It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter), for whom I have the highest respect. We do not always agree on everything, but having served on the Welsh Affairs Committee with her and various other Members present here on both sides of the House, I echo her words in praising the staff who make the Welsh Affairs Committee run so well. We discussed this
debate in the Committee and we all feel, whichever political party we represent, that this important event enables us to bring the affairs of Wales to the Floor of the House, which we all are keen to do.
My own upbringing was in the tourism industry—we have had much talk about it already in this debate—at the Lake Vyrnwy Hotel, which my father ran as a business. It is only a few miles south of my constituency of Clwyd South, which in itself has a wonderful tourism industry with the wonderful heritage, the canal, the steam railway, the beautiful countryside and so on. I will return to that theme later.
With all due respect to the hon. Member for Cynon Valley, I do not recognise her point about the spending review cutting money to Wales. Given the figures that my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Robin Millar) gave—I will not go back over all those—it seems self-evident that the block grant to the Welsh Government is rising year by year by a generous amount. I do not see how we can dispute that fact. At £18.4 billion rising to £20 billion in the coming year or two, it is the most generous spending review settlement since devolution.
There has also been mention of the fact that the amount of money coming from Europe to Wales will be cut. With all due respect, that simply is not the case. The shared prosperity fund will equalise, if not increase the amount of money that would otherwise have come from the European Union. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) made the point about the levelling-up fund not being fair. As an MP for north-east Wales, I would argue that the European funding was not fair, because it was concentrated on west Wales and south Wales. North Wales, mid Wales and north-east Wales had little representation in that. My argument is that all parts of Wales need support. My constituency and my neighbouring constituencies have deprivation as well—deprivation is not exclusive to south Wales or west Wales. Therefore, the new shared prosperity fund, and the other funding that is coming through in the levelling-up fund and the community renewal fund, are spreading the money and investment across Wales, which strikes me as being much fairer.