Is Wales Working?

We know Wales is beautiful.

Friendly, of course.

But are we misunderstood?

People from other parts of the UK think they are going to get to Wales

and everybody's going to have a lamp on their heads and black marks under their eyes.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Are we confident? Do we think big enough?

Not so sure.

The Welsh perspective is still inward rather than outward-looking.

But don't look to the newspapers to get cheered up.

The figures show we're bottom of too many leagues.

If we had more private sector creating long-term sustainable jobs,

we wouldn't have the social problems

and the devastation that you now see.

I think it's too easy these days,

suggest sit down and do nothing rather than get up and do something.

Industry is reeling, unemployment too high.

It seems a bit mad, really, that none of us can get a job.

So what on Earth has happened?

Where have all the Welsh jobs gone?

I'm Steve Evans and I'm the BBC's Berlin Correspondent,

but I'm back in Wales today

and I'm beginning my journey at my old school,

Brynteg Comprehensive, in Bridgend.

'My trade is reporting

'and I've covered two of the world's most successful economies.

'Germany at the moment and, before that, the US.

'Why, I wonder, can't we thrive, too?

'Wales is in my bones and when Wales hurts, it hurts me, too.'

It is one of the poorest parts of the country,

with a quarter of young people on the dole.

So, I'd like to find clues for improvement.

It's the old cliche, but it's true nonetheless.

This is the future. These are the people

who are coming out of schools hoping to get jobs.

These are the people who will get jobs

and pay the taxes in the future.

We need these people.

But with something like one in four young people out of work,

what hope have they got?

Why don't any of you want to do business?

Why don't you want to go out and make pots of money?

I think the...the way the economy is at the moment,

over the recession and everything,

it seems like a kind of a risky option to take, really.

But do you feel it in your guts that we are as good as anybody?

We can do anything that anybody else can do.

I'd say so. I think it's one of the great things about being Welsh,

is you've got the pride and the ambition there,

but sometimes, you don't have the resources to follow it through.

I mean, with America, they've obviously got the money

and the resources already there.

And in Wales, we don't have quite as much.

But I think that we are just as good anyone else.

Four of you want to go and work pretty well in the public sector, for the government.

-Why do you think that is?

-I think there's a risk involved

for when you are working for yourself more so,

more security for when you've got a job, when you get a salary.

Also, when you are working in the public sector,

your hours are usually set,

whereas when you are working for yourself, you could be working for a lot longer.

This is a good school and you kids are clearly bright kids,

but the figures show that the standard of reading,

the ability to read in this country of Wales,

has actually been falling. Why do you think that is?

I really enjoy reading but not many of my friends do.

I think there's two or three other friends that actually enjoy reading.

-Really?

-Yeah.

One obvious problem is that coal has gone,

leaving an area bereft of industry.

Coal is what this village of Blaengarw is built on.

It's right up at the top of the Garw Valley,

about ten miles north of Bridgend.

The coal came here and it created the village,

sucking in people, employment, paying wages.

But now that coal has gone, what do the people do?

'"Not very much" is often the answer

'and the problem is that no work means no confidence.

'A third of the unemployed in the Bridgend area are young.

'Like 19-year-old Nickita, who lives with her parents in Blaengarw.'

I've been out of work for like a year.

I want a full time job, but there's none about.

And uh...most of the people that we're near of,

I'd send them CVs and application forms

but I wouldn't hear off them at all.

I've done hairdressing for nearly two years,

but then, I gave up.

Why?

I don't know...

Had enough.

There's no jobs up here, you've just got to look around.

This is all coal, coal has gone.

-You could have moved, you could have gone to Cardiff.

-Yeah.

I don't want to work that far away, because I don't drive or anything.

I don't want to work all the way down there.

'Sign on every fortnight,

'takes about half an hour on the bus to get there.

'I just go there, sign. You've got to look for jobs every day.'

You've got decent qualifications from school.

Yeah, they were all right.

If you could go back to school now, would you do things differently?

-Oh, yeah.

-Like what?

Behave better, listen.

How do you mean?

Don't just mess about in school.

SHE CHUCKLES

-Why?

-I don't know.

Go on, talk to me.

THEY CHUCKLE

I don't know, just messed about with everybody,

didn't listen to the teachers.

Now, if I'd listen, I would have had better grades than that.

Could she do more, I wonder? Should she move?

How can she get her confidence back?

But in today's economic climate, even graduates struggle.

Jane studied physiotherapy at Cardiff University.

They did tell us, before we started physiotherapy,

that it would be quite hard to get a job,

but I didn't really believe them until I graduated.

SHE CHUCKLES

There were 80 graduates at the end of my course.

About 30% to 40% have got jobs so far, which isn't that great.

Jon, from Port Talbot, has a degree in neuroscience from Leeds.

What an asset to the economy! But not in Wales - he's leaving.

It's quite a funny thing with neuroscience.

A lot of people are hoping to do medicine, but it's so competitive.

80% to 90% of my friends in neuroscience applied for medicine

and one or two got into postgrad in medicine, which is really bad.

People came off from university really stuck, you know, not sure what to do.

The NHS fund everybody in Wales and England's fees,

so it seems a bit mad, really, that they've paid for so many of us

to be graduates of physiotherapy and none of us can get a job.

The first six months were hard, you know,

it's not easy seeing friends get a job

or having to rely on parents or families or sign on to the dole.

I gave out my CV to everywhere in Cardiff

and I had one reply from Carluccio's, so I really pushed for it.

OK there, gents? Did you enjoy your coffees?

When I've rung up to get feedback

for why I haven't been shortlisted for interview,

they've said that they were just overwhelmed with applications, like 250 applications.

Then, in January, I applied for a job in Carluccio's.

I got that straight away

and I've been working there ever since.

-That's for table 61.

-61? Yeah.

'I've decided I'm going to move to London with the restaurant.

'They did offer me a graduate scheme

'to learn about the whole restaurant business

'and then, I'd become an Assistant Manager.'

OK, this is for you. Thank you, enjoy your coffees.

'Cardiff is an amazing city, it's great, it's vibrant.'

But there's just not that economic support

within the city that London provides.

There's just greater job prospects, greater job opportunities.

In one in every five households, there's nobody working.

A good measure of an economy is what it produces -

Gross Domestic Product, GDP.

And on this, Wales is bottom of the UK league.

If you look at some of the major countries in Europe -

France, Germany or Spain, for example,

the comparison between the GDP per capita

in the wealthiest regions and the poorest regions is about two to one.

In the case of the United Kingdom, the disparity between the wealthiest region, which is inner London,

and the poorest region, which is currently Wales,

is about five to one.

And those disparities are increasing.

So the gap between rich and poor regions in Britain

is wider than elsewhere.

Welsh productivity is low.

It's not laziness, it's just that the industries in Wales

tend to be low tech, low wage, low profit.

Some of those people say, "Oh, Wales has somehow got a right to be

"a rich and prosperous country, we must be screwing it up in some way."

That isn't the case.

The point is, left to itself, Wales would be peripheral.

We've got the job of making it something different.

This is the Rhondda Heritage Park,

Wales as a museum.

Museums have their place, of course,

but you can't pay the bills of the future by living in the past.

After jobs in coal and slate and steel vanished,

the aim was to attract light industry.

There were big grants in what was called regional policy,

but it failed to keep companies here.

Welcome to the Hirwaun Industrial Estate,

right at the top of the South Wales Valleys.

The Neath Valley comes up here, the Rhondda Valley -

this industrial estate was one of countless ones across Wales,

built just after the war to bring industry in.

And industry did come in.

Now, though, companies are leaving.

How can you compete with Eastern Europe,

let alone China, on the basis of wages?

The collapse of heavy industry left Wales high and dry,

so what filled the gap?

In Germany, there is still manufacturing,

but they invest in machinery and training for the long term.

In the US, there are creative, innovative new businesses.

In Wales, we relied on employment in the public sector.

If you've ever wondered where your taxes go,

this is the place to see it, Cathays Park in Cardiff.

City Hall there, the Law Courts, the police behind that,

the University, Museum over there,

and not so far away, the Welsh Government,

the BBC and the Heath Hospital.

Sometime it seems like everybody in Wales is in the public sector,

paid for by taxpayers.

Every thriving economy has government workers,

but the question is, how many?

In Wales, about one in four workers are in the public sector,

higher than the rest of Britain.

No government will turn round and say,

"I want the DVLA to be 10% bigger in five years' time,"

whereas if you're running a private company,

that is exactly the sort of attitude that you will be taking,

and so from that point of view,

if you have a large number of public sector jobs in Wales,

you are therefore looking at a significant part of the economy,

which nobody actually wants to grow, they actually want to see diminish.

So that really tilts the sort of economic potential growth framework

that you have for the economy as a whole.

I'm on my way to visit something of a rarity in Wales -

a big manufacturer, high tech, high skill, high flying.

Good old-fashioned metal-bashing - very, very clever,

sophisticated, high-end metal-bashing,

but that's what it is, manufacturing.

Making things.

And that, you know, fell out of vogue.

But in China, in Germany, in the United States,

all those fast-growing economies, it never went out of fashion.

This factory and its airspace heritage

has been around for over 70 years. Pre-war, in fact.

12 years ago, when I first joined this plant,

there was just over 4,000 employees.

Today, it's over 6,000, so quite a significant amount of growth.

In addition to that, there's probably some 2,000 employees

who have jobs in the extended supply chain

as a result of our presence here.

Over the last 10 years,

the Welsh Assembly has invested over £80 million in this facility.

Airbus contributes £100 million worth of salary bill

to the Welsh economy.

I don't think Western Europe will ever have a labour market

that is cheaper than the competition,

so we have to be faster and we have to better.

And the reason why we are here

is because today, we are faster and better.

Airbus trains people.

In the last 20 years, it's taken on 4,000 apprentices.

Bright young people get trained and get paid while they are doing it.

How good is that?

Apprenticeships are at the very core

of our recruitment strategy at Airbus.

70% of our senior managers in this company,

in the UK Airbus side of the business, are all ex-apprentices,

who started from school, learned the trade,

served an apprenticeship, either in engineering or in the shop floor,

and are now senior managers,

and have grown their careers over 15, 20 years.

What's the gain of doing an apprenticeship,

rather than going the formal way through university?

I just thought it was the better option.

I get to study for a degree, and I'm also getting industrial experience,

which I know a lot of my friends

are struggling to get on standard university degrees,

to set them aside from everybody else who's doing the same thing.

Why are you in it, in this dull old manufacturing stuff?

I don't quite think it's dull and old!

This is a really nice factory in here,

and the opportunity with the company is great,

and the fact that we get paid, we are studying,

we're getting experience.

When you were going through school, the two of you,

towards the end, thinking about these things,

were there pressures on you to go into certain jobs but not others?

Definitely in my school, the pressure to go to university,

and if you didn't want to go to university,

you weren't always guided in the right area

for other options that you could take up.

Some people say engineering is undervalued in this country,

do you get any sense of that?

Quite possibly, engineering is thought about like that,

but I think it's to do with education,

and once people have an insight to what it involves,

they might think it's not dull any more.

HORN BEEPS

How competitive was it to get here?

Very.

600 people went for about 11 jobs on my course that I'm on.

But there just aren't enough places for apprentices.

The opposite of the situation in Germany.

For three years, after leaving school, I went to Barry College,

learning to be a plumber.

There were 25 people in my class, and as far as I know,

there are now me and only two others currently in work.

Lots of my friends are out of work,

so I do feel lucky that I've got a trade.

TOILET FLUSHES

I feel being an apprentice is a good opportunity for me.

Hopefully in ten years' time, I'll be qualified,

and will be working as a plumber.

It's not only companies which are enterprising.

Cadwyn is a housing association, which builds houses,

but doesn't aim to make a profit.

It takes on apprentices,

kids who come in without confidence, and who then grow.

What do kids without confidence look like,

and what do they behave like,

and how do you recognise them when they come through the door?

They look so different to the kids that we meet every day.

They look at their feet, they won't engage,

they won't look you in the face, they don't think anyone cares.

And we employ apprentices within our organisation,

to certain levels of qualification,

to make sure they are equipped to do proper jobs in the future.

And they pick themselves up, they square their shoulders,

they get engaged with the office banter,

they start taking the mickey out of people.

They're just different people.

It's great, great for you, great for the kids,

but actually, you can't make a thriving economy

on the strength of it.

Well, you can, actually.

We have worked with six other housing associations,

and what we've done is insert clauses in the building contracts,

specifically requiring the contractors to provide jobs

and apprentices and training places.

And since April 2009, we've provided 270 opportunities.

But it's small and medium-size companies

which are the backbone of thriving economies.

Enterprising people like Billy and Eddie,

in business now for 30 years.

Taking on apprentices isn't as easy as it was.

Started my apprenticeship on the council,

and at the time, they had an apprentice motor mechanic,

apprentice carpenter, bricklayer, two apprentice decorators.

So, yeah, people were taking on apprentices then.

With the apprentice, you've got to allow them to go to college,

and you've got to pay for them to be there.

Sick pay, bank holidays, they've all got to be allowed for,

and it comes out of your profit.

And with just a small company,

you can't really carry that sort of scheme for a four-year period.

The way forward with apprenticeships

would be to actually cover the cost of the apprentice

for the first 12 months, completely.

They have to travel in the front with a seatbelt,

not the way we were taught,

just thrown in the back, and travel round that way.

We've only got the one van now, anyway, so that wouldn't work.

It would mean buying extra vans

just to accommodate an apprentice, really.

With few places in companies for apprentices,

there's been a big growth in courses without a guaranteed job,

like this one in the Garw Valley,

for young people who don't go to school.

It takes ages to find a job,

but if you do stuff like this, you can hobble for a while,

and then get a tidy job.

But the jobs market is changing.

The jobs on offer are very different now.

The new coalface is the computer screen.

Oh, I see, sir, right.

We Welsh can talk. We know we're a nation of talkers.

But this room is not just a group of people chattering away.

This organisation is very, very different in Wales -

it is one of the few big, big companies

that's actually put its headquarters here -

the brains of the organisation.

We were a business plan team, working out of London.

All we had was a business plan, and we knew

we could put the business, kind of, anywhere in the UK outside the M25,

so we sent off letters to ten areas

where you get grants for locating your business.

And about two days later,

we get a call from what was then South Glamorgan County Council,

and they said, "Can we come out and make a presentation to you?"

We said, "Sure, come on out."

We didn't have a grant, we didn't have the grant at that point,

so we were ready to go to Brighton.

We had building premises picked out, all set,

and we were just a couple of weeks away from moving in,

and that would have been the end of it,

and the WDA came through with a £1 million grant.

You know, as a business, we couldn't go to our backers and say,

"Sorry, we just turned down a £1 million grant,"

-when we were a start-up business.

-You've got your headquarters here.

How important is that in terms of the future of the company,

but also in terms of persuading other companies?

Well, it's really important for the Welsh economy

that it's headquarter businesses that come in here,

not just moving an office from one part of the UK to another,

or maybe even getting part of a US company,

or some other country's company to locate here.

I mean, that's not bad, but the roots grow deepest

with headquartered companies.

And what has Admiral brought?

Well, Admiral brings a lot of jobs.

Almost all of our people who move up in our organisation

start at entry-level positions in the organisation.

We don't go outside and recruit from middle-level managers.

We take from within, so there's really room for people to grow

if they have the energy and the desire and the talent.

Admiral is one of the biggest private sector employers in Wales,

employing 5,000 people,

brought here by some incentive from the taxpayer,

but also with a lot of private enterprise.

You're from Chicago, you're from the heart of the free market,

if you like, the US.

How do you contrast the way of doing business that you grew up with,

and the way of thinking in Wales?

Well, there's really a can-do mentality in the US -

anybody can succeed.

There is that belief, that kind of American dream...

-Is that really true?

-I don't know if it's really true,

but it's what people think, and by and large,

people believe that you can go from nothing to something,

and I'm not sure that's the way it is here.

I'm not sure people aspire to that,

much less yet believe they can achieve it.

So how can we aspire to it?

What do we need to do?

By showing people examples,

and not one or two, but lots of them,

sprouting up, planting seeds of business generation,

and then nurturing those seeds,

and showing people that you can grow big trees from seeds.

As you go round your country now, Wales, and you see the economy,

what thoughts go through your mind about what might be done?

I come back to education,

because the kids need to value the fantastic education

that they get in this country.

And I'm not sure they do.

And there are kids in other countries, millions of them,

who would give their right arms to have the education

that our kids have, and a lot of them don't really care about.

And we need to have that same energy from our young people.

What should government do, and what should government keep away from?

They should be trying as hard as they can to make it easy,

they should work with the banks

to try and make sure funding is available.

Funding is very difficult to get

if you are trying to start a new business.

And they should stay away from creating new rules and laws,

and things that people go, "Oh, you know,

"I can't wait till I can get out of this business."

And there are a lot of those, there's a lot of rules

and things that come up,

they are often seen as being very petty,

and people with small businesses, in particular,

can't carry the burden of those things, and so they get out.

Too much government here?

How much time have you got?

HE LAUGHS

-Time to hear the answer.

-Too much government.

I think that there's a lot of government, yeah.

You know, if you take the ratio of government per person,

I think if the equivalent was true in the US,

Congress would be about 6,000 people.

I think in this day and age,

a lot of our government is built up because 100 years ago,

Caerphilly was different from Cardiff,

but now, where's the line, really?

You know, I can drive to Caerphilly in 15 minutes.

It probably used to be you'd get dressed in your Sunday best

and come to Cardiff twice a year, something like that.

So why do we have separated government?

There's a thing that strikes me, and that is that you're an American,

so you come free of prejudice towards Wales,

you come with an open mind.

I didn't know where Wales was.

The sad thing is, so many people we meet,

even people from other parts of the UK,

think they're going to get to Wales,

and everybody is going to have a lamp on their heads

and black marks under their eyes,

and nothing could be further from the truth.

This is a cosmopolitan city, it's got a lot going for it.

All of South Wales does.

And it's just very misunderstood.

Misunderstood? Well, maybe.

What is clear is that strong economies thrive

on lots of enterprising people doing things for themselves.

Government does some things, but people do the heavy lifting.

Now here's an enterprise I love.

Why have you set up this business,

because you could go on the dole, you know,

and it's hard work doing business here, so why don't you?

Well, it's just the way we were brought up,

is, er...to work to pay our own way.

I think it's too easy these days to just sit down and do nothing,

rather than get up and do something.

How easy is it to run a business here?

It's hard work. It's a...well, six days a week we work,

and also then the Sunday, having to do things on the Sunday, usually.

Shopping and catching up with everything,

your own things that you've got to do as well.

Where do you get money from? How do you raise the money,

-how did you do it?

-We had a loan, that's how.

We went to the bank and had a loan.

We had no help at all.

Is there anything you would like to change?

Would you like the government to do more for you,

the government to do less for you,

or do you just want more people on this estate?

More people on the estate, basically.

I don't see anything at all happening up this area.

You've only got to look around you

to see that there's nothing going on up here.

You have little units, little smaller units,

people coming into them,

but they're usually there for about a year, and then they are gone.

It's sad, really,

because this estate has been here 30, 40, 50 years,

and there's just...well, there's nothing up here.

This place is refreshing.

Good tea, good vibe, good atmosphere,

enterprise, a bit of hard work, keeping its head above water,

one of those small businesses that absolutely every economy needs.

You go to a small town, you find, typically, bed and breakfasts,

hotels, garages, shops,

other small businesses all providing vital services and products

to the local community.

They create, in turn, jobs, valuable jobs.

Penderyn Whisky is distilled in Hirwaun at the Heads of the Valleys.

It is a Welsh product, but that's not the important bit.

It's a product that people want to pay money for.

Wales needs a distinctive product,

and there wasn't really anything you could turn to,

apart from lovespoons, that was Welsh.

And we thought,

"It's about time we regenerated that whisky industry."

What gave you the guts, if you like, and the confidence,

the chest-out to have a go?

Well, it is all about belief.

And we believed in ourselves.

We believed that if the Scots could do it and the Irish could do it,

why couldn't we do it?

And we thought we had enough skills to make it.

I can vaguely remember people saying, when you set up,

"Ooh, who does he think he is, and what's all this stuff?

"It's all front, it ain't going to work."

And that's the Welsh mindset, you know, that's the truth of it.

Well, it is, and you're right enough,

it's the old lobster approach, isn't it?

You know, you've got the lobster climbing out of the barrel

on the Pembrokeshire dock, and somebody's saying,

"Hey, your lobsters are getting away, mate,"

and the guy saying, "Nah, they won't get away, they're Welsh lobsters,

"the rest of them will pull them back."

That is the Welsh mentality.

We thought that once we had a Welsh whisky

and a couple of other Welsh drinks, that the Welsh would get behind it.

In fact, they didn't see Wales's new drinks as a quality product.

All around this place is desolation. There's an awful lot of failure.

How do you change that?

The best thing the government can do is create a level playing field

for people in Wales to get their products to market.

If you're in Aberystwyth, it takes you longer to get to the M4

than it does to get from the M4 to London.

The other thing governments can do - get better access to finance.

Banks don't want to invest in risky products, that's not their business,

so to get risk capital, you need a different sort of investor.

And in Wales, we haven't got enough of those,

and if we had more private sector, creating long-term sustainable jobs,

we wouldn't have the problems, and the social problems,

and the devastation around here that you now see.

The government could say,

"Your jobs aren't there.

"They were based on coal, coal has gone, you need to look elsewhere."

"Get on your bikes", is the phrase.

If you didn't have a regional strategy,

we'd all end up living in London.

You know, you've got to have a system which tries, at least,

to distribute the wealth across the country.

Otherwise, it becomes an unattractive country

in which to live.

# Pan fyddwn rhodio gyda'r hwyr

# Fy nghalon fach a dowdd fel cwyr... #

If you took the view there's no such as society,

there's just people and their families and they can live anywhere,

then that's what would happen.

There'd be a net emigration from Wales on a big scale,

you know, flood a few valleys, make some more reservoirs,

have a few old folks' homes, and that's it.

And if you were just totally indifferent to community,

that's what you'd do.

But of course, if you value community,

if you think that the Welsh people are a people,

then you have got to worry about the economy.

Right at the other end of Wales from the makers of Welsh whisky

is another big Welsh liquid asset -

the Menai.

Water - salt water.

From that salt water comes a global brand

gracing the tables even of the President of the United States.

This is where the company called Halen Mon makes money

out of the salt in the sea around this country of ours.

We noticed that we were getting orders from a chocolate factory

on the west coast of America in Seattle.

Eventually, it came out that Obama liked these chocolates

that had smoked sea salt on the top of the caramels.

And when he got into power,

this became the traditional gift when you left the White House -

you got a box of Obama's favourite chocolates,

and they have a sprinkling of our sea salt on.

My wife and myself came to Bangor to the local university,

loved it and wanted to stay here, and there weren't jobs,

so we thought we'd create them.

We started a public aquarium that used the clean sea water.

We were paying the Queen a reasonable amount of money

for the sea water, but tourism in Anglesey only happens in the summer,

and it was that that led me

to take a saucepan of sea water from the sea, take it home,

and actually begin the process

of evaporating it on an Aga to just see what happened.

And I thought, "OK, there's a little germ of an idea."

And at the time, there was CAMRA, the campaign for real ale,

and even that made me realise in my student perspective

that people would pay more for something better.

That idea of paying more for better is a new way of thinking,

or certainly in Wales.

This idea of going upmarket, quality,

but charging the prices, not selling it cheap.

Absolutely, and we can...Wales can never compete on doing it cheap,

because there will be somebody with cheaper labour,

cheaper resources, more sun or whatever.

We can only compete, in my view, by doing it better,

so being a niche market and charging a lot.

And loads of people said, "It won't work,

"people will never pay that much money for sea salt."

And I just had a burning gut instinct that it could work,

and that people would pay.

Look at cars - any car will get you from A to B,

but a Rolls-Royce will cost you ten times as much,

and there's a market for it.

It cannot be right that we Welsh lack enterprise,

that we're a bit inferior, that can't be right. It's not right.

Well it's not necessarily correct, because the Welsh are not inferior.

You only have to...

You know, I interact with all the people around me,

and they are fantastic people.

But there is a culture,

like success is defined as a job with the council, you know,

in the economic development department giving advice.

And that makes me uncomfortable, because success for me

is actually generating Welsh wealth from customers.

The people who really, really made the difference

at the beginning of Halen Mon, 14 years ago,

was an organisation called Menter Mon,

who said, "Yes we'll put £6,000 into this project."

That made the key difference.

Doesn't matter how many business plans you have,

you actually have to have a bit of seed corn funding to start.

This is a very old-fashioned map.

We now live in the...well, it's paper,

-but we now live in the world of the internet...

-Yeah.

-..which I imagine has transformed your business.

-It has, it has.

Without that, I think we would have been scuppered a long time ago.

People come to us through the internet

looking for high quality sea salt.

There's a whole community, as well, on the web,

and on things like Twitter and Facebook,

and we tap into that and we use that extensively.

-Could you do this business without it?

-No, no, we couldn't.

In the age of the internet, the world is the market.

But there are many spots in Wales without internet connections.

"Not spots."

In this world economy,

connections and easy links are everything for business,

and not just with the internet.

When I was growing up just down the road, this place,

Rhoose Airport as we called it, was the future -

a lot of hope invested in it.

Bristol Airport was just a wannabe. Now, it's the other way round.

Cardiff International Airport, as it's now called,

is like a ghost town. When I come back home, I come through Bristol.

The airport does make money from the landing fees

for empty aircraft flown in to be serviced.

Passengers are not crowding the place out.

One thing seems absolutely clear,

and that is, if you want a strong economy,

you have to have ways of moving things around reliably.

People and things have to move to where they need to be.

You have to able to move products to the people who want to buy them.

Network Rail plans to electrify the route from London

as far as Swansea to make it faster, and some of the Valleys lines.

But what about other parts of Wales?

Governments in successful economies invest in transport.

Barriers to movement keep money-spenders out.

Though some enterprising people

find a way of attracting them anyway.

Well, my name is Brenda, but you can call me Pamel-ah today.

LAUGHTER

It is a pleasure to welcome you

to this corner of south-eastern Wales.

And enterprise further down the coast,

at Ffos Las near Llanelli, on the site of an old opencast mine.

The first National Hunt racecourse in Britain for 80 years.

Giving it a go!

'It's all about people doing it for themselves.'

From the small, like setting up a car-wash in a supermarket car park,

to the big. The very big.

Sir Terry Matthews is Wales's first billionaire.

Keep a positive attitude.

Born in Gwent, founder of the Celtic Manor in Newport.

But a fortune made in Canada.

'I started up my own company, Mitel,

'in parallel in the US, the UK and Canada,

'with only 4,000 dollars.'

After ten years, every dollar invested became 2.5 million.

And the people that worked with me

were mainly in their last year in university.

Are they married? Typically not.

Do they have children? Typically not. They're too young.

Can they work seven days a week? Yes, they can!

So you've got people with energy, well-educated and hard work ethic,

directed at something which is customer-demand-driven.

What should government do, and what should government keep right away from?

I'm very supportive of a system whereby the government says,

"I'll supply funding," let's say, for the sake of argument,

"30%, 40%, 50%, and then get funding back in the royalty scheme

on the basis of the success of the product, until they are repaid.

Young companies create jobs,

so create a society that encourages young companies.

In the US, from 1985 to 2010, so you have a 25-year span,

in that time, all new jobs US-wide came from new companies.

Some of the big Fortune 1000 companies in the US,

they grow from acquisitions, it's not net new jobs.

Now, in Wales, the public sector, compared to private sector,

needs to be re-balanced,

and one way to get it re-balanced is to create more private sector jobs.

-There were a lot of people studying electronics in Swansea.

-Mm-hmm.

-But you were the one who jumped into business.

-Mm-hmm.

You were the one who thought, "I can make a bit of money out of this."

No, I didn't think that.

I enjoy what I do. It isn't about...

I'm not knocking it at all, I'm just trying to understand it.

Well, I must tell you, like, it is good to make money,

make no mistake about it. It's much better to...

You know, if you're really going to get upset about something,

cry in a Rolls-Royce than a rusted out Toyota.

You have a very American demeanour.

-Do you think?

-By which I mean North American, Canadian.

-Mm-hmm?

Do you need to be there to get that confidence?

Why can't you have that confidence in Wales?

Of course you can.

It's wrong to say that you can't create businesses here.

Some of the wealthiest people in the world came from Wales.

As a matter of fact, you know, Thomas Powell,

who built the Manor House of the Celtic Manor,

was the world's first millionaire.

If a lad called Terry Matthews, at the top of a Valley, said,

"I don't know what to do, I don't think I can do anything,"

what would you say to them?

As for people who today feel a little bit despondent,

you know, you need winners,

and you need to be able to publicise those winners

in order for people to say, "Do you know what? I can have a go at that".

You know, if you start with nothing, there's only upside.

And be persistent.

The single most important word to success - "persistence."

'In my journey round Wales, trying to find clues to success,

'one thing seems clear - confidence is important.

'Governments can help, but people actually do it, or not.

'Back to school, then, to find out more.'

Brynteg Comprehensive in Bridgend had another pupil with views.

You come over very optimistically, but just look at the figures.

Incomes are lower, unemployment is higher,

the productivity of Welsh workers is lower...

I'm not sure that's right about productivity.

Well, the value added per worker is 75% of the UK average,

three quarters.

Any measure you choose, Wales performs worse, pretty well.

So why your optimism?

Because I know the interest that exists in Wales

from investors from abroad,

If Welsh productivity was really that bad,

we'd have no investors.

What we don't have, of course, is a large pool of capital,

unlike Germany, unlike the States,

so we have to look for that capital to invest in Wales.

Businesses are saying to me, "We can't get the capital to expand,

"the banks will not lend to us."

It's an universal problem.

Now, until that's cracked, until we see a better flow of capital,

people with good ideas, some of them will get funding,

but those that don't at the very beginning will struggle

to raise the capital to develop their ideas.

Maybe you should be saying, "Don't come to me, matey.

"I'm the Government, I don't do it.

"You sort your own problems out. You have a bit of enterprise, you do it."

-It's a partnership. If you look...

-Is it a partnership?

It's not for the Government to do that kind of stuff.

Who else is going to do it?

I am a believer in government intervention

where the economy is bumping along the floor,

and that's what we've been doing.

It's not just the economy that's bumping along the floor.

It's basic reading and writing skills.

Wales is way down the list.

Between 2006 and 2009, reading standards in this country, in Wales,

actually fell.

And so did ability on maths on OECD figures.

Something is going badly wrong.

We know we want to improve basic skills.

-We've put in place, now, tests...

-Reading has fallen.

-Fallen.

-Well...

We know there's room for improvement,

and that means we want to make sure that literacy and numeracy improve,

and we've put measures in place to deal with that.

Maybe I'm too gloomy, but I go around bits of Wales,

'and I think, "What on Earth is going on here?"'

You see lads who should be working hanging around on street corners.

You see unemployment, you see the lack of money.

How can you tell me that I'm not being too gloomy?

As RS Thomas would have put it,

I think you are worrying the carcass of an old song.

There are some parts of Wales where things remain difficult,

and have been since the '80s. There's no question about that.

And it is a tough nut to crack, but I think we are getting there.

The unemployment rate is too high - we want to bring it down.

I think what we need to do over the course of the next five to ten years is try and spread prosperity.

Cardiff has done very well,

Swansea has had serious investment over the past ten years,

the old mining valleys, more difficult.

Geography makes it difficult

to attract investment in there historically.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. We're investing heavily in broadband.

We want to make sure that people have access to super-fast broadband

by 2015 in Wales, in all parts of Wales.

Then it doesn't matter where your business is, geographically.

It's immaterial. You can be in Glyncorrwg, you can be in London.

There are countless Welsh people watching you and thinking,

"He talks the talk,

"but I don't believe it cos I've seen the past."

How can you convince them?

I think what people wanted for their children was a job that was safe,

respectable, had a pension at the end of it, which is why, of course,

we've always generated many, many teachers -

my mother and father were two examples of that.

I'm a lawyer by training.

In many ways, we were put off going into business

or going into commercial activity. It was seen as a bit risky.

That has changed over the last ten years.

We've never been short of entrepreneurs.

What we've been short of is the confidence

so that those entrepreneurs can turn their ideas

into successful businesses that employ other people.

'Any economy would struggle when the world economy's struggling.'

But the better economies will eventually thrive on people -

skilled people, ambitious people, people unafraid to give it a go.

Any country with low standards of reading and arithmetic

and high unemployment clearly has a problem.

There are success stories here,

whether it's running a cafe on a trading estate

or running a big insurance company,

or taking the salt out of the ocean and turning it into money.

Government has a role, of course,

but all those success stories don't look to the government

to solve their problems.

What they've got is ambition and self-belief.

They know they can do it, they think big.

Confidence is the thing.

And do you know what?

We Welsh are as good as anybody.

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