13/11/2013 The Wales Report

Tonight on the Wales report: Is Wales a haven for zero-hours

contracts? Are Welsh workers particularly

vulnerable to being exploited? We have new evidence.

Could the answer to reviving some of our local economies be staring us in

the face? have new evidence.

Could the answer We look at some home-grown solutions.

And, is Wales serious about its iconic buildings? We'll be asking if

the time has come for a national blueprint.

Stay with us for the Wales Report. Good evening and welcome to the

Wales Report, where we examine the issues affecting lives in Wales, and

question some of the decision makers. On tonight 's programme: We

start with the significant task of revising the economies of

communities right across Wales. In the moment we will look at one of

the problems of the alleged exploitation of workers on 0-hours

contracts. Before that let us consider the possibility that the

solution to some of our economic problems is staring us in the face.

Karel Williams of Manchester Business School is calling for a

sharp local focus to reverse the trend that sees Wales lagging behind

other parts of the UK. That means less emphasis on inward

investment and more emphasis on local business initiatives, keeping

money in local areas. Professor Williams has been back to his

hometown of Llanelli to explore the potential benefits.

I have come back to Llanelli. I was brought up here and my father was

they get here for 20 years. I went to the local grammar school and then

a lifetime later I am a professor at Manchester business School and my

research is partly about how places like Llanelli can find a more

sustainable and prosperous future. Coming back to where you grew up is

always a troubling experience because the place you know no longer

exists, it has been rebuilt and upgraded. But this place looks at --

this place looks as if it has gone backwards. I remember this street in

the 1960s, full of affluent factory workers. If the affluence has gone,

what strategies and policies do we need to restore prosperity to

Llanelli? Deindustrialisation is an ugly word and in Llanelli there is

one place that symbolises it. The tin plate Works opened in 1951 and

employed 2000 in its heyday. Now it is closer to 500. The site is not

empty. They built a retail park here and it is sucking the heart out of

Llanelli because the retail spend goes out of town and the community

in return gets low-wage jobs, which is part of a wider British problem.

60% of the jobs created since 2010 in the UK have been in low-wage

retail and hospitality. So, what is to be done? Here we are at a

crossroads. The old response was to crust -- trust in inward investment

which would bring new success in tradable goods. Inward investments

come and go and it is now time to question the idea that our future

can be built on inward investment and exported goods. So, there is a

new interest in managing what is left of the Welsh economy, what I

call the foundational economy, the sheltered economy of services, of

retail and utilities, of health and education. In Llanelli and many

other places in Wales, that is what left -- that is what is left and

managing what is left is the key to better services and better jobs. 15

miles up the road from the tin works is the best of the alternative, a

cafe which is meeting local social services. We put money together to

start a cafe to develop a business for people with learning

disabilities and other disadvantaged members of our community. It is

worthwhile in itself but it is also tackling the problem of scaling

things up so we have a chain and plans to franchise its model. We

have five groups at the moment interested in starting one in their

areas and we thought rather than repeating ourselves over and over

again we thought we would come up with a business in a box that

requires all the policies and procedures that they need to run

from day one. We will not get far until we challenge the business

models of the major players. Think of the supermarkets. There is a

superstar -- a superstore on a roundabout near you. Their business

model means a spend of ?75 per household per week and you can

almost hear the giant sucking sound of money crossing the bridge. We

need to build local supply chains that keep the money here where it is

useful and needed for infrastructural things like social

housing we need to think about keeping pension funds here, not

sending them off to London and we need to think about low, steady,

secure returns on socially useful projects. Let us not argue that the

Welsh government needs more money and more power. What we need to do

is change the limits on what is politically thinkable and

economically doable in Wales. That is how Wales can win.

Professor Karel Williams in Llanelli. That was plenty of food

for thought. Joining me now is the businessman

and co-founder of Hiett Denim, David Hieatt, and the chair of the

Assembly's Enterprise and business committee Nick Ramsay. Thank you for

coming in. David, to you first ball as someone who is famously

responsible for a successful business model. Does it make sense

to you to talk almost exclusively in terms of local solutions to local

problems. I think what that film touched on was a doughnut town where

the supermarkets create a hole in the middle. I have been thinking

about this on the train on the here today and in Cardigan town the way

they have worked out to beat that is by being better. We will not change

habits by the sentiment alone. A town house to have a vibrant culture

business, new businesses because old businesses have died there. The

biggest employer in Cardigan, the old jeans factory, closed in 2001

and many jobs went. We have created just a few jobs so we are just a

small part of the answer as so we need many other companies to get

back to where we were in 2001. Partly the answer is local. You

cannot deny that the supermarkets and chains will not go away. And

what do you think, the model simply is not working, life is being sucked

out of these town centres and Llanelli is just one example. We are

not really focusing on the local economic opportunities that there

are. You can understand the anger. If you look at what has happened to

many town centres across Wales in the last decades then, yes, things

have got to change. I liked a lot of the ideas. The idea of more localism

is a good one and the idea that it is not constantly about saying that

we need more powers, but to shut the door on inward investment, I

certainly would not do that. You need a balanced economy, it is a

mixture of the larger economies and the supermarkets but also promoting

and supporting the smaller businesses. I think he was maybe

saying not about shutting the door but that we were over dependent on

that notion of inward investment. That has made us blind to

opportunities that were there. That cafe talked about the business in a

box that you can franchise easily. Could that translate into a more

successful model on a bigger scale, not just to do with cafes? What

scales really well is when someone does something very well. In Bristol

Bay have a Bristol pound. That currency can only be spent with

independent shops and it is actually very successful. You cannot spend

that money outside of Bristol and I think it is a really clever way of

trying to keep the money into the town because it makes a lot of sense

and creates a lot of jobs. A big controversy in the last few days to

do with finance, Finance Wales is supposed to be helping businesses in

Wales and there is criticism of how it has been run and how it is

operating. Do you share those concerns and think that in the

context of trying to help business, lots of them are desperate for

funding source and do you think the picture in Wales is healthy enough?

Businesses have been telling me and other assembly members for a long

time now that they had big concerns about Finance Wales and concerns

about their interest rates. Some of them are up to 12%. My party and I

think, and the wider community thinks, that although Finance Wales

might have been fit for purpose once, it is not now. It is not

addressing the needs of businesses. There was scathing criticism of it

in that it was giving out loans but it did not have an eye or focus on

economic development in Wales. For business to flourish funding sources

are crucial. What is your take on the easel difficulty of getting

funding? Ideas need funding. I can only talk about Finance Wales in

terms of my experience and actually they helped to fund me and it was

very successful funding and they were very good to work for so I can

only say I found. But if you are an ideas person, new need an idea and

you need to build a team and get funding. The access to funding, not

just in Wales, but in Britain is tough. Finance Wales has been to

distance. In the report there is a recommendation that there should be

a new development bank and whatever form that is, and the committee have

not looked at this yet, what ever form it takes there is a strong

argument to somehow localise Finance Wales and make it more public facing

and more business friendly so that in the same way if you went into a

bank in your high street and ask for a loan then the business should be

able to access that information locally. A lot of businesses are

made to go to talk to a faceless bureaucrat and that puts a lot of

companies off at the early stage. Thank you for coming in. There are

fears that more Welsh workers are being exploited by a

highly-controversial type of employment contract which doesn't

specify any hours of work. It's called a zero-hours contract,

and it's seen by many as powerful tool for employers, which leaves

workers vulnerable. Some experts warn that the number of people

working on these contracts could be much higher than previously thought,

and they seem to be particularly prevalent in Wales. There are calls

for the Welsh government to step in and review the practice, as Helen

Callaghan reports. They are the contracts causing

controversy all across the UK and affecting the lives of many

thousands of Welsh workers. Anyone on a 0-hours contract is not

guaranteed a minimum amount of work. They do not know when they will be

working or for how long. This woman who wants to remain anonymous was

employed on one of these contracts by a Welsh council and says that the

uncertainty was hugely stressful. You could be shopping or anywhere

and get a call asking you to work that afternoon. She was working in

the care sector and says that the 0-hours contract was not bad for her

but it was also bad for the vulnerable children she was helping

to look after because there was no continuity of care. I do not think

it does any good for the service user, irrespective of what the

service is. They can put people at risk. These contracts tend to be

more common in the public sector, in areas like air, catering, cleaning

and labouring and since one quarter of Welsh jobs are in the public

sector, many believe that workers in Wales are disproportionately

affected. At the moment no one is really sure

how many people in Wales are working in this way. Recent estimates range

from 40,000 to 55000 and many think the true figure could be much

higher. The public service union has contacted every council in Wales in

order to arrange an urgent meeting about these contracts. It wants

better protection for workers. I hope the leaders and chief

executives agreed to discuss the situation we are facing so that we

can have some compliance and control around the use of these contracts.

The unions are not the only ones calling for more to be done. One

employment charity believes that when councils use private firms to

do work for them, they should ensure that those on the these are not

using anything resembling zero-hours contracts. I know of organisations

where they are using these contracts, but they do not want to

be, and the only reason they feel forced into going down that road, is

because that is the only way they feel they can compete for public

contracts. Recently, the Labour Party leader said that if they win

the next general election, they will immediately move to restrict the use

of zero-hours contracts. We know we have an epidemic in this country of

zero-hours contracts. Exploitation at work. We should say yes to

flexibility, but no to exploitation. And nowhere is that more true than

when it comes to zero-hours contracts. But many are now saying

that the Welsh Labour Government could take the lead here by issuing

guidelines which could advise local authorities not to employ people and

zero-hours contracts, or report contracts to companies which use

them. What we would like to see, and what we will be asking the Welsh

governments to do, is to issue a statement confirming that they will

look at zero-hours contracts and they will look at ringing in some

form of control around zero-hours contracts. -- bringing in. The

concern is that, without such intervention in Wales, and in the

present climate of spending cutbacks, money will be saved by

using more and more casual zero-hours contracts, with the

result being more and more people facing the worry of not knowing if

they have a secure job. I generally have a good 37 hours per job. Then

my father had a brain haemorrhage. Iranian to explain the situation and

I did not get any more shifts -- I rang him to explain the situation

and I did not get any more ships even though I said I was available.

Joining me now is Assembly member Vaughan Gething. Thank you for

coming. Are there any circumstances in which these zero-hours contracts

can be justified? Yes. You see, some of these contracts are generally

flexible and they do not exploit the worker themselves. For example,

someone would describe some supply jobs as not being exploited.

Sometimes there is a requirement to accept work, and the real problem

comes when there are especially low-paid workers, because regardless

of the legal ins and outs, if that is work that you rely upon, and if

you are called to do it at short notice, you may be afraid to turn it

down. I accept there are real issues of exhortation that take place,

especially in care work in retail and cleaning, so we realise this is

a present challenge facing many workers in Wales and the rest of the

UK. And the response should be? I think we should have legal reform,

and that requires Parliament to act. We should have a ban on zero-hours

contracts, where they will require exclusive performance. We should

then contracts like this at do not have a mutuality of obligations, so

that's work must be provided in that sense. We should see a band on a

situation where you are required to take these types of contracts when

you actually worked much more regular hours. That is difficult,

because giving people right is one thing, having them enforced is quite

another. What do you say to local authorities in Wales about

guidance, are you actually being as rigorous as you should be in terms

of using these contracts customer -- contracts? The West Government has

been pretty clear that we do not support the use of these types of

contracts. The calls from the unions are interesting, because the forum

to have discussed is part of a Council -- is involved in part of a

Council in which these issues that discuss the strap broke -- a Council

in which these things can be examined. Do you think this issue is

being examined as energetically as it might be? You are talking about

partnerships and all the rest of it. Is there something more proactive

you could be doing? The guidance that could come from the Council is

guidance from the Government, which would meet the call made by the

councils, but it is important to have the voice of the trade unions

in the debate and discuss with them players where they can use these of

zero-hours contracts, because there is an exploitative end of these

contracts, which I recognise, but there can be other forms of the

contracts where there are flexibilities and benefits for the

worker. For example, the NHS is a good example. To deal properly with

how you do something about these exploitative contracts, there should

be a discussion involving trade unions, employers and the

Government. Ed Miliband says there in -- says there is an epidemic of

these contracts across the UK. Is Wales actually suffering more

heavily in terms of these contracts in other parts of the UK? I could

not say whether there is a bigger problem here in Wales, because this

is not just restricted to the public sector, but we note from figures

that we have seen that there has been a rise in these types of

contracts as there has been wider -- wider unemployment. This should not

surprise anyone. There is a large pool of Labour that is worried about

their work. The circumstances are less favourable and employers will

often exploit that. When you think of in work poverty, which is a

particular concern of ours, you can see that the growth of the number of

people being employed, but the problem can also be people who are

working in part term hours and zero-hours of work as well. There is

a really big issue here in Wales and across the rest of the UK. But

basically, if people are expecting action, as in meaningful action, any

time soon, what are you saying to them? Do not hold your breath? I do

not think that is fair. I think the Council should take seriously the

concerns of the trade unions. It is unfair to prejudge what that body

will do. It would be wrong for me to say that I can't guarantee a change

in a certain period amid -- I can guarantee a change in a certain

period of time. We are very clear that we do not support the use of

exploitative contracts. Thank you very much. The Millennium Stadium.

Caernarfon Castle. St David's Cathedral. The Senedd building. Each

one has a claim to be the most iconic building in Wales. We all

have our favourites. But for one of our leading experts on architecture,

Wales isn't serious about increasing the number of exemplary buildings.

Patrick Hannay, editor of Touchstone, Wales' only architecture

magazine, says the current commissioning system does not set a

consistent national standard. And as he explains, it's the Welsh

Government's job to demand and set higher standards.

Welcome to Newport. This city once had a proud industrial heritage.

This is a gateway city. People come in from England. What do they see?

And exciting mix of Arctic texture -- architecture, or do you see too

many missed opportunities for excellence? But there is promise

here. This is the city campus in Newport: . -- in Newport. It was

designed by a famous architect. The interior is especially vibrant and

colourful, and after all, it is inside where the staff and students

live most of their life. Why can't this be the minimum standard? The

picture continues across Wales. Too many blunders, too few delights,

insufficient aspiration and little public promotion of talented

architects aced in Wales. Take the wise building at the centre for

alternative technology. It is award-winning, world-class, yet it's

architects have not picked up a single substantial commission since

its completion. Who is making architectural quality? With the rise

of contractor power over the last decade, architects have been reduced

to just simply being subcontractors to the process. Talent slips through

the net. This is all because those at the heart of power have

insufficient judgment about architectural design, and therefore

will take no risks. Good architecture receives very little

coverage in the public media. Our newspapers and television. Has

anybody heard of the most important architectural award in Wales? The

architects to create these great buildings are really named in

national newspapers. This needs to change. -- are rarely aimed. This is

not an original concept. In Scotland, there architectural

policies are and their third reform. Should the body responsible, the

Design Commission for Wales, actually act more aggressively in

promoting in the public good architecture and being critical of

the bad? Whether it be in our high streets or in our housing areas, or

in major public buildings, I am calling for action at the centre of

Government for putting sufficient architectural judgment and

high-quality architectural patronage at the centre of their thinking and

promote architectural debate with the public. It could be the start of

an exciting future landscape for Wales.

Patrick Hannay there. Joining me now is Carol-Ann Davies from the Design

Commission for Wales. Good to have you with us. Thank you very much. Do

you accept his main point, that we are not in a position where we can

have proper safeguards for architectural standards? I think

part of it is insightful. I do not think it is the whole story. We are

in a far better place than we were ten years ago, or even when we were

seeing what we call turning point buildings coming out of the ground.

The Millennium Stadium and other buildings around the rest of Wales.

We have got to remember that it is not just about buildings. It is

about homes and streets and schools and health care buildings and all

sorts of public spaces. Are we in better shape? Yes. Is there more to

be done? Yes. We are working on it. Do you have the Design Commission

have the powers necessary to enforce the kind of standards that you would

like? Lots of comparisons are drawn. He pulsate to look at Scotland.

Would you like to be the Scottish -- people say to look to Scotland.

Would you like to be in the Scott's position, where you can say, sorry,

that is not good enough, we have got better standard than that? I think

we have got a number of tools. Wales has very good design policy, written

into its planning policy, and divine policy was put at the heart of our

decision-making process. -- design policy. What has happened in

Scotland is great, however standards, and force, power, is that

really how you bring back the process of design? Maybe it is. If

you look around Wales and the awful buildings that. -- performed badly

as well, that is what some local authorities are putting up. Maybe

you do need the powers to say, sorry, that is not good enough. We

are happy to say, sorry, that is not good enough. We rent a national

design -- three run a national design service throughout Wales. 37

then tested professionals unpaid throughout the whole of Wales

championing good design. The things we should not forget as well, I

think, is that we have fantastic designers in Wales that the export

across the whole of the world. Is that talent being exported more than

it should be and we are not benefiting from the kind of skills

that are being developed here in Wales? That is a key issue, and it

is also about teams and risk aversion. We might want to look

about how we want to skewer stop that is not -- procurer. That does

not mean you should throw caution to the wind. You have to have value for

money. But, for the long-term, we could be looking at how we manage

risk and how we assess attracting talent and procure it for projects

all across Wales, and let's not forget, attracting some of the best

in the business. Are we rather reluctant in Wales to take risks

with buildings? Are we in Wales sometimes too reluctant to take

risks? I do not think we are more reluctant than anywhere else. There

is a tendency to see that the grass is greener elsewhere. It is

interesting to see one Institute, it is a fantastic building and has been

highlighted at the building of the decade in Wales. With big projects,

you always want them to be high-quality, on-time and on

budget, without question, but there has to be a case for magic. If you

look at the Royal Welsh holly jug music and drama, they are absolute

gifts. -- College of music and drama. We have designed panelists

who are out there working for nothing and championing good design.

We look forward to seeing how things move forward in the future. Thank

you. That's it for this week's programme. We'll be back next

Wednesday. In the meantime you can get in touch with us about the

issues discussed tonight. Thanks for watching. Good night. Nos da.