Lots of cooks, no broth

It’s a confusing day for anyone trying to get a handle on the direction of future economic strategy in Wales with the only common point of agreement among various groupings is that the present approach is ineffective, if not actually broken.

Plaid Cymru declare themselves into bonds as a means of financing the large infrastructure projects that Wales can no longer afford. This is despite the fact that the Treasury has already rejected a similar Scottish government idea. Welsh Lib Dems call the plans "pie in the sky" but only because their own convoluted ideas have been greeted with similar culinary epithets.

Sir Terry Matthews favours the entrepreneurial model or recovery, which seemingly means we should all start up companies, sell out to conglomerates and then move to Canada. On the other hand, Professor Kevin Morgan and former Plaid MP Adam Price extol the social enterprise concept and claim this would help the recovery more effectively than shareholder-driven capitalism.

The Wales Manufacturing Forum feels is of the opinion that firms should be more ambitious and achieve "high performance status" but they surprisingly fail to list any strategic proposals on how this is to be done other than make a reference to a need for "leadership" (presumably from Cardiff Bay).

Yet the dispiriting reality is that the Assembly government can do very little to spur growth in the manufacturing sector now that it has abandoned the big carrot approach and muddied the waters with what was supposed to be a ‘simplified’ funding regime. Recent studies indicate that more firms appear to be deterred by the intricacies of an inflexible Single Investment Fund than those who have actually benefited.

And even the most optimistic minister would have to admit that smaller indigenous companies looking to expand or diversify need far more day-to-day support than their larger counterparts. Therefore it makes little practical sense to expect growth in this sector whilst further depleting regional DE&T regional offices.

One of the arguments often proffered on how Wales could ‘go it alone’, is the compact size of the nation and the closeness between the various tiers of government and the social & economic communities they serve. It will be instructive to see how much this vaunted philosophy remains to the fore during the election campaign and afterwards.