Most of Wales is a small town, and it might be time we started developing our economy from the town upwards rather than always from the region downwards. That is the argument put forward by Dylan Jones-Evans, who highlights that the median Welsh built-up area has a population of only around 1,260.
Writing for WalesOnline, Jones-Evans reflects on an American article entitled Most of America is a Small Town, which examined population data for nearly 20,000 incorporated places in the United States and found that the median community has just 1,153 residents. Three-quarters have populations below 5,000, and almost half have fewer than 1,000. The article did not argue that America's great cities don't matter, but that much of the thinking around economic development was created for relatively large places when most communities are actually very small.
A striking picture of Welsh settlements
According to the Office for National Statistics, Wales has 579 built-up areas, which represent actual settlements rather than artificial administrative boundaries. Together they account for 88% of the Welsh population. The median Welsh built-up area has a population of only around 1,260, with 252 having fewer than 1,000 residents and more than four out of five having fewer than 5,000. Only a handful of Welsh settlements have populations greater than 50,000, and Cardiff, with 348,535 residents in the 2021 census, is in a completely different league from most of the country.
Jones-Evans, who was brought up in Pwllheli in North Wales, argues that this raises an important question about how economic development has been organised. For the last two decades, there has been a steady movement towards ever larger economic geographies, including city regions, growth deals, regional economic frameworks and, more recently, corporate joint committees. There are sensible reasons for this, as transport systems, labour markets, universities and major industrial clusters do not fit neatly within council boundaries.
Focus on local businesses
But Jones-Evans asks whether Wales has moved too far away from the places where economic activity actually happens. A business does not expand in an economic region but in a town. When a manufacturer runs out of factory space, it needs another building somewhere close enough to retain its workforce, and if a company employing 50 people closes in a community of 5,000, that is a major economic shock regardless of how insignificant those jobs might appear within the larger region.
Real economic development, he argues, means knowing which businesses in a town are growing, which are thinking about expanding, which are struggling to recruit and which may be considering leaving. Above all, it means regularly talking to the firms already employing people. For most small communities, the biggest economic-development victory will not be attracting a huge company from somewhere else, but helping an existing business employing 20 people become one employing 30, or preventing another established employer from leaving because it cannot find suitable premises.
A modest proposal
Jones-Evans suggests that every significant Welsh town should have somebody whose responsibility is simply to know its economy properly. Not another bureaucracy and certainly not another strategy, and in smaller areas, several towns could share the resource. Their job would be to speak regularly to local employers, understand which businesses had growth potential, maintain a live picture of available property and land, and connect companies with finance, colleges, universities and business support.
This would not require a huge new pot of money. Wales has £546.5m available through the Local Growth Fund over the next three years, including more than £156m for innovation and business competitiveness. A network of 50 town business growth managers would cost around £3m a year, or less than 2% of the overall Fund, and could cover roughly 125 of the larger towns.
For that relatively modest sum, virtually every significant Welsh community could have someone whose job was not to write another strategy, but to know its businesses, identify those capable of growth and help remove the obstacles holding them back. Wales should be developing globally competitive industries, attracting investment and supporting businesses capable of rapid growth, but that does not mean ignoring the economic geography of the country we actually have.
