Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Norris Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

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

The reality is that the rhetoric is just not matching up to what the Government say they want it to deliver, but those analysts at Oxford Economics are not fooled. They say the levelling-up White Paper contains

little that is new or significant.

They say that there is nothing to cause them to revise their national and regional growth forecast, and they call its targets and missions either “pre-existing or “vague”. That is a damning indictment. What we needed was a plan to bring good jobs back to all communities to breathe life into our high streets and to transfer power from Whitehall to local communities. This White Paper is not going to address regional inequalities, is it?

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Gentleman said that the rhetoric is not matching up to the delivery, which suggests, actually, that we are underselling what we are doing. I think what he meant to say, if he had written out his question more clearly, is that the delivery is not matching up to the rhetoric. I have to disagree with him on that, because a plethora of organisations from Onward to the Institute for Public Policy Research have pointed out that everything in the levelling-up White Paper is what Labour should have been doing when it was in power.