A Distressed Area Sir Hilton Young, the Minister of Health,
has been visiting the distressed area in South Wales and has given his impressions of the visit to The Times. It is, of course, a district that depends on the heavy industries —coal, iron and steel—and it is suffering acutely because these industries have felt the very worst of the depression. Sir Hilton Young naturally spoke . of new industries .which might be started, if employers and workmen were to show enterprise in providing and seeking work: But the difficulty is, that in a highly industrialized area like South Wales, the rates. ,are very heavy, and the workmen, or many„of them, are specialists and not very I adaptable. t is well known that most of the new industries begun of late years have been established in places, especially in the Home Counties or in agricultural centres like Rugby, where factories were unknown, but *here communications were good and the rates low. From many points of view it would have been well if the region between West London and Slough had been left in its eighteenth-century peace and if the many thriving factories there could have been set up in areas like South Wales, South Lancashire or the Black Country. It is satisfactory that the Government should have agreed to support, on a for £ basis up to £10,000, the admirable work initiated *by the Society of Friends for the provision of allotments, mainly in South Wales.
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