CONCERNS have been raised for the future of young people in Dwyfor and Meirionnydd over fears that jobs are being moved away from the area and centralised in Cardiff.

Cllr Simon Brooks raised his concerns following the news that HM Revenue & Customs announced in November it was to close all tax offices in Wales outside Cardiff, which includes Ty Moelwyn in Porthmadog, which would result in a loss of over 20 jobs.

Cllr Brooks, who lived in Cardiff for five years himself, said he found it disheartening when he moved to Gwynedd from the south and found that many local young people felt they had to move out the area to get a job.

He said: “Gwynedd is great. It has mountains and sea and beaches and it has the Welsh language. It is the Bavaria of Wales. But what it doesn’t have is jobs.

“And rural Gwynedd doesn’t have many young people. They all move to Cardiff. As a friend told me on the Llyn Peninsula ‘We love our children. We bring them up. And then they are taken away.’”

The Porthmadog councillor said that there is a current policy in place of putting everything and everyone in Cardiff and says the there is no longer a process in place of building a nation in Wales any more, it is now building a city-state.

He added: “North-west Wales does not house the national headquarters of a single substantial Welsh institution.

“S4C had the chance to buck the trend, but blew it.

“Gwynedd does have the national headquarters for sailing and, as it happens, for Cerdd Dant singing, but there are no national headquarters of an institution central to Wales post-devolution.

“In Porthmadog we had until last month HMRC’s Welsh-language tax collection service. If you wanted to work in Welsh-language tax collection, you have to come to Gwynedd.

“The service is excellent. Since hearing of its demise, people have been taking to twitter praising the joyous experience of paying tax through the Porthmadog Welsh-language tax service.

“But the service is moving to Cardiff. It’s moved to save money and in order to make ‘a big contribution to the economy of Wales’.

“It’s also moving so that the Welsh-language service can liaise more effectively with other Welsh-language government services, all of which are in Cardiff.

“The message of HMRC centralisation is simple. And what an apt slogan for post-devolution Wales it is too. If you don’t move to Cardiff, you don’t get on.

“I know that fighting to keep Porthmadog’s Welsh-language tax collection service in Porthmadog might appear to the man on the omnibus in Roath to be a somewhat paraochial issue.

“But it speaks a wider truth about the sort of society we want to create in Wales.

Is the new Wales merely to be the mirror image of the bad Britain of old with everything located in the capital?”