths of the UK average. We have a deep-water port at Milford Haven, an Airbus wing plant at Broughton, a compound semiconductor cluster in south-east Wales, a steel transition under way at Port Talbot, and a floating offshore wind opportunity in the Celtic Sea that few coastlines anywhere can match. We have universities good enough to anchor industries we have not yet built. The materials of an advanced economy are here. The efficient arrangement of them is not.
That is the gap we have inherited.
Prosperity is not a stockpile. It is circuitry: knowledge moving between firms, sites made ready for investment, power and planning and skills arriving in the right order. Where the wiring is poor, possibility stays trapped as potential.
As the new Cabinet Minister for Enterprise, Connectivity and Energy in the first Plaid Cymru-led government, my message to business and to the country is direct: Wales means business. Not as a slogan. As an instruction.
Government does not create prosperity alone. Firms invest, workers raise their game, researchers generate knowledge, unions defend fair growth, communities give enterprise its roots. But government decides the speed at which all this is allowed to happen. It can make a site investable or strand it. It can treat energy, transport, planning, procurement and finance as separate files, or as parts of one system. Wales now needs the latter.
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The results of fragmentation are familiar to anyone who runs a Welsh business. An established engineering firm I met recently – profitable, with orders waiting – was told the grid cannot connect its expansion. Such answers used to be rare. They are now ordinary. Promising projects stall on land, grid, planning, transport or finance, sometimes on all five at once. Companies get passed between programmes when what they need is a route through.
None of this is uniquely Welsh. Modern economies are full of such coordination problems. The difference between places that advance and places that drift is not that the former have no problems. It is that they have built institutions capable of seeing the whole chessboard.
Our ambition is for Wales to become one of the easiest places in the United Kingdom to start, grow and invest in a business. That does not mean a bonfire of standards. Deregulation is not development. What we mean is more demanding: a state that is faster, clearer, more commercially literate and more serious about delivery.
The test is simple. If a firm wants to grow, does it know where to go? If a strategic site is blocked by power, transport or planning, who owns the next decision? These are not ideological questions. They are the practical grammar of economic development.
Over the coming weeks I will meet business organisations, employers, investors, founders and unions across Wales. I will ask for big ideas and for small ones – the low-cost and no-cost changes that would make Wales easier to operate in. Which forms have outlived their purpose? Which approvals add delay without protecting anything? A confident government should be humble enough to ask, and disciplined enough to act on the answers.
The larger choices remain. Inward investment matters, but not as a numbers game. The right question is not whether activity lands in Wales, but whether it deepens and broadens what Wales can do. A factory that assembles components made elsewhere is worth something. A factory – or head office – whose presence pulls suppliers, designers and engineers into the country is worth a great deal more.
Economies grow by accumulating know-how. Some of it sits in individuals. Most of it sits between them – in firms, networks, suppliers, institutions and places. A country becomes richer when it can do more complex things, and when it can move from what it already knows how to do into adjacent activities that stretch its capability.
The wing at Broughton was not built from nothing. It grew from decades of aerospace know-how that successive generations chose to keep. The compound semiconductor cluster in south-east Wales is a younger example of the same dynamic – a globally significant capability built deliberately through firms, a catapult centre and university research that have learned to work together. Our task is to make such accumulation routine rather than accidental, and to repeat it.
Energy will carry much of this weight. Clean, reliable, affordable power is no longer simply a climate matter; it is industrial infrastructure. In the economy now arriving, firms will ask not only where land is available but where electricity is, predictable and increasingly clean. The Celtic Sea could remake the economic geography of west Wales – provided that ports, grid, supply chain and skills are ready in time. They are currently not. Aligning them is the difference between hosting an industry and merely hosting its energy on the way somewhere else.
Connectivity matters in the same way. It is not only about roads, railways, buses or broadband, important as each is. It is about the economic cost of distance and delay: whether the valleys or rural communities are joined to opportunity, whether Wales is as well-connected to itself as to its neighbours, whether we operate as a coherent national economy rather than a string of thin local ones.
This is why enterprise, connectivity and energy belong in one ministerial brief. A growing firm needs premises, power, workers, finance and routes to market. None of those things arrive in step unless someone makes them.
The new government will not solve every problem in its first weeks; no honest minister should pretend otherwise. Some barriers are expensive. Some require legislation. Some depend on the UK Government. But the most valuable changes are often changes of grip and attitude: quicker answers, clearer ownership, earlier attention to power and infrastructure, a front door that businesses can find, and a willingness to stop doing things that do not work.
The relationship between government and business should be candid. We will not always agree. Government answers to workers, communities, future generations and the natural world as well as to firms. But a mature economy does not seat business and government on opposite sides of the room. It asks them to be serious together.
Productivity can sound bloodless. Stand in a Valleys high street where every other unit is shuttered, and the abstraction sharpens. A productivity gap, in the end, is a young person at Cardiff Central with a one-way ticket. Closing it is the difference between a country children leave to succeed and one they stay in to build.
Wales’s economic story will not be rewritten by one announcement, one programme or one minister. It will be rewritten by a different discipline: fewer excuses, clearer priorities, and a government that treats the time of Welsh business as if it matters.
Wales means business. Now we must prove it.
- Adam Price is Cabinet Minister for Enterprise, Connectivity and Energy in the new Plaid Cymru Welsh Government.
