There has been desperate news on the jobs front in my region in recent weeks.

The closure of Tillery Valley Foods - which has been a mainstay of the Blaenau Gwent economy for decades – is a bitter blow.

It is disastrous that this will leave around 250 people looking for work but when you look deeper into the nature of this firm and its location, the impact will be even worse than it initially appears.

This is because the firm employed generations of the same family and couples, meaning some households will be losing more than one income.

An employee who contacted my office also said that a majority of the workforce walk to work because they live so close to the factory on the Cwmtillery industrial estate.

Many of these people are without a car so will struggle to find work elsewhere given the state of public transport in the area.

Unfortunately, the wider Abertillery area does not have another employer of this scale that could absorb this many job losses. In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, this news could not have come at a worse time.

When news first broke of the firm’s financial difficulties, I asked the Labour Economy Minister on the floor of the Senedd what his government was doing to support them.

He revealed that discussions had been ongoing with the company’s owners for some months and that officials had been working on a solution to the company’s problems.

I also asked how increased public procurement could help a company like Tillery Valley Foods who, from what I have been told, had a big contract supplying the NHS in England with meals but hardly any business – if anything at all – was done with the NHS in Wales.

For the last decade, Plaid Cymru has been calling for increased public procurement in Wales to help protect existing jobs and create new ones.

It was therefore disappointing that the Welsh Government did not match our when it came to having targets on public procurement set within the Social Partnership and Public Procurement bill that passed through the Senedd earlier this year.

Labour blocked our calls for such targets and this was a major missed opportunity in my opinion.

I have written to the Economy Minister now to see what assistance the Welsh Government can offer Tillery Valley Foods employees and whether they have plans for what is a large factory unit capable of employing hundreds of local people. I hope that a positive response is forthcoming from the minister in due course.