Levelling-up Missions: East of England

Alex Norris Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Davies, and to speak in this debate on behalf of the Opposition.

As has been mentioned, it is a little over a year since we had a similar iteration of this debate. I was relatively new in my role as shadow Minister and rather expected a blizzard of similar, regional-type levelling-up debates in this Chamber, but that has not been the case. That is testimony to the commitment of the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous), but also to his ingenuity in the use of the Backbench Business Committee process and to the wisdom of the Committee’s members. I associate myself with comments that he and others have made about the 70th anniversary of the 1953 storms. We will all hold those communities in our thoughts as they mark the anniversary today and tomorrow.

I was struck by the way in which the hon. Gentleman’s all-party parliamentary group is monitoring levelling up on a thematic basis, which probably provides a good model for the rest of the country. There are likely to be some similarities, particularly the more input-type targets, such as on research and development, which are easier to do. Progress is good, but there are knottier, longer-term questions around skills, transport and housing. As he said, we could debate each of them at great length. They pose common challenges across the regions, and they show how much further we have to go.

The region was well represented in the debate, and I agree with everything that the hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) said about long-term funding moving away from the “Hunger Games”-style stuff that we have seen with the levelling-up fund, and all the disappointment that it has clearly generated in Bedford and other parts of the country.

In response to a comment made by the hon. Member for Clacton (Giles Watling), levelling up can be a funny fish. All our communities are different in some way, and we could create many different carve-outs for towns, cities, rural, coastal, north, south or whatever, to the point that the scheme would stop meaning anything. There has to be some degree of commonality so that there is a consistent and effective approach, but coastal might just be different in this case. There are many issues relating to housing and mental health services that mean that we have to have a bit of an enhanced approach to coastal communities if we are going to deal with some of the knotty, long-term challenges. I think the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel) said that the hinterland may mask a lot of those social challenges, which is a very important point.

One of the things I will take away from the debate is the cross-departmental focus. We have many different and well-meant interventions from all over Government, but how do we get true value? For me, the answer is devolution—certainly of the leadership, if not of all the funding and the power—to those communities, because place is the best way to hold all those different streams together.

I knew the hon. Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild) would not miss an opportunity to raise QEH, as he does with admirable consistency. He made an important point about the funding formula for rural schools, which can have a profound impact on resources for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

Members do not see levelling up as either a “north versus south” thing or a “London versus the rest of the UK” thing. We recognise that there is deprivation in every local authority, and all right hon. and hon. Members made that case very well. For the east of England, that is certainly a real challenge.  If we look at the top lines—it is one of the net contributing regions and it has high home ownership—we could kid ourselves about some of the underlying challenges. That point has been well made in the debate.

Of course, the region has huge potential. The hon. Member for Waveney spoke about energy, which made me think of a visit I undertook with the Industry and Parliament Trust last week to the east midlands. We went to see Donaldson Timber in Ilkeston, which has 10 similar sites around the country, including one in Cambridge that serves the east of England. It specialises in off-site timber making and provides hundreds of jobs and tens of thousands of homes each year. If we get the right mix of increased house building and skills, sites like that in Cambridge have the potential to create many more skilled jobs in careers that will last. That is the sort of potential we need to tap into through levelling up-type interventions.

We have to deal with the problem that the brand of levelling up has become highly discredited. YouGov polling this year showed that in only four local authority areas residents feel that their community has improved in recent years, whereas in 215 areas they think it is the same, and in 142 they think it has got worse. Of course, that is understandable and right: people cannot see a GP, they cannot get a train, the available jobs are insecure and on low pay, and there is the sense that nothing in this country works any more.

The levelling-up model has not delivered by tackling that. Devolution deals are great, unless the Government have decided an area is not good enough to have one or that it deserves more limited powers than others. Similarly, the “Hunger Games”-style funding by bidding for pots has not delivered. Those who succeeded in round 1 are now trying to work out how to salvage bids that have been eaten up by the inflation crisis. Round 2 threw up some eccentric and disappointing outcomes for many, including confusion about whether some areas could ever have been successful. If not, why were they encouraged to bid?

Indeed, even the winners are losers. For example, it is great news that Norfolk County Council has secured £24 million to improve transport in King’s Lynn; it is less good news that, even taking that money into account, in the last four years alone, that local authority is £146 million worse off in real terms due to cuts to its budget. With levelling up, even the winners are losers.

It does not have to be this way. There is a better model that would deliver for the nations and regions of this country. We can end the deals and the beauty parades, provided we get the powers and resources to all our nations and regions—to the experts in place—to shape their economies and invest in the things they know their areas will be good at in the future and that their young people will work in. We want every community, as part of a combined authority—or on its own if it is big enough—to access top-level powers. We want to go further than what is on offer on skills, devolution, the Department for Work and Pensions and jobcentres, net zero and much more. We want to move funding away from having hundreds of different pots and instead, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford said, have proper funding based on need, with consolidated settlements, so that local communities can plan and spend in a way that reflects their priorities.

There are significant political conversations to have about levelling up in this country, as there are in the east of England, but we must be hopeful as we have those. The hon. Member for Waveney and many other colleagues have shown the clear potential in the east of England. We want the power and resources to be given to those communities to make that potential a reality.