Thu Feb 12, 2015 11:20 pm
I don't think it is completely pointless, Jantra - and there may be money for it in the longer term.
Here are a few things such work could be good for:
1) Branding and 'the offer'. Even just marketing something as a city region may have a small +ve effect. Creditsafe, for instance, base their corporate staff in Cardiff Bay, and their UK sales staff in Caerphilly. Selling the region as integrated but with different niches in different areas may be helpful.
2) As a strategic guide to priorities as and when funding becomes available. I think here it is pretty weak - its pretty consensual, and non committal. I would have hoped they would have said what the priorities are for transport infrastructure. Is it M4 relief road? Is it improved metro rail? Which parts of the metro rail network? When investing in new infrastructure/services, is it cross-Valley, or North South to prioritise.
3) Setting a vision to help build the case for more funding to be made available in both the Welsh budget context, and negotiations around further development.
Transport capital spending has done relatively poorly in Wales, because they decided to protect capital spending on "development", "housing" and "health" relatively more than in England. Maybe this builds the case for shifting more to transport and connectivity if that's the key thing to boosting performance (not yet more grants to tidy up dying high streets, or boost social housing, where more innovative funding streams might becoming available).
And in negotiations with the UK government two things could happen. (1) is a boost to capital borrowing powers. Wales is currently being offered £500 million, compared to £2.3 billion for Scotland. Given parity on population we should get about £1.3 billion; on revenue perhaps £1.0 billion. And there is a debate about whether to devolve the network rail grant to Wales - if we had the same deal as Scotland, that would be a boost of a couple hundred million a year. Might then argue for a consequential for HS2 which definitely has no benefit for Wales!!
Having a plan of what to spend the money on can help bolster the case; and is there to go if the political negotiations are pulled off and Wales does see a bit more money coming its way.
And you talk about handouts from England. You could just as easily say every part of the UK has handouts from London and the South East. Or that people in the bottom 80% of the income distribution get handouts from those in the top 20% through tax and spending. Another way to put it is risk sharing and redistribution in a fiscal union. There is a question about how that union should be structured - how much is "needs based" versus how much is "own resource" or "contributions" based. But as always you oversimplify.