Sheep graze on a strip of rewilded land next to gleaming new technology buildings in Ebbw Vale, where a ewe and three lambs appeared to be the most frequent users of the area’s modern facilities during a visit to the Welsh valleys town last week. The scene captures the paradox at the heart of a community that has received hundreds of millions of pounds in regeneration funding yet still struggles to attract visitors and sustain local livelihoods.
From Steel to Silicon: The Town That Rebuilt
Where the Ebbw Vale steelworks once stood — at its peak in the late 1930s the largest in Europe, employing up to 34,000 men across the wider area — a cluster of gleaming modern buildings now rises. A hospital, a leisure centre and a college were the first to replace the industrial site after the works closed for good in 2002, ending more than two centuries of iron and steel production that had begun in 1790. Since then, a public-private cybersecurity research centre and two technology firms have joined them. A new railway station opened in 2015, linking the town to Cardiff.
The Welsh Government’s £100m Tech Valleys programme, launched in 2017, aims to bring new industry to the area, with a focus on artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced manufacturing. Three tech companies have already opened offices on the old steelworks site, which is also home to Goldworks (or Gwaithaur), a co-working and business support hub that opened in 2024, funded by the Welsh Government’s Tech Valleys programme and the UK Government’s Shared Prosperity Fund. Nearby, the High Value Engineering (HiVE) facility — a new post-16 education centre specialising in robotics, advanced materials and digital technologies — has been co-funded by the Welsh and UK governments.
Yet the area remains quiet. “We don’t get as many visitors as we would like,” said John Edwards, 77, a volunteer at the Ebbw Vale Works Museum, an archive of the area’s coal, iron and steelmaking past housed in the steel mill’s former general offices. “The train station is busy in the mornings, it’s packed with people going to Cardiff. We’ve become a commuter town.”
The EU Funding That Did Not Save a Town
After the steelworks closed, Blaenau Gwent received the maximum amount of EU funding available for structural and regional development programmes. Much of the money was spent on the regeneration projects on the old site, including the hospital, leisure centre and college, and later on the “The Works” — described by Blaenau Gwent Council as one of the largest and most complex economic regeneration initiatives in Wales.
Despite that investment, the town’s economic fortunes did not turn around. Up until the Brexit vote in 2016, the number of jobs in the area steadily declined, as did median wages in real terms. The Bevan Foundation, a Merthyr Tydfil-based thinktank, offered a stark assessment: “It’s pretty clear that whatever else EU funds may have achieved, they didn’t boost the fortunes of Blaenau Gwent and many other parts of Wales. If these towns were ‘showered with cash’, it appears to have gone straight down the drain.”
Ebbw Vale and the wider Blaenau Gwent area are among the poorest places in the UK. Everyone the Guardian met during its visit said the town’s troubles began long before Brexit shrank trade and investment, leaving families on average thousands of pounds a year worse off. The closure of the steelworks removed the last traditional skilled manufacturing jobs, and the area’s industrial heritage — which saw it become one of the first in Britain to adopt Bessemer converters in the 1860s and host Europe’s first electrolytic tinplating line in the 1940s — now belonged to the past.
The Brexit Paradox: Highest Leave Vote Despite EU Money
In the 2016 EU referendum, 62% of voters in Ebbw Vale — a town of 18,000 people — voted to leave the European Union, the highest proportion in Wales. This occurred despite the vast sums of EU money that had been poured into the area, with EU flags visible on signage across regeneration sites.
“It was shocking so many people voted leave when you just had to look around to see how much help we got from the EU – the flag was on signs everywhere,” said Claire Jones, 52, out shopping on the high street. “Either people didn’t care or they didn’t know, or they believed what [the leave campaign] said about immigration.” According to Office for National Statistics data, just 3.2% of Blaenau Gwent’s population was born abroad, down from 2.2% a decade earlier. Mike, a 62-year-old shopper who worked in the steelworks until he was made redundant, said immigration remained a concern for him and others.
Lindsay Whittle, a Plaid Cymru representative for the constituency in the Welsh Senedd, said: “What the Brexit vote showed was the depth of despair and how people felt left behind. I think now, with more information available and a lot more engagement on the subject, a lot of people here now regret that decision.”
After Brexit: Patchy Recovery and New Political Alignments
In the decade since the referendum, the UK has — as predicted — failed to make up the EU funding shortfall in full. The Welsh Government’s Tech Valleys programme and the UK Government’s Shared Prosperity Fund have provided some new money, but the scale has not matched what was lost. Blaenau Gwent Council reports that more local businesses have opened over the past 10 years than in the 10 before it — a net gain of 870, up from 511 — and the council, together with neighbouring Torfaen, has announced a joint blueprint for growth capitalising on Welsh Government investment and funding pots for deprived areas announced by Labour in Westminster. Torfaen and Blaenau Gwent have also published a joint vision, “Thriving Together – Tech Valleys Growth Corridor”, aiming for a more prosperous region by 2035.
But none of it, it seems, has yet made a tangible difference to people in town dealing with the cost of living crisis. Nathan Grist, 40, part of the family-owned butchers with the same name, said: “We’re doing OK but some businesses are barely keeping afloat, and people, customers, have to cut back on even little things now. It’s a struggle for everyone.” Mike called the regeneration projects on the former steelworks site “white elephants”. “I worked in the steelworks until I was made redundant, then I worked for myself. But it’s different for my kids and my grandkids,” he said. “There’s no jobs. You have to get the train, and people from other places have realised that and now it’s pushing up house prices.”
The political landscape has shifted dramatically. Blaenau Gwent, the birthplace of the Labour movement and once the safest Labour majority in the country, saw voters abandon the party in May’s Senedd election. Ebbw Vale’s constituency did not elect a single Labour Senedd member. Under the new, more proportional voting system, three of the six seats went to Plaid Cymru and the other three to Reform UK. Whittle said: “More and more, people in Wales are seeing that Westminster doesn’t work for them. The EU referendum and the mess afterwards are a big reason for that.”
