White clouds billow from the steelworks in Port Talbot as shoppers traipse down from the station into a town nestled between the rocky hills of south Wales, the M4 motorway and the charcoal blue of Swansea bay.
If the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, had a place in mind when drafting his budget, Port Talbot could have been it. The steelmaking town at the mouth of the River Afan has among the highest rates of workforce inactivity in the UK attributed to health issues, disability, or caring responsibilities. While locals here reckon Hunt’s budget will help, they argue the government could have gone further.
“Nobody can argue with extending the energy support. We knew that was coming,” says Margaret Lake, the chair of Neath Port Talbot Carers Service, which offers help and advice for about 2,000 people in the area.
“But there could have been a lot more though. From what I can see social care hasn’t been mentioned once. And that’s a big issue in the valley communities, where people are waiting for packages of social care. And of course unpaid carers fall into that category.”
As well as a larger share of people limited by ill health, the local authority of Neath Port Talbot has the highest rate in England and Wales for people providing at least 20 hours of unpaid care each week.
Hunt’s budget proposal to expand free childcare for one- and two-year-olds could help in England. As a devolved responsibility, the Welsh government could use its budget funding settlement to follow suit. However, Lake warns that wider investment in public services is required to help those caring for children with disabilities or elderly relatives. With lengthy hospital waiting times and cuts to social care provision, unpaid carers are left to pick up the pieces and are unlikely to be rushing to apply for paid work anytime soon.
“I think it’s desperate, absolutely desperate,” she says, adding that there was no increase in the meagre £69.70 a week carers allowance to help those looking after loved ones. “The care homes, they’re creaking. Carers are preventing their loved ones going into hospital or into a care home, because if that carer can’t cope, then that loved one has got to go somewhere.”
At the newly reopened Plaza Cinema, Andy Brown, the chief executive of the local YMCA, hopes the refurbished art deco building will play a vital role as a community hub. With funding from the council and Welsh government, it has office space, a theatre, gym and cafe.
“It’s a mixed bag,” Brown says of Hunt’s budget. “There’s a lot more that could be done, we’re in an area of deprivation.”
The community leader says UK government funds designed to replace EU investment allocated to the local area are not as generous. “Local authorities haven’t had additional funding, so with Brexit and the fact we haven’t got more European funding coming, it could reduce the number of projects we can get off the ground.”
Stephen Kinnock, whose Aberavon constituency includes Port Talbot, says austerity has had a much bigger impact on local workforce participation than can be overcome by the changes announced in Hunt’s budget.
“It’s clear that Neath Port Talbot should be a target for the government’s so-called levelling up strategy. But the reality is there’s been a £3bn cut in real terms to the grant that the UK government gives to the Welsh government since 2010.
“Whilst also failing to have a strategy for growth, you’ve got the perfect storm.”
Rob Jones, the council’s former leader, before Labour was toppled by an independent-led coalition last year, agrees. “There was a lot on rhetoric, but it’s short on delivery,” he says, while arguing that Wales is significantly down the pecking order for the Conservative government in Westminster.
As a result of decisions in the budget, the Treasury said Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland would get £630m over the next two years through the Barnett formula. Wales will get £180m. However, “there is nothing about economic growth and stimulation that will help the Port Talbot area. They could’ve done so much,” Jones adds.
Hunt’s measures to remove the lifetime tax-free allowance on pensions, previously capped at just over £1m, won’t do much to boost employment here, Jones says. “It’s only going to benefit those on the higher incomes, certainly not the working or middle class.”
Among the reasons for Port Talbot’s higher rates of ill health and disabilities is its legacy of heavy industry as a hub for steelmaking and coal mining. As employment dwindled in the area in the deindustrialisation of the past four decades, a lack of public and private investment left the town with fewer opportunities to find work.
Steve Hunt, Neath Port Talbot’s independent council leader, says his story is typical of many in the local community.
“Dare I say this is where the inactivity is born from. I am from a coal background. I breathed in the dust. I was a welder, so I picked up the fumes and the physical work. You tend to not be able to work when you get to 50, 55. You start to get health problems.”
While welcoming much of the budget, he says more public investment could have helped to encourage private sector business activity in the area. There are new developments the council is helping to support – including at the Baglan Energy Park, on the site of BP’s former Llandarcy oil refinery, while officials have approved a £300m adventure resort in the Afan valley with an ambition to create 1,000 jobs.
The biggest hope is for Port Talbot to be selected as the site for a Welsh freeport in a joint bid with Pembrokeshire council, Associated British Ports and Milford Haven’s port authority. Freeports are a pet project of Rishi Sunak, and the budget could have been an opportunity to announce a winning bid. However, locals have been left waiting.
“It’s potential for an industrial renaissance,” the council leader says. “The only way you can deal with inactivity is to create a culture of job-based structures so there’s something for everybody. The transformative power here would be the wages that possibly, or probably, will come. It would be high skilled.”
Kinnock say: “My Aberavon constituents will be disappointed that we are yet to hear a commitment to the Celtic freeport, which could unlock up to £60bn of inward investment and 16,000 new jobs in floating offshore wind – an industry economy where Wales has the opportunity to become a world leader.”
Paul Butterworth, the interim chief executive of Chamber Wales, which represents businesses across the local area, says the budget made an important “start in the right direction” to help employers struggling to recruit staff. “We really liked the returnship scheme for the over 50s. It could be key to stimulating the workforce in the area and bringing back some of those skills into the market. It’s been a key focus here,” he says.
However, the decision to raise corporation tax back up to 25% could be tougher for companies to swallow, even with a £9bn package of investment tax reliefs. “To raise that in middle of cost of living crisis, we think is a little shortsighted.”
The measures announced by Hunt are designed to help encourage people who have dropped out of employment to return. However, the criticism in Port Talbot is that Hunt failed to invest in public services and to boost the pay for workers tasked with delivering them – seen by some as the most powerful way to boost the local economy.
“There’s hardly any investment in public services,” says Sharon Freeguard, a retired headteacher who is now a local Labour councillor.
“We need to be looking at what underpins good health and wellbeing – which is all the services. The simple reason why we are where we are is because of the austerity of the last 13 years with this Conservative government. End of.”
