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Builders' blackmail in the Valleys
ROY JONES says Persimmon's decision to stop building is a bid to undermine environmental regulations

It's still a life of hard knocks for the south Wales Valleys, struggling to find a viable economic future in the wake of hundreds of years of exploitation and the more recent Tory-inspired decimation of steel and mining communities.

The Welsh industrial cause has not been well served by its home-based business sectors, which have failed to take proper advantage of billions of pounds in European funding for deprived regions such as the Valleys.

Last week Wales's biggest house-builder Persimmon Homes announced it was pulling out of one of the poorest of the Valleys - the reason being that it does not make enough money out of houses on sites north of Pontypridd in the area known as Heads of the Valleys.

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