PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

  As we slowly but surely emerge from the restrictions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, it is becoming clear that whilst some things may return to what they were prior to last March’s first lockdown, other elements of our lives will have been changed irrevocably.  In particular, the fact that nearly all of us have had to stay at home for most of the last fourteen months means that our relationship with the locality in which we live has probably changed forever. This phenomenon was explored in a recent report from the thinktank Demos and financial business Legal & General that looked specifically at post-pandemic places. This was done through a poll of 20,000 adults in Britain during December 2020 and was followed up two months later with a series of focus groups The results are fascinating and reinforces the view that the way we perceive at ‘place’ has changed and actually become stronger during the pandemic which, of course, will cause a change in behaviour into the mediu...

Since I began writing for both the Daily Post and the Western Mail as a business columnist, one of the themes I have constantly returned to over the years is that of buying locally. Back in 2002, I referred to various initiatives in the United States of America which had encouraged organisations to support their local communities through buying local produce, with ten US states passing laws requiring that schools, prisons, and other state institutions buy a percentage of food from local farmers. Since then, I have written various pieces which have implored the Welsh Government to ensure that they do everything possible to use public procurement as an economic development tool by ensuring a greater percentage of their annual spend is with local Welsh firms. For example, in 2004 I wrote that that public sector in Wales spent approximately £3 billion on services, although very few small firms seem to be able to access this. At the time, I argued that if we could improve the proces...