WEDNESDAY 14 JUNE 2000

SIR REG EMPEY MLA, MR LESLIE ROSS AND MR BILL PAULEY

  420. Before I have the pleasure of calling Mr Thompson, let me just pick up one thing in your preface which you made before we started asking questions, and the manner in which you have just answered questions from Mr Beggs. I am not seeking any comment now but it would be helpful to have a short note after the event. The PAC report, with which you will be familiar, when one unravelled the figures, disentangled the figures, indicated that areas which generated 60 per cent of the unemployment in Northern Ireland—I am now simply quoting the PAC report—were only actually receiving about 25 per cent of the inward investment in terms of the particular series of figures they quoted. That marches a little uneasily with your statistic of 76 per cent being in TSN areas or adjacent to them. Of course, I am delighted to have an answer now, if you want to give one, but I would be perfectly happy to have a reasoned answer in writing afterwards.
  (Sir Reg Empey) Thank you for that option. There are two points I would make to you. On the PAC report in general, Mr Ingram, I notice, was able to make some comments. I am in some difficulty in that the IDB has got eight weeks in which formally to give its reply to the PAC. I am going to be inhibited in public comment on that, until that reply is formally within the hands of the Committee, because we have to answer; and I understand it is the etiquette that no comment is made until that eight weeks has passed. But on the generality, without being specific—and I certainly will provide you with full answers to those questions as soon as I am able to do so—I would make a general point that some criticism is made from most local authority areas at some point in time: (a) that we are not getting enough visits; and (b) that we are not getting the outcomes from those visits. If I could just quote one figure. In 1998/99, 12 per cent of total investment was located in Belfast, but Belfast contains 23 per cent of unemployment. Therefore, you would see a discrepancy there at a stroke. If you take the figures over, say, a five-year period, we see a different pattern emerging. Belfast got 20 per cent of total investment over the 1994/95 to 1998/99 period, which is almost on a parallel with its actual 23 per cent of total unemployment. So that over a period of years, the pattern is much less stark than the figures you quoted me would give reason to believe. Therefore, we believe that whilst Belfast in the year I quoted, 1998/99, got 12 per cent of investment, it actually got 23 per cent of IDB assistance. So it depends on what you are actually using to measure it. We are very conscious—

  421. I realise you have got some difficulties of protocol in responding to this issue. If there is information it may be informally pointing us to data which is already in the public domain. That might be a helpful way of getting through that particular problem we are talking about.
  (Sir Reg Empey) I think the information that I have here probably would be—I am not sure how much is in the public domain at this stage—but we have no difficulty in making that available to the Committee, Chairman. It may not be in the public domain but we will certainly provide it to the Committee.

  Chairman: It is a very great pleasure to invite Mr Thompson to ask his question. This is the first question he has asked, as a Member of this Committee, since Mr Donaldson left the Committee last week.

  422. Just to carry on with these questions about inward investment. To what extent does situating inward investment in, or close, to TSN areas actually create jobs for the residents of those areas? Can you offer the Committees any statistics on the proportion of jobs created by inward investment in TSN areas that have gone to residents?
  (Sir Reg Empey) I am aware, Mr Thompson, that this is a question which is the subject of significant debate. If I may give a general view from a policy point of view before I answer in detail. Anybody who knows some of these TSN areas, knows that you are dealing with areas where there has been almost a generational issue of unemployment. If you bring shiny new businesses into certain areas and you plant them there, if they decide to go there, is it the case that people are simply looking through the railings at the parked BMWs and not benefiting from the work that is actually provided there? I think there is a very great danger of that happening. I can quote you one particular example. Again, it is a Belfast related one, where the City Council decided to develop a gas works site in Belfast. Now that is located around two or three of the most deprived wards in the city of Belfast, but you are not allowed under employment law to target a geographical area and say, "We must get people out of that area for jobs." It does not work like that. So what we undertook, as a way of dealing with that, is that we supported a skills audit of the residents in the wards immediately surrounding that site. We then looked at the results of that audit and we compared them with the sort of businesses and companies that we anticipated were going to come on to that site. Then we worked with the Training and Employment Agency and others, looked to see how we could bring up the skills of those people in that area, so that they would be able to have the opportunity to apply for the jobs which we expected were going to emerge in the area. I think that approach is much more likely to produce a positive result than simply trying to put a company in a particular area. This is because what actually happens in many cases—and again you will probably have examples from your own experience—people drive in from outside the area and the local people maybe only are able to attract the more menial of the jobs because they are not trained to deal with the companies that are coming in. Now, having said that, you asked specifically for a table of statistics, which have proved how much benefit those areas have actually received from the investment. I think in the Annual Report and Accounts 1998/99, if we could give you examples for 1996/97, for instance. There were 1,559 jobs promoted in TSN areas, and of those 1,261 were jobs created by March 1999, which was a 91 per cent performance. The two previous years we had only 248 and 1,306 jobs promoted, of which 247 and 710 were actually created. Therefore, what we have evidence of is that there is an improving performance but it is starting from virtually a very, very low base in the mid 1990s, a very, very low base. Now I would have to say that I think that very often what is happening is that people do get indirect jobs. We reckon that for every three jobs which are created in a particular business, in a manufacturing business, one job will be created to service that business. What happens is that you do get some jobs like security, maintenance cleaning and so on, which tend traditionally to be drawn from local communities (for very obvious reasons) because you will not get people to travel long distances for those sorts of jobs. But the wider point you are making is one we have to have a totally new look at because it has become a political icon to say, "Oh, I have got IDB to bring visitors to this area." That does not directly guarantee assistance to the people living in that area, apart from the peripheral jobs, so I think the route I am suggesting—that we do audits of those areas, and we try and relate training more closely to the companies that we are trying to bring in, so that people have the opportunity—is because there is a gap and a weakness in our policy in that area.

  423. It is very much tied up in the skills level in that area. And, may I say, if you have had unemployment for many, many years, it is very hard to get the skills up.
  (Sir Reg Empey) We can all quote examples from our own constituencies where that is the case. One of the things that has happened since devolution is that my colleague in the Department of Further and Higher Education, Training and Employment, Dr Farran, and I, having looked at what was in Strategy 2010 with regard to the link between business, academia and training, have decided that our two Departments—because we share the Training and Employment Agency between us, and because he is responsible for further education—that we would work together; and we have had two formal meetings with the Permanent Secretaries already. Our objective would be to try and co-ordinate the policies of our two Departments to deal exactly with the point you are making. This is because the weakness in all of the system, particularly where you have areas of endemic unemployment, is that people over the years have gone in for schemes—whether they have been ACE or various training schemes over the years—and when we have come to the end of those schemes there has been nothing at the end of them, which has had a demoralising effect. It has lowered the esteem within which people regard their participation in these schemes. Now, what we are trying to do is to have a bespoke training facility, so that we anticipate from our knowledge who is likely to come in, and try and identify an area where there are those potential people who can be trained up. It is a matter of joining up these two things. It sounds easy in theory but it is actually quite difficult in practice. We are attempting to do that as part of Strategy 2010 but also because we think it is commonsense. If you are going to have a knowledge-based, knowledge-driven economy, you can only do that if people are well trained. There have been examples where individual companies have actually sent in advance parties of their staff, to work with training organisations in particular areas, to try and fill the skills gap. The one thing we have going for us is that we still have people who have an ability to undertake work, and because of over-heating in other areas and so on, that potential is there. In my opinion, this is the only way in which there is going to be a long-term solution to that problem.

  424. It has been argued to us that, but for the troubles, the level of inward investment in Northern Ireland would have been several times greater. Do you agree with that? Has Northern Ireland been obliged to countenance less attractive projects (either in employment or grant requiring terms) as a result of the political and security situation?
  (Sir Reg Empey) I need hardly tell you, Mr Thompson, of the impact of the last 30 years on a particular area. The fact remains that it is perfectly obvious that with the difficulties we have encountered, that creates a huge amount of problems. It creates a huge perception problem. I think that perhaps in the 1970s and 1980s, when things were at their darkest, there could well have been a temptation to follow projects that would perhaps not pass the threshold today. I think from what I have seen—and I am only doing the job for a comparatively short space of time—what I can see is that we are not confronted with those sorts of choices today. This is because of the type of companies that are coming to us today which, by and large, seem to be of a very high standard and a very high quality. But I do not think any of us could totally deny that there may have been a possibility in the past, when in an attempt to try and keep an economy going, that we may have had to look at projects which would not today pass the tests. I am going back quite a while. As a result of monitoring—a variety of inquiries by other Committees of this House, for instance, into what has been going on—there has been progressively a more rigorous approach and attempt to make the taxpayers' money go further with regard to inward investment projects. So I think the answer to the first part of your question is: yes, there may have been tendencies in the past; but that is no longer something that would be considered to be happening at the present time.

  425. Could you just cover the second half of my question. Has Northern Ireland been obliged to countenance less attractive projects?
  (Sir Reg Empey) I think the answer is currently no. I do not think we need to do that. We have enough there because we have got something that a lot of other countries do not have right now. We have still got people who have the capability—particularly when you go to the IT sector, particularly when you go to the software sector—where in other countries there is a huge spiral of wage inflation; where there is a huge spiral of staff turnover. Now we have a product in our people that we can offer to counteract that. Therefore, I do not think there is any need whatsoever to go for anything which is less attractive than other regions. If we take the example of the current new inward investment in the year for which figures are most recently available, 80 per cent of those jobs were in high-tech and manufacturing, software services. I think this illustrates the fact that we no longer need to consider—and, indeed, while I do not dispute that risks sometimes have to be taken—I do not think there is any requirement for us to be involved or chasing after what you might describe as duff projects.

  426. Do you expect the restoration of the devolved institutions in Northern Ireland to make it easier to attract inward investment?
  (Sir Reg Empey) In one sense, if the restoration of devolution leads to the establishment of long-term stability, which is what it is designed to do—and I know not everybody shares the view that it is the right answer but it is designed to achieve that—one of the biggest problems we have had is that we have been perceived as an area of instability. Nationally and internationally that has a major impact, when investment is a highly mobile product that can go to any part of Europe or wherever. As long as there is deemed to be political instability, then that will mitigate against us. However, I would still maintain, Mr Thompson, that the biggest single factor in determining inward investment is very largely the experience that people have had commercially. People look at whether other colleagues in a particular industry are making money, or not making money, in Northern Ireland. That is the biggest single issue. People do not come to Northern Ireland for charity. If they come to invest, they come because they think they can make money. Equally, if you are looking at indigenous companies, they expand because they think they can make money. That is the only reason, or only logic, for doing it. I do believe, however, that sentiment is a big factor. Market sentiment, as you have seen in recent months, has turned the dotcoms upside-down. There was never any track record of profit to justify the prices that they were getting. All of a sudden sentiment says, "This is wrong. The traditional companies are more viable." I think what is happening is that devolution can have, from the limited experience I have seen in dealing with businesses, particularly North American ones, where it has had an effect, they believe that this is an outward sign of long-term stability. Therefore, the evidence before me is that the amount of interest started to increase substantially towards the end of last year, and that interest has been kept up. So far, we have not lost because we had a period of suspension. Most of that interest is staying with us. I believe that if we do have the stability, then with the devolved institution we will be able to be more hungry for the inward investment. I believe we will chase it and tailor policies to suit Northern Ireland. It can have a positive effect but we must remember that, at the end of the day, people only come to Northern Ireland if they think they are going to make money.

  427. What programmes do you think there should be for attracting high-tech research centres and software development centres rather than just manufacturing operations?
  (Sir Reg Empey) Again, I think that you are correct to identify that. In Strategy 2010 we have identified those areas of activity as our key ones. Could I make a slightly broader point here, Chairman, because I think there is a risk. I alluded a moment or two ago to the frenzy over dotcom companies and so on. I hark back, (and Mr Thompson will remember this), to what happened to Northern Ireland in the 1960s and the 1970s, where the then Northern Ireland Government had done exceptionally well in attracting large chunks of the man-made fibre industry to come to Northern Ireland. All of a sudden we woke up one day and it was not there. Now I think that, with any specific sector, it is wrong to put all our eggs in one basket. The dotcoms are fine and they are generating huge amounts of wealth, but one invention can trip out an entire sector virtually overnight. I think it would be rash of us, Mr Thompson, to concentrate on those to the exclusion of a broadly based economy. I still believe that we have to have as broad a base as possible on the very simple theory that not every strand of the economy can go wrong at once. That was the mistake we made in the 1960s and we ended up with a branch economy and when things got tight they just closed the British enclaves, the cordons, we had them all, and the monuments to that particular failure Mr Beggs drives past every day on his way home. They are there because we know that too much emphasis was put on that. It is fair to say that 80 per cent of last year's new inward investments were in this sector of newer industries. 80 per cent, that is a very high figure, but you have to remember that in all centres that still represents a small proportion of the total jobs. It is probably only about 2 or 3 per cent at the moment and we have a target to get it up to 6 per cent over the next number of years, so it is still a small sector, but it is a very rapidly growing sector. My own view is that we have to still maintain a balance between what we describe as traditional businesses and these new ones, because our function I think is to provide a lot of the infrastructure, the fibre optic loops, the telecom backed infrastructure that allows these companies to flourish, and then if they feel comfortable they can come in, but not to the exclusion of other sectors of the economy.

  428. The planned closer of IMR Global's software development centre in Belfast must have come as something of a disappointment to you. What reasons have IMR given for the pull-out, and are there any wider implications for similar projects? How much money had IDB put in to the IMR Global software development centre project? Will it seek to recover any of its investment?
  (Sir Reg Empey) First of all, it is a United States company. It invested in Northern Ireland with an offer from IDB of £1.9 million towards a projected project costing of £2.8 million with a promise of 311 jobs. The company strategy in 1997 recognised the need to move from older mainframe technologies to new internet technologies. The operation grew successfully to about 150 employees and invested heavily in the training of staff in the new technologies. However, the market and technology moved more rapidly than the company had expected. This has resulted in IMR having to restructure its operations globally, including the closure of its Northern Ireland operation. The hightech business world changes very rapidly and companies must always be reviewing their strategies in response to this environment, and we remain in close contact with them. The raw statistics of this particular case was that the start date was May 1997, the cessation date was May 2000, the grant offered was £1.9 million of which 43 per cent was actually paid over. The jobs offered were 311 and at October 1998 the jobs peaked at 152. That was the highest point they reached, but by the end of May 2000 there were 53 jobs and 53 people were made redundant. By the end of May 2000 approximately 125 of the 150 former IMR employees had secured new employment, and currently we are following up for a significant claw-back of grant that has already been paid over. As I said, 43 per cent of the sum offered was paid and we are currently in negotiations over clawing-back a substantial amount of that which was paid over.

  429. Presumably some of these jobs when they were with IMR Global were training jobs? Has that helped the ones that have been made unemployed to get new jobs?
  (Sir Reg Empey) My understanding is that while they did do a lot of training most of the jobs were actually hands on dealing with their mainstream business. They contracted training from outside, but they did have some internally driven training because they are a global company, but most of the jobs were actually involved with the main part of their business and were not actually principally training jobs. It is for that very reason that these people have been able to pick up jobs very rapidly.

  Mr Thompson: Thank you very much.

  430. Good afternoon.
  (Sir Reg Empey) Good afternoon.

  431. We have had reference from various people who have given evidence to us of the concordat for financial assistance to industry reached between the government and the various devolved administrations. What impact do you think this will have? Will it restrict you or can you see them having a bigger impact than that?
  (Sir Reg Empey) Mr Grogan, we are very content with concordats. First of all, you are probably aware that concordats are being drawn up between regional administrations over a whole range of issues, not simply this one. I think it is a very sensible thing, because there was an informal understanding between IDB, the Welsh Development Agency and the Scottish Development Agency that we would not get into an auction to buy in projects. We are competing, we are competing with Wales and Scotland and the Irish Republic and we are competing in the world. Therefore, to say that there will be no contest would be misleading you, there will be, but we are perfectly entitled to allow our own infrastructure, our pool of labour and the skills of that labour to do the competing for us, but we will invest in those things and we are perfectly entitled to do so. The concordat basically means that if a project over 500 posts comes on to the general circuit we will ensure that there is not an auction that starts with Wales offering so much and we trump that and you go on round and round and round. We do communicate with one another, and that is the point that the concordat makes. I have to say that we do have—and Europe understands this—a fair degree of additional flexibility over Scotland and Wales in the amount of money that we are allowed to offer, but I have to say that we are trying to keep well away from that sort of threshold at the present moment and, in fact, our trend, as far as we can, is down. We are entirely positive about the concordats, we have agreed the concordats, we have a say in their construction and I believe that they are a very sensible thing to do. Indeed, there are some unofficial arrangements with the Irish Development Agency which deal with similar issues. What we are talking about is that the concordat refers to the protection of taxpayer's money in the United Kingdom so that, in fact, it is not squandered by needless competition within the different regions.

  432. It is interesting you mentioned there the European Union and state aid and so on, because there is increasing pressure to reduce state aid. It is also interesting that you mentioned the Republic of Ireland as well. Is there a case for, you say, informal level developing the understanding within institutions in the Republic to remove wasteful competition? If there is a pressure to reduce the amount of state aid generally is there argument for specialism in terms of which areas you pursue?
  (Sir Reg Empey) Mr Grogan, let me make it clear, certainly we are all operating within the European context, but we are in competition with the Irish Republic and the Irish Republic has a number of tools at its disposal which we do not have. They have fiscal freedom, which we do not have, and I have to be careful how I put this, it does not simply apply to the Irish Republic, I have to say, but it applies to other European countries as well. My limited experience is that the United Kingdom is much more rigid in its application and enforcement of European guidelines and regulations, particularly in this area, and my concern is that that sort of flexibility that the Irish Republic has could be used to our disadvantage. While we are neighbours, my responsibility is primarily to ensure that Northern Ireland's economy gets the maximum amount of benefit, and I will fight for that, that is my job, but if we do get a sort of rogue investor floating around trying to bid up something from the Republic and get us to pay more and get Scotland to pay more, we do have informal mechanisms that will identify such people, and there have been one or two of them around. Not many, but some. We also have to be very aware of the fact that as competitors I have to be careful that our limited ability and the limited number of tools that are at our disposal for attracting inward investment—being less than the Republic has at its disposal—I do not create a circumstance where we box ourselves into an even tighter corner.

  433. Turning to another issue, is it a matter of complaint from small and medium sized employers in Northern Ireland that sometimes you get an inward investor who comes into an area, dominates an area and perhaps poaches employees from smaller firms? Is this just a fact of life? Is there anything that can be done about it? Are inward investors encouraged and are they generally good at training programmes and so on as an alternative to poaching? (Sir Reg Empey) I think the truth of the matter is a certain amount of that goes on in business any way. If I can quote an example that I used earlier of over heating, it is notorious in the IT sector, the software sector, particularly in the west-coast of America and in other places that you get this spiral of people going round from one company to another and getting higher wages and so on. Companies will tell you that one of the most expensive things, particularly in that industry, is the training up of their staff, and the knowledge that those people have acquired. Because, do not forget, from the idea to the market in that sort of industry can be six months or less. I think the software year now is 1.8 months the way the thing moves, so the one advantage that we have at the moment is that we can offer those companies lower rates of staff turnover because we are not over heated to the same extent. Places like Dublin are beginning to get affected by this. At the present moment that is actually one of our main selling points. Let us not move away from the fact that if you get a multi-national or a significant inward investor coming, that inward investor is bringing skills and knowledge, and I think it is advantageous to a labour force that they get exposed to that knowledge and those skills, because they are able to retain them within the Northern Ireland pool and pass them on to other businesses. We want to create clusters if we can. We do have complaints from time to time from smaller companies that they are not able to compete with some of these bigger ones and they lose their people accordingly and then they have to try and go round and get replacements for that. That is the difference between being a corner shop and being Tescos, it happens, it is an economic fact of life that we cannot entirely deal with. What we can do, however, is through our awareness of that we have a number of training schemes that are available to small companies, one of them is The Bridge to Employment, which is a programme to help unemployed people access jobs, and also it gives them the opportunity to reduce the turnover in staff, but we have schemes designed to bridge over and we tailor that because we are aware of the fact. We cannot stop it. It is a natural development in any economy, Chairman. I think we cannot over estimate, as I said earlier, our ability to influence an economy.

  Mr Grogan: Thank you very much.

  434. I do not know whether you want to answer this question from the anecdotal or imperialistic stand point, but you are eminently qualified in both. There are a number of people who do not know Northern Ireland particularly well and I have been surprised to hear from a number of witnesses that there is a reluctance to travel to work, and this goes against the Protestant work ethic of course, but we are constantly told this. Is there any evidence that this is a real problem, the location of new jobs and that people will simply not move from a particular area?
  (Sir Reg Empey) I think, Mr Pound, the answer to your question is that there is some evidence that that does apply to some people, but I think it falls into two separate categories.

  435. Is it a factor when you come to consider the viability of a scheme?
  (Sir Reg Empey) I would say it is a very marginal factor. Let me put it to you this way—and I am sure my colleagues from Northern Ireland on this Committee would concur with this—a situation has arisen that because of the 30 years of violence our community has become more geographically polarised. Bearing in mind that terrorists over the years have deliberately targeted certain types of workers and certain individuals who travelled to an area which was not of their own political persuasion, and a significant number of people perished along those particular lines, there has therefore been a reluctance against the background of threats due to the Troubles that people were reluctant to move away from their own districts. That appears to be receding at the present time, thank God. It is also true to say that it depends largely on the type of work. For instance, there is no evidence that we have that a software graduate is not prepared to travel anywhere, basically. However, people who are doing unskilled work, by and large, are more reluctant to travel, and I think that that probably reflects the difference between the fact that obviously somebody earning a smaller wage is less likely to travel a long distance than somebody who is earning a large amount of money. There does appear to be evidence that if you have people who are doing fairly highly paid work, they will go wherever that work is. There is some evidence to suggest that at the other end of the labour market there is less flexibility with regard to movement. Part of it has been this historical factor for a number of years that people felt threatened to go outside their own districts. That I think we will cure as time passes.

  436. Is it caricature of the—if there is such a thing—typical construct that what you have is a business set up mainly in a TSN area where the middle and upper management people are coming in but the jobs at the lower end, the cleaning, security et cetera, are generated within the walk to work area? Is that unfair?
  (Sir Reg Empey) I think it is unfair, but I do believe, as I have responded to Mr Thompson's question on TSN areas, it is precisely that situation that I want to avoid, because there is no point. Can I give you an example? The early development of the London docklands, which we came to see as a local authority point of view—

  437. This is when? In the 15th century?
  (Sir Reg Empey) Slightly more recent than that. You scored a hit there. I think the development of the sort of Canary Wharf syndrome in recent years, where it was felt that lots of local communities felt excluded from the shiny developments that were happening around them, and it is precisely that, the point I was making to Mr Thompson, that we want to avoid. I think we have a mechanism to do so. I think it would be unfair to caricaturise the typical IDB investment in those circumstances. I can think of one or two localities where still that would be a high risk, but they are fairly geographically defined and I do not think it in any sense is a typical thing. You will be aware that under the current arrangements in new TSN, which we are pursuing and which is a cross-cutting policy right across the administration and across all departments, it is actually one of the things that we are looking to ensure that local people are able to benefit from. Otherwise what is the point of bringing them there.

  438. This takes us almost with a spooky precision into the next area that I was going to ask you about. You are familiar with the West Belfast Economic Forum and its 1999 report "Jobs or Just Promises?" This is an absolutely scathing indictment of the IDB and particularly IDB within West Belfast. It criticises the IDB for a series of grandiose failures and for attracting sunset industries, for not providing sustainable employment, for being peripheral, for being an extremely poor performer compared with its sister body in the South, but it specifically refers to West Belfast and the criticisms are around the poor quality of the jobs, and the point that has been touched on two or three time already about the people within the community not getting the better jobs and it criticises the lack of community involvement. To be honest it has not got a good word say for you, but I am sure you have. How would you respond to it?
  (Sir Reg Empey) Let me say that I am aware of the group. I have told that group, when I met some of their senior officers during the first phase of devolution, that I was personally very prepared to meet them and I suggested that they should organise a seminar of whatever format they wanted to produce and I would attend that and I would sit down with them and look at the difficulties in that area. You will appreciate that when I served in fact for five years as Chairman of the Economic Development Committee I was obviously keenly involved in projects in West Belfast that the council was involved in. However, I am bound to say that I think that that criticism is unjustified. First of all, there is the development taking place of the whole Springvale project, which involves still huge sums of public money and where you are having effectively a new campus established of the University of Ulster in that area. That is a deliberate and direct response by government with the university authorities to try to create a sort of centre of gravity in that particular constituency. You have Fujitsu based in that area. In more recent times FG Wilson, who is now owned by Caterpillar, have set up in that area. I think that taking that into account and taking the fact that if we look, for instance, at the figures that you will be getting from me in regard to LEDU and its involvement and the figures that you will be getting in regard to IDB and its performance, the amounts of money that are offered to West Belfast will show that compared to some other constituencies it is not doing all that badly. If I look at these tables correctly it seems to me that there are other constituents who could perhaps cast more stones than the West Belfast Economic Forum. I am just having a quick squint round here. In fact, there are two members of this Committee whose constituencies ended up getting less financial assistance.

  439. I think Mr Brooke and I are excluded from anything.
  (Sir Reg Empey) And whose constituencies came out worse last year from IDB than West Belfast and, indeed, I think that one of them in particular could do an equally scathing report. I think we have got to understand the area that we are dealing with. I served as Chairman of an organisation called City West Action which was brought in by Baroness Denton, and it may be that it was just after the Chairman's involvement, but the Community Work Programme was a programme that was designed to deal with long-term unemployment, people who were unemployed for more than one year. It was a three year benefits plus scheme. It operated in West Belfast and I was the Chairman of that. I think I have some working knowledge of what goes on there. We have to remember that that was a killing zone for many, many years, and people were afraid to move in and out of it. We just cannot sweep this under the carpet because it is relevant. If you are trying to bring an inward investor into an area and they have to pass by police stations that look like fortresses, pass by heavy security force presence, and all the razzmatazz that goes along with civil disorder, it has an effect on the minds not only of the investors, but of the people. Hopefully we are passing through that phase now and are on to a new phase. To have succeeded with some of these investments in that area—BCO Technologies are another company that comes to mind—where people have been trying and succeeding in getting roots established, significant roots, in major manufacturing businesses is good. I am not saying that we could not do more, of course, we always can do better, but I do not accept that government as a whole has not addressed the issue. In fact, when your Chairman was Secretary of State I am quite sure that the Making Belfast Work Initiative and all of those schemes were very largely focused in that particular area, and TSN, everything that we are doing, is designed to have an impact. We are acutely aware of the long-term unemployment problems in there and I have to say they do not apply exclusively to West Belfast. There are other people in Belfast that can make claims about certain parts of their areas too. The tables that we will furnish you with demonstrate that a serious effort has been made and success is being achieved, albeit that we are starting from a much lower threshold than in some other districts.