Midlands Engine

Debate between Andrew Mitchell and Lilian Greenwood

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Westminster Hall

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) on securing the debate. I am sure the Minister will enjoy the opportunity to talk about the Government’s industrial strategy, but I am afraid that most attention right now is probably focused on what is happening on the other side of Parliament Square. I will return to the significance of our relationship with the European Union later.

Outside this place, many people still ask what the midlands engine is. The answer is simple: we are the midlands engine—we being the many right hon. and hon. Members who stand up for their midlands constituencies in this place, and the entrepreneurs, innovators and grafters back at home. All of us are working harder than ever, together, to build our collective identity; to develop our competitive offer; to promote the midlands to the world; and to attract people to come to us to invest, to study, to work and to live. The midlands engine is not just a brand, an organisation or a place. It is all of us working together to show that when the midlands succeeds, Britain succeeds.

The assets of the midlands engine will be familiar to everyone, not only up and down the country but throughout the world—Range Rover, Rolls-Royce, JCB, Toyota and Boots are a few of the names that have made the midlands famous. What is great about all those assets is that their industrial evolution is constant as they reinvent themselves and their products to meet the demands of our ever-changing world.

No clearer evidence for midlands resilience and ability for reinvention exists than in my constituency. The site where thousands were once employed to manufacture Raleigh bicycles is now the University of Nottingham’s innovation park, where businesses and researchers work together on everything from satellite navigation, aerospace and sustainable energy technologies, to drive-chain engineering and sustainable chemistry. The city centre site where ibuprofen was discovered by Dr Stewart Adams is now one of the UK’s largest bioscience incubators, commercialising cutting-edge research. When I came through Nottingham yesterday, I saw that the brand-new BioCity Discovery Building is almost up and finished, showing how the sector is developing and growing.

None of that is new. As the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington said, the midlands has been an engine for growth for centuries, and will be for centuries to come. The strong midlands DNA is rooted in our industrial heritage, which is reflected in our being the advanced manufacturing heartland of the nation, responsible for almost a quarter of the UK’s total manufacturing capability.

Two and a half centuries ago, new canals connected England’s major rivers, opening up the interior for the movement of raw materials and trade of finished goods. High Speed 2 can have that same transformative impact, with the potential to unlock huge economic benefits for the midlands and for the UK as a whole. To me, HS2 is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to transform Britain’s infrastructure, linking the cities of the midlands and the north with fast, frequent and reliable services, connecting people and places, businesses and workers, markets and customers, driving up growth and productivity, and expanding the life chances of more than 11 million people in the midlands engine region. HS2 is not about the much mocked 20 minutes off the journey time to London—although who would not want to have even better connections to one of the world’s mega-cities? It is about improved capacity and incredible connectivity within the midlands region.

[Mr Mitchell]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. HS2 is not about speed; every day 4,000 people stand on trains going into and out of Birmingham.

[Lilian Greenwood]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Phase 1 of HS2 in particular is about vitally needed extra capacity, although for phase 2 connectivity and journey-time savings are important. Cutting the journey time between Nottingham and Birmingham from a dawdling 1 hour and 13 minutes to only 36 minutes will make a real difference to the choices available to workers, businesses and investors. We should not downplay that.

HS2 can and must act as a spur to regeneration and job creation. The West Midlands combined authority’s growth strategy aims to add £14 billion to the economy and to create and support 100,000 jobs. The Curzon investment plan is designed to regenerate that area around the planned HS2 station. In the east midlands, councils, local enterprise partnerships and the East Midlands chamber of commerce are working together to develop ambitious but deliverable proposals for maximising the economic potential of a new HS2 and classic-rail hub station at Toton, not only for that immediate area, important though that is, but for the whole region.

The benefits of HS2 for the region will be fully realised only if they come alongside other transport improvements. I recognise the danger of my sounding like a broken record, but Conservative Cabinet Ministers came to the east midlands before the most recent elections promising to deliver our region’s top transport priority—the electrification of the midland main line—only then to pause it, unpause it, delay it by four years and now give the impression of wanting to scrap it altogether. That is not good enough. The midlands deserves 21st century infrastructure, and the Government must deliver on the promises they made to our region if we are to be ready for the global challenges ahead. I am sure the Minister understands the importance of the midland main line electrification to our region, so I hope he will speak to his Department for Transport colleagues and ask them to think again.

I remain optimistic about what the midlands has to offer and its ability to seize the coming opportunities. However, I cannot fail to sound a note of caution about the UK’s future relationship with the EU and the profound risks that that poses to the midlands engine. The midlands is the manufacturing heart of the UK, so the potential loss of tariff-free access to the single market and the potential imposition of customs controls would surely have a chilling effect on those businesses I mentioned. We know that Toyota is considering how it can survive in a post-Brexit UK. Boots tells me that it is deeply concerned about our being outside the European Medicines Agency. Our world-class universities are extremely worried about their ability to maintain their position in global league tables without access to the Horizon 2020 funding, and without the ability to recruit and retain the highest-calibre students and staff from around the world.

In the coming weeks and months, therefore, I will press the Government hard to ensure that they do not put obstacles in the way of the bright future that our region is heading towards.