FEAR, honesty and allowing risk-taking are three of the most important elements to motivate sports players, Warren Gatland admitted yesterday.

THE European Commission yesterday criticised the “absence of detailed departmental spending limits” in Chancellor Alastair Darling’s plans for curbing the Government’s budget deficit.

Nissan is to build its new electric car, the Leaf, in Sunderland, safeguarding hundreds of jobs, the Japanese firm announces.

A damning verdict on the UK’s £24bn secondhand car market is published by the fair trading watchdog.

Yesterday, the latest unemployment figures showed that Wales had 133,000 officially unemployed. If you add those who are economically inactive to that figure, it means that ONE in THREE of working age adults in Wales are not in a job.

Predictably, the reaction by politicians to these statistics is a sterile debate over whether the figures are accurate and whether we should trust the jobseekers allowance data which is itself flawed as an accurate depiction of those who are looking for work.

As this blog stated back in December,

“The fact that JSA doesn’t actually cover everyone who is looking for work at this present time. For example, contribution-based Jobseeker’s Allowance is only paid for 182 days and excludes the self-employed whilst income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance is based on income and savings and is only for those on a low income. Therefore, it is clear that the JSA will miss out a significant proportion of those looking for a job who, for various reasons, will not qualify. In addition, it is clear that after six months, the chances are that you will no longer qualify for JSA support and will fall off the register.”

In fact, the only good piece of news is that the number of self-employed has increased slightly since last year but this is mainly because many are being forced, through the recession, to find jobs for themselves. Indeed, it would be interesting to find out whether WAG support services in enterprise are being inundated with requests or not for help in starting a business or, as I suspect, people are just getting on with it.

The fact of the matter is that since WAG decided to finally take the recession seriously at the end of last year, an additional 23,000 people have found themselves unemployed. This is despite the ’success’ of Pro-Act which, as many of us have pointed out, seems to be the only instrument which this government is capable of utilising to stop the haemmoraging of jobs from Wales.

Of course, WAG will argue that it is currently ‘consulting’ on the Economic Renewal Programme for Wales but surely there are enough people working in the Department of Economy and Transport to come up with solutions to deal with this crisis without having to ask every person in Wales what should be done? If not, what are they there for?

The beauty of devolved government is having the ability to do something immediately to deal with an economic crisis, not the ability to talk to every Tom, Dic and Harri about what should be done.

Action does speak louder than words and it is about time this government got on with the job instead of just talking about it.