Wales is held back by its pay problem

IMAGINE a United States in which a single city is home to the political institutions today found in Washington DC, the tech companies now based in California, the giant banks located in New York and Hollywood’s entertainment companies.

Such a revolution would impoverish many of America’s great states and cities, and it would leave the US looking very like the UK.

London is a political, economic and cultural capital that overheated long ago with grave consequences for the rest of Britain.

People who move to London for work have received an average pay boost of 18%, according to the Resolution Foundation – by far the biggest increase in earnings in the UK. People who come to Wales for a job are likely to have seen their pay rise by a mere 4.5%.

We offer the second-lowest earnings boost in Great Britain. This makes it harder to persuade highly skilled men and women to come and work in Wales; it makes the task of getting our best graduates to settle in Wales even more difficult when they could earn so much more if they take a journey east for a little more than two hours.

London is not a paradise. As the Resolution Foundation points out, when housing costs are taken into account typical incomes in London are lower than those in the South West.

People cannot afford to live within reasonable distance of their workplaces and spend thousands of pounds each year to commute on often crowded and notoriously unreliable trains.

One of the strengths of Germany is that it is home to great cities rich with employment opportunities that support regional economies. Berlin has flourished in the years since reunification but the country would not be such an economic colossus without the attractive likes of Düsseldorf, Munich, Stuttgart and Frankfurt.

A much bigger and better idea than HS2 is needed to spread wealth and opportunity beyond London so the heartlands of the industrial revolution can once again thrive. There will be bitter disappointment in post-Brexit Britain if the economy becomes even more unbalanced than it is now and manufacturing is held back with new obstacles.

Wales can take pride in its reputation as one of the most glorious places in the world to come to visit and live but we need the infrastructure and education which will make it among the finest nations in which to set up a business. We need to work for a renaissance. The Western Mail newspaper is published by Media Wales a subsidiary company of Trinity Mirror PLC, which is a member of IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation. The entire contents of The Western Mail are the copyright of Media Wales Ltd. It is an offence to copy any of its contents in any way without the company’s permission. If you require a licence to copy parts of it in any way or form, write to the Head of Finance at Six Park Street. The recycled paper content of UK newspapers in 2016 was 62.8%