
Welsh Government backs aerospace and defence sectors
Wales is home to around 285 aerospace and defence companies, supporting 16,000 jobs and contributing approximately £1.5 billion in GVA to the Welsh economy.
Ms Evans said: "Wales boasts world-class capabilities in the defence and aerospace sectors and Paris Airshow represents a global platform to further raise the profile of Wales as a dynamic hub for inward investment."
Eight of the world's top 11 aerospace and defence companies have a significant presence in Wales, including Airbus, RTX, General Dynamics, GE Aerospace, BAE Systems, Safran, Rolls Royce and Thales.
Ms Evans said the Welsh Government is committed to supporting businesses to create jobs in emerging industries.
The government recently attended DSEI in Japan and will lead a delegation to DSEI in London in September.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
India confident of meeting fiscal deficit target, despite planned tax cuts
NEW DELHI, Aug 17 (Reuters) - India is confident of meeting its fiscal deficit target of 4.4% for the current fiscal year, according to a government source with knowledge of the matter, despite its plans to cut consumption tax later this year. In the biggest tax overhaul since 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday announced sweeping changes to the complex goods and services tax (GST) regime which will make daily essentials and electronics cheaper. "India's federal and state governments have options to offset any loss of revenue due to lowering of rates," the government source said without providing further details. The source also said it will end the practice of collecting compensation cess by December. The GST compensation cess is an additional levy imposed on certain items to compensate states for any revenue loss incurred due to the implementation. India's finance ministry did not respond to a request for comment sent outside of office hours.


South Wales Guardian
2 hours ago
- South Wales Guardian
Racing tax: What is it and why is the sport going on strike
For the first time in the modern history of the sport in Britain, its participants will voluntarily go on strike for a day. A day of protest will be held in Westminster. What does that mean? It means there will be no racing in Britain on September 10. The meetings scheduled for Lingfield, Carlisle, Uttoxeter and Kempton that day will not take place. They have been rescheduled to other dates. And why has all this come about? The strike announcement has come as part of British racing's 'Axe the Racing Tax' campaign, which is urging the Government to axe the Treasury's proposal to bring existing online betting duties into one single rate. Why would tax rises be so bad? Economic analysis commissioned by the British Horseracing Authority has shown that aligning the current tax rate paid by bookmakers on racing with that of online games of chance could see a £330 million revenue hit to the industry in the first five years, putting 2,752 jobs at risk in the first year alone. Strike action will surely cost the sport money? It will, it is estimated it will cost around £200,000 in lost revenue on the day. So does the racing industry support the strike move? In a word, yes. Racecourses, owners and trainers are all in agreement. The National Trainers Federation said cancelling fixtures was 'a huge sacrifice' which 'should serve as a stark reminder to the Government of the impact its tax raid will have on our sport'. Is this is a one-off, or will there be more strikes? No more strikes are planned, as things stand. Can I still have a bet anywhere that day? Yes, there will actually be one meeting in Ireland, at Cork. Irish racing is run completely separately to British racing.


Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
‘We downsized somewhere we'd never heard of'
This time last year, Jeff and Sheena Evans had never heard of Hildenborough, a pleasant Kent commuter village two miles north-west of Tonbridge and five miles south-east of Sevenoaks. Fast forward 12 months and the couple now live there with their cavapoo puppy, Beau. Their new floor-to-ceiling windows look out over greenery, trees and a carp pond – a view that's a world away from the one they enjoyed from their three-bedroom house in a gated development in Marbella on the Costa del Sol. 'The sunshine was fantastic – there's a romance about Spain and the way of life there,' says Jeff, 74. He had lived with Sheena, 70, in the country for 24 years and had intended to retire there. 'I'd play golf, and the summers were wonderful with people sitting outside long into the night every day of the week for four or five months. We miss that quite a lot.' For the most part, it was a desire to be close to their son, daughter-in-law and two grandsons that prompted the couple to downsize in the UK. 'We woke up one morning and thought: 'What are we doing? We have family and grandkids back here',' says Jeff, who runs a logistics business. Post-Brexit red tape also played a significant role in their decision. Non-EU citizens can now stay in Europe for only 90 days within any 180-day period without needing a visa and so the couple began the process of applying for a Spanish residency permit. After five years of continuous legal residency, one can apply for permanent residency. 'It was incredibly complex to get the visa in the first place,' Jeff says. 'You had to get things like reports from your doctor in the UK and take out private healthcare in Spain, which is very expensive. 'If you have Spanish residency, they don't want you to come back to England for long, which would make it difficult to see family – and if you run a business, you also have to move your tax affairs to Spain and I didn't want to do that.' Once the couple had made the decision to move back to England – and after enduring a rather 'traumatic' year of selling their Spanish house, suffering two aborted sales before it finally went through – they had to choose where to go. The last place they had lived before moving to Spain over two decades ago was Kingswood, in Surrey, and their son and his family live in Borough Green, Kent. Jeff needed easy access to London for work, so they ended up with a vast search area across both Kent and Surrey. They rented a property while they looked for a UK home and last September while visiting family they came across Berkeley's Oakhill, a 30-acre gated development in Hildenborough. 'I said to Sheena: 'Where's Hildenborough?' But it turns out our daughter-in-law's brother used to work there when it was offices and it looked lovely – a beautiful Grade II-listed building that had been converted into apartments,' Jeff explains. They went to see the site that day and the next morning put in an offer on a large two-bedroom apartment, which they bought for £930,000. They moved in two months later, at the end of November last year. Jeff decorated the apartment and, because they sold all their Spanish furniture with the Marbella house, they had to furnish it from scratch. 'That was expensive but exciting,' he jokes. Their leap of faith has paid off and they are getting to know their new area, often travelling into Tonbridge or making the 25-minute journey to Tunbridge Wells. 'I didn't know Kent that well, but it's a beautiful county and we've found some great restaurants and nice artisan coffee shops,' says Jeff. Most importantly, he and Sheena now spend plenty of quality time with their family who are only 20 minutes away, and they are making friends – helped by their puppy Beau, who joined them at the beginning of April. 'There's a path near our home and everyone stops to talk to Beau – it's like the old days when you'd chat to people over the fence,' Jeff says. 'A lot of people here are like-minded. It's not cheap to live here, but it's worth it.' House first, location second Downsizing usually has a practical impetus – wanting to reduce cost, hassle and maintenance, or free up equity for later life or to give to children or grandchildren. Yet Jeff and Sheena Evans are not the only ones seeking a complete change of scenery by moving somewhere they don't know, with research by Hamptons estate agency showing that downsizers move 40pc further than average buyers. 'In the country house market, we often find that buyers choose the house first and the location second – especially when downsizing later in life when proximity to schools and the workplace become less important,' says Claire Carter, of John D Wood & Co estate agency. 'Often the move is dictated by being a certain distance from family and grandchildren, but there's definitely an element of people seeking a shift in lifestyle and something different.' Last year, Carter sold a house to a British couple who had recently returned from 25 years working in pharmaceuticals in America and living in a Boston 'brownstone' (a 19th-century townhouse). Looking for a new start, they wanted to relocate to the UK and, with family spread between Kent and the north of England, they decided to settle somewhere in the south-east to allow their children to visit easily. 'They ended up in a chocolate-box cottage with a lake in the garden in Hadlow Down, a rural East Sussex village they had never heard of before they came to view the property,' says Carter. 'They visited on a day of horizontal rain, but the setting – and the house – completely won them over.' The sale went through in only six weeks and when she handed over the keys, Carter wrote out a full list of everything the couple might need in the area – from the nearest butcher to Waitrose and the farmers' market. 'They really had no clue where anything was,' she says. For the first few weeks, they'd text her every couple of days with questions. Look before you leap While many of those who have leapt feet-first into an area love their new neighbourhood, some inevitably don't. So research is key for those thinking of downsizing somewhere they don't know, advises Harry Gladwin of buying agency The Buying Solution. 'Local insight becomes absolutely critical,' says Gladwin, who works in the Cotswolds. 'When it's done well, downsizing can be hugely liberating. But without the right support, it's very easy to get wrong – and hard and costly to undo.' Going against the tide and moving away from most people's downsizing dream, Dave Fenwick, 77, and his wife, Rita, 71, upped sticks from Cornwall after moving there from Shropshire eight years ago. The couple have come to realise how far their 'forever home' – a three-bedroom, three-storey townhouse in Truro – was from their family, who live across Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. 'While we loved living close to the coast, we had placed over 200 miles between us and our children and grandchildren,' Dave says. The couple began researching areas further east, aiming to find somewhere a maximum of two hours from family. They looked everywhere from Bath to Telford and Devizes to Coventry. They ended up settling on a three-bedroom semi at City & Country's Burderop Park development, a collection of 58 homes near Swindon in Wiltshire. Despite not knowing the area at all well, they moved there last year. 'Living in Cornwall, once you've done places like Newquay, Padstow and St Ives, you feel as if you've pretty much seen all there is to be seen down the coast,' Dave explains. 'We're now close to so many places – we've been to Bath, Oxford and Cheltenham... We also have the North Wessex Downs on our doorstep. We can be doing something totally different each weekend.' 'It's our time in the sun' Happily, Zenos and Lynne Christodoulides have no regrets about their seaside move. For the past 13 years, the couple have lived in north Manchester with their three children and two dogs. 'We thought it would be a great place for teenagers, with lots of life and culture, plus a hippie scene – everyone's vegan,' says Zenos, 58, a teacher who is retiring this summer. However, now that the children have grown up and left home, the couple found they were 'rattling around in a four-bedroom detached house,' he explains. 'One daughter is in London, the other is in Bristol and our son is starting his career in Manchester – but he could be moved anywhere so there is nothing keeping us [there]. As we reached the stage where we stopped working full-time, we thought: wouldn't it be nice to live by the sea?' They started looking for homes in Cornwall and found one they liked but the legal report said it was built on a tin mine. That necessitated further costly reports, remedial work or both. So they did more research. 'Devon is next to Cornwall and we found a town called Brixham – not Brixton, as my mother initially thought – and fell in love with the place.' The couple, who had no mortgage on their Manchester house, bought a two-bedroom bungalow into which they moved in June. 'We have released some equity that will partially fund our retirement,' says Zenos, who has a physics technician job starting in Torquay in September. 'It's mornings-only but I couldn't retire from teaching and do nothing, so this will be perfect. I'd like to learn to surf and can do that in the afternoons.' While it's early days, the couple have found the neighbours to be 'lovely'. 'We visited in February half term and, unlike many other seaside towns in winter, it was bustling,' Zenos says. 'It's a fishing town so doesn't rely only on tourists. Everything feels like it's slotted into place and after many years of work and ferrying children around, we feel it's our time in the sun. Moving from Manchester to Devon is the best thing we've ever done.'