Tidal lagoon support from Cardiff Capital Region and WECA
The Cardiff Capital Region, that represents the 10 local authorities in South East Wales, and the West of England Combined Authority will now work together on the proposal.
The commission had been hosted by the Western Gateway Partnership, that brought together 28 councils from Pembrokeshire to Swindon and Salisbury with businesses, to work together on economic development but is formally disbanding in June.
The partnership was first formed as a collaboration between Cardiff, Newport and Bristol councils in 2016 before expanding and receiving UK Government support from 2019.
But the Labour government announced in its October budget it would withdraw core funding for what were known as pan regional partnerships and wanted the new system of elected mayors in England to take up their work instead.
Monmouthshire County Council leader Mary Ann Brocklesby said the council wasn't directly involved in the partnership but represented through the Cardiff Capital Region that she chairs.
She told councillors work with English councils on economic development, including the proposals put forward by the Severn Estuary Commission, will continue.
She said: 'While the decision can be seen as disappointing it has not impacted the commitment of local authorities or other bodies on both sides of the border to continue to work together on projects that jointly benefit all our communities and businesses.
'Notably the recommendation of the Severn Estuary Commission, hosted by the Western Gateway Partnership, to harness the tidal power of the Severn will be taken forward jointly by the Cardiff Capital Region and the West of England Combined Authority.'
She said a memorandum of understanding for a formal partnership between the West of England Combined Authority and the Cardiff Capital Region is being drafted and they share interests of improving transport links and exploring opportunities of 'green, sustainable growth.'
Labour's Cllr Brocklesby said she has already written to Helen Godwin, who was elected as Labour's West of England mayor earlier this month, and is due to meet with her and also has a meeting planned with the UK Government's Welsh Secretary, Jo Stevens, as well as with the Welsh Government and meets with Monmouth Labour MP Catherine Fookes.
She said the council works with both governments so Monmouthshire can benefit from their 'growth agendas' while she has also given evidence to a Westminster select committee.
Conservative councillor for Llanfoist and Govilon Tomos Davies, who had asked for a statement on the UK Government's decision to withdraw the partnership's funding, asked if Cllr Brocklesby would 'use her position to hold her Labour UK Government colleagues to account and ensure its devolution and growth agenda benefits the whole of the UK and doesn't abruptly stop at the Severn Bridge.'
He also wanted to know how Cllr Brocklesby would advocate for 'further and deeper cross-border economic partnerships.'
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New Statesman
28 minutes ago
- New Statesman
One year on, tensions still circle Britain's asylum-seeker hotels
In the Park Hotel car park, a little boy bounced around in the drizzle as his mother watched on from the foyer door. This was his makeshift playground: kids' bikes on a rack, a basketball net furring with moss. Families including 34 adults and 46 children live at this hotel – in the centre of Diss, a small market town in Norfolk – contracted by the Home Office in 2023 to house asylum seekers. They have come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia and Eritrea. When I visited, they were in limbo in more ways than one: not just waiting for refugee status or a permanent home, but to find out if they would be replaced by a group of asylum-seeking single men. Imposed by the Home Office with little notice, this plan sparked a protest on 21 July. Around 150 people turned up to oppose the hotel's use, chanting, 'We want our country back.' It turned aggressive, when some crossed the road to confront counter-protesters. Local politicians accused out-of-town activists of stirring up trouble. Two men were charged with public order offences. A Norfolk reporter said the crowd had 'turned on' him and warned me to be careful as I wandered up the quaint high street of wool shops and stalls of fresh fish and hog roast. 'We used to have lovely Christmas dinners there,' recalled Martyn Thorndyke, 34, who works nights at a factory and often went for a pint at the hotel. 'But I guess they don't celebrate that there now, do they?' A 36-year-old woman suggested sheltering asylum seekers in tents. 'If it was me and I had to flee, I'd absolutely flee. But there's no housing for them here.' A fisherman, testing out some equipment in the lake, had another idea: 'They should have great white sharks patrolling Dover.' As the rain hung eyelash-thin and seagulls eddied above, the town tensed up. Police parked around the corner from the hotel. Further protests had been scheduled. The hotel owners were in a stand-off with government, threatening to close if they had to take solely men. 'We don't know what will happen, it's up to the Home Office,' said an employee. Another told me the hotel residents – who have cooked for people in Diss, taken English lessons at the library and sent their children to local schools – were distressed. Locals spoke, some unprompted, about the 'young, fit men' due to arrive. Emma Lummis, 47, a school worker, had banned her 13-year-old daughter from going out in the town centre, or wearing a short skirt. 'You just don't know who these people are. We're not racist. It's not about whether you're white or not; it's about whether you're a wrong 'un.' A 55-year-old woman who had collected donations and organised craft events for the families told me they had 'integrated' and 'Diss is a very welcoming town' – just not the place for young men. 'Just like the 'professionally unemployed' British guys drinking in the park, they would have nothing to do here but hang around.' When the riots hit last summer, she said police warned her to keep her activities at a 'low profile'. There are 210 hotels housing 32,345 asylum seekers across the UK – a drop since the height of 400 housing 56,042 in 2023. This July, protests spread through Diss, Norwich, Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Leeds, London's Canary Wharf and Epping in Essex. Far-right figures have attended and coordinated protests via social media. Stand Up to Racism counter-protesters rally in response. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The asylum hotel policy could be a parable for all that is wrong with the British state. The Conservatives under-resourced asylum claim processing. Channel crossings rose despite government promising the reverse. Ministers commandeered much-loved venues at short notice, cancelling wedding receptions and birthday parties. And this was all contracted out to private providers such as Serco, costing the taxpayer £15bn. It is a tired tale of cuts, broken pledges, neighbourhood neglect and poor-value outsourcing. But a subplot fraught with rumour and racism is darkening the story. Reporting around England in recent years, again and again I have encountered the same fears: that these newcomers might assault women and girls. Riots in Southport and Ballymena over the past two years had the same trigger: charges of attacks on young girls. The Best Western Brook Hotel in Bowthorpe, Norwich – a site of recent protests – was home to a man now imprisoned for raping a woman, and another for asking a 14-year-old boy to send naked pictures. At Epping's Bell Hotel, there have been both violent clashes and peaceful protests after one resident, now in custody, was charged with sexual assault for allegedly attempting to kiss a 14-year-old girl (which he denies). Such cases have led to the demonisation of young male asylum seekers as potential criminals and sex offenders. The memory of working-class white girls groomed by British-Pakistani gangs pulses through these suspicions. Victims then were ignored by authorities, partly down to political correctness – a fact that emboldens some people to voice Islamophobic generalisations about the attitudes of certain men towards women. Police National Computer data suggesting Afghans and Eritreans are more than 20 times more likely to be convicted of sexual offences than British citizens are widely shared. Officials warn, however, that this data neither accounts for gender nor for how much younger these ethnic groups are than the British average (young men generally are more likely to commit crime), that it is 'not reliable for nationality' as it omits dual nationals and that it doesn't reflect the number of repeat offenders. After violence outside the Bell Hotel, where officers were injured and 17 protesters arrested, Keir Starmer warned of a second summer of riots. Unrest last year followed the murder of three girls in Southport. The perpetrator, born in Britain to Rwandan parents, was falsely said to be a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived on a small boat – disinformation that led to rioters attacking a mosque and setting an asylum hotel on fire. Anger is not just confected online in bad faith. At one Epping protest, I was struck by the dissonance between mums waving suffragette flags and grandmas Sharpie-ing 'Protect Our Kids' on to M&S bags for life, and the presence of ex-British National Party councillors and a member of Homeland, a far-right splinter group of the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative. Wearing a T-shirt with the slogan 'Save Our Children', the vice-chairman of Reform UK's Epping Forest branch, Orla Minihane, described this wave of protest to me as a '#MeToo moment'. 'Women won't go out for runs, they're getting their husbands to pick them up from the station, they're scared to walk their dogs,' she said. 'I'm sure most of the men in there are good, decent people – but we don't know.' She waved a suffragette flag among the rippling St George's Crosses. 'When we walk past a woman with a child, she pulls the child behind her as if we are going to take them – it is so painful to see,' said Khadar, 20, a Somali asylum seeker living at the Bell Hotel who crossed the Channel three months ago. 'We are not here to hurt you. It was very good here before the incident. Now we feel uncomfortable and there is a lot of tension; people treat us like we're criminals and say insulting words.' Another young Somali man at the Bell Hotel, who preferred not to be named, had been chased by a group of men while shopping. Even as warm sunshine soaked the tree tops of Epping Forest opposite, he pulled a thick black jacket around him and glanced around as we spoke. 'I was very scared.' 'Sexual violence and crime impacts all communities and involves perpetrators of all races,' said Georgie Laming, of the anti-fascist campaign group Hope not Hate. 'It's clear from Epping how an arrest, an allegation or a rumour can quickly take hold, be whipped up and racialised by the far right.' Rumours were ripping through the protests outside the Bell Hotel. I was told repeatedly that Essex Police had bussed anti-racism activists towards the demonstration – a story the force denies but which is all over social media and has been repeated by Nigel Farage. Numerous protesters also told me hotel residents were shoplifting from Tesco, but the police had no reports of this, and the local Tesco had no knowledge of it either. Since 2020, the year asylum seekers moved into the Bell, instances of rape, reports of antisocial behaviour and the number of robberies have dropped in the area. There is also misapprehension that the hotels are five-star experiences for their new guests. 'They're fed and watered, have hot showers, for free,' said an Epping local of 45 years. 'But for us living here, the town has gone downhill.' In Diss, the school worker I met said: 'We're working our arses off and they're given a lovely hotel, clean sheets every morning, it's plush.' In reality, those with knowledge of the Park Hotel talked of breakfast running out, children going hungry and women asking for donations of buckets and mops because of uncleanliness. At another hotel, I've seen a four-year-old scarred from bed-bug bites and families falling sick from undercooked chicken. I've also heard of young people forced to share rooms with adult strangers. The children's commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, found a 'troubling' lack of safeguarding at these hotels. Such details don't resonate, though, when the world outside the hotels is one of low wages, housing shortages and a crumbling public realm. 'You've got to look after your own first,' said the factory operative. 'We need stuff given to English people, they haven't got houses themselves,' said the school worker. 'This town is empty, it's dead; people haven't got money to shop anymore. I worry about my future grandchildren: life is shit now, what will life be for them?' Deprivation and social dislocation, not levels of immigration, were the most common factors in riot-hit areas last summer, according to a report shared exclusively with the New Statesman that has been read in No 10. 'This Place Matters', by Citizens UK, UCL Policy Lab, and More in Common, finds no consistent correlation between high immigration to an area and low social cohesion. Rather, integration is what counts. The constituencies that experienced unrest all have populations where more people feel 'disconnected' than 'connected'. While financial insecurity is one of the strongest predictors of disconnection, the report identifies other alienating trends: neglected high streets and town centres, the decline of in-person socialising, and a loss of 'associational life' – fewer communal spaces where people interact, remote working and even self-checkouts. In a town of shuttered shops and fly-tipping – where children's centres and social housing and the municipal fireworks display are just a memory – it is little wonder you look up less from your phone. And when that screen is full of lurid innuendo, shared by politicians and activists who have no beguiling slogans for public service reform or community renewal, it only takes a spark to light the tinder. 'In Somalia, I couldn't work because I was in a rural area ruled by militia. I wanted to come to England for a better life, to contribute, not to depend on government, and it took ten hours on the boat – so long and painful with people suffocating,' said Khadar of the Bell Hotel. 'I thought England was a good place, more welcoming than Europe, and would help a lot. Now it feels like a hostile land.' [See more: Can Starmer and Trump come to an agreement on Gaza?] Related
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Badenoch should not touch Milei's Argentina with a bargepole
The stated model of the British Conservative Party is now Argentina, a country with a CCC credit rating, 40pc annual inflation, net negative foreign reserves and industrial output at 2005 levels. Lord have mercy on us all. One would have thought that the Tories – the oldest political party in the democratic world, the inheritors of Pitt, Peel, Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher – might be cautious after the historic collapse of their economic and governing credibility three years ago. Kemi Badenoch has admirable courage, but she is gambling with leverage by joining the anarcho-capitalist cult of Argentina's Javier Milei, calling him 'the template' for her reboot of British conservatism. President Milei is charmingly bonkers in many respects. He is both a Hayekian economist and a mystical philo-Semitic who converted to Judaism after reading the second book of the Torah and discovering Moses, whom he deems 'the greatest hero of liberty of all time'. Yet he also ran for office on the occult policy instructions of his dead English mastiff Conan. He plays each morning with the four clones of this beloved dog, created at great expense by a specialist clinic in the US. They are named Milton, Murray, Robert and Lucas, representing monetarism, the Austrian School and the Lucas Critique of neoclassical economics. We can mostly agree that Peronism has reached a historical dead end and that Argentina needs institutional shock therapy. A clientilist 'casta' has pauperised a country that should be as rich as Australia in commodity wealth but is today four times poorer. Decades of corporatist statism – with its origins in Mussolini's social fascism – ended in a tangle of subsidies, price controls and 14 different exchange rates, with episodic hyperinflations along the way. But Britain is not remotely in the same condition, though some would have it so, and Milei is learning on the job that chainsaws are better left to lumberjacks.
Leader Live
3 hours ago
- Leader Live
MS shares an update on the Coastal Path in Flintshire
MS for North Wales As Chair of the Senedd's Cross-Party Group on Disability, I met Amnesty International UK's Government and Political Relations Manager - Wales to discuss how we might ensure that the rights of disabled people are given proper legal effect in Wales. I also met with Wrexham-based Community Organising Charity TCC and other members of the coalition of organisations campaigning for the removal of barriers along the Wales Coastal Path in Flintshire, for discussion on further action. I have been working with disabled people and others across Flintshire for a decade, seeking to work with Flintshire County Council to remove all barriers along the Wales Coastal Path that are managed by the Council, allowing access for all. The current situation contravenes both the UK Equality Act (2010) and the legal and policy frameworks of the Welsh Government and Flintshire County Council itself. It was a pleasure to visit the 2025 Royal Welsh Show in Builth Wells, where I was a member of the Gylfinir Cymru/Curlew Wales Panel as Wales Species Champion for the Curlew. My other meetings and visits there included, Adferiad, the member-led charity operating services across every constituency in Wales, that campaigns for and provides services to people with mental health, addiction, and co-occurring and complex needs; British Veterinary Association's Welsh Branch Reception as one of their Honorary Associate Members; The British Army Stand, to meet serving personnel, explore interactive displays, and learn more about the Army's contribution to Welsh society; Farmers' Union of Wales (FUW), to discuss the significant issues facing Welsh Agriculture at the moment; and Natural Resources Wales (NRW), to discuss some of their recent work and my priorities and concerns, and to meet their Senior Leadership team and area specialists. The Senedd's Public Accounts and Public Administration Committee, which I Chair, has identified significant failings in the Welsh Government's handling of the acquisition of Gilestone Farm, near Talybont-on-Usk in Powys. In March 2022, the government paid £4.25m for the freehold of the Farm, as part of a plan to secure the future of Greenman Festival held nearby. There has since been a £0.5 million drop in the asset's value. The Committee's report, published on Monday (28th July) highlights that the purchase was rushed due to end-of-year budget pressures, resulting in avoidable mistakes. To ensure lessons are learned, the Committee will want to carry out further work looking at the Welsh Government's approach to property investments, to assess whether current processes are sufficiently rigorous and fit for purpose. For help, email or call 0300 200 7219.
