Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Alex Norris Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

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

It is a pleasure to close this debate on behalf of the Opposition. When it comes to levelling up, we have had a few rounds of departmental questions, the White Paper, the Bill and, today, nearly six hours of very good debate. There is only one question left in front of us: when it comes to levelling up and the Government’s approach to levelling up, is this it? With our huge regional inequalities, is what is in the first third of this Bill really it? When it comes to the wasted potential of the nations and regions in our country, is this it? When it comes to the over-centralisation of this country, is this really it? The Minister for Housing seems to think that maybe it is, but I say gently to him: if this really was a comprehensive Bill aimed at tackling the regional inequalities that are holding us back, it would not have been necessary to bulk it out with a planning Bill as well. That is the reality: the first third of the Bill is levelling up, and two thirds are about planning. The reality, too, is that there are no answers in here either to the immediate cost of living challenges we face, or to the long-term structural questions that we as a country must address—more evidence that this Government are out of touch and out of ideas.

Hon. Members should not take my word for it: the Office for National Statistics report clearly shows that, far from levelling up, things are getting worse, and the excoriating report from the Public Accounts Committee shows that the approach so far has been a very poor one indeed. Is this really it?

This debate has been a good one. I know the Minister is a listener and will reflect on the contributions that have been made, but he will certainly have heard a lot that would improve the Bill. The Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), should have been drafted in to help to write it because his speech was about two fundamental things: first, more money, ending the beauty parades of small pots of funding, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) and my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter) said, and properly funding our communities so they can build their futures; and secondly, new powers for existing Mayors and access to those powers for communities that do not currently have them. That was a really good starter for where we could go with the Bill.

Some reality was injected into the debate by my hon. Friends the Members for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) and for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), who talked movingly about just how hard things are for people right now and the struggle people are facing just to make the bills work, finding that there is too much week or too much month left at the end for their paycheques to cover. There is not enough in the Bill to address that. Again we see the promise of jam tomorrow, but there is no value in jam tomorrow when there is not bread today.

My hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss) and for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) also injected some reality around cuts to local authorities. We talk about this on the Labour Benches a lot, but we used to see Government Back Benchers standing up to say how much they had been winning out of levelling up so far. The reality, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) said in her opening speech, is that even those winners, through the levelling up fund, the towns fund or the future high streets fund, are losers because of the cuts to their local authorities. She made those points very well.

My hon. Friends the Members for York Central (Rachael Maskell), for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake) and for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) also made moving points about decent housing. I hope that we can feature that in Committee, because it is impossible for people to build a life and to build communities, to have that solid foundation to reach their potential and to help their family to reach theirs, if they are worried about their housing, or if their housing is of poor quality or a detriment to their health. We must aspire to much better for our fellow citizens.

Finally on the Labour Benches, I must refer to the contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova), and the points she made about London. Hon. Members on the Government Benches also said this, but it is important to understand that across every community there are pockets of deprivation. Levelling up fails if it becomes a conversation of north versus south or the rest of the country versus London. That does not serve anybody, and my commitment to her is that she will never see us do that.

There were an awful lot of very good contributions from those on the Government Benches, particularly those that majored on planning—I counted 27, and I think I got them all—but there were also good contributions in interventions on the Secretary of State and the shadow Secretary of State. For the moment, I think there was contentment that, broadly, the Secretary of State largely seemed to think that he could accommodate all those significant and strongly felt views about local decision making. We want to see that too. I think it will get harder. I say to the Minister, and I know this is his instinct, that he will have to bring people with him on this. There is inevitably a trade-off at some point between reaching the volumes we need to address our housing crisis and having respect for communities and local decision making. Nobody thinks that is easy, and that ought to be dealt with. We will have plenty of time in Committee to do that. If we are not going to do levelling up, we might as well do that in its stead.

To make a few points of my own, four months ago, the Secretary of State presented the levelling up White Paper to this House. After all the big promises and slogans, before elections and after, it offered little other than the usual: governing by press release, with the reality never quite matching up. The one thing in there was that levelling up, which, as the Prime Minister has reiterated, was defined as the core mission of this Government, would have 12 missions. The hon. Member for Burnley (Antony Higginbotham) made an excellent case for them, although I would gently say to him that they also served to highlight the failings of this Government over the past 12 years on education, housing and crime— 12 admissions of failure to cover 12 years of wasted time in Government.

[Antony Higginbotham]

One of those missions relates to healthcare. It was the Labour Government before 2010 who closed Burnley’s A&E. It was the same Labour Government who forced our schools to have new PFI buildings, which has seen money taken away from educating children and instead paying for expensive contracts. So the hon. Gentleman might just want to think about whether a Labour Government have all the answers.

[Alex Norris]

I will always think carefully about the contributions the hon. Gentleman makes, but I am afraid that he will struggle to win an argument with Labour on NHS investment. [Interruption.] Conservative Members are all back then—nice to see you. I will take you all on if you want. [Interruption.] Even the Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien) —but I shall save him for Committee.

On the 12 new levelling-up missions, which are the centrepiece of the White Paper, and so important to the Government that they want to place a statutory duty on Ministers to report on their progress—what a big and bold claim that is—we now see that they come with a rather crucial addendum, which is that, if the Government decide that they do not like them any more, or perhaps think that they will not meet them, they can just do away with them altogether: when they fail, they can move the goalposts. Measured by actions, I am afraid that that is how important those missions actually are to the Government, who cannot even commit themselves to them. In that sense, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan said, they are not worth the paper they are written on.

We are told today that those missions are a core part of, and a key moment in, levelling up this country. I find that hard to believe, for the reasons that I have stated. But if they are going to be so impactful that they will create the change on which there is, I think, a universally held view across those on all Benches, why is there no impact assessment? Why is there no impact assessment on regions either? I hope that the Minister will give a commitment that before we enter Committee we will have the chance to see that so that we can debate the facts of the matter.

Levelling up was supposed to be about getting all parts of the country firing on all cylinders, but yet again we do not see that. Another key example: where is the community power in this? If the levelling-up portion of the Bill is really about saying to people, “We want you to have greater control over the state of your community and its future”, why does that stop at a sub-regional level? That is still a very long distance away from communities. We will certainly seek to add to that in Committee, and I hope Ministers will be in listening mode on it, because there is a great deal of expectation beyond this place that we are going to see more devolution to communities. We want to see powers and funds devolved from Whitehall to town hall, and beyond, so that communities are empowered to make these decisions for themselves.

One of the things in the levelling-up section of the Bill that we are pleased to see is further devolution of power and all communities having the chance to access those highest levels of power. However, I cannot quite understand why that comes with the caveat that they must accept the Government’s preferred model, which is a Mayor. The message from the Government seems to be that they are willing to devolve power but only on their own terms. That does not feel like proper devolution. The hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) and I frequently talk about devolution of power to Nottingham and Nottinghamshire. I agreed with much of what he said but, in our access to tier 3 powers, which we both want and is wanted universally across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, I do not see why we should have to take a Mayor as well. I do not see how those two propositions are linked, and I have not heard anything in the debate that has moved me further on that.

The Minister will also, whether in closing or in Committee, need to address the important points made by the hon. Members for Gloucester (Richard Graham) and for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott) about provisions in the Bill that allow powers currently held by district councils to be drawn up from them to combined authority level without their consent. That is a really challenging provision that will not hold for much longer.

As I say, this Bill is not enough, but it is what is now in front of us, and we will seek in Committee to make it better. We will also, I warn the Minister in advance, help the Government by adding back into the Bill some previous Government commitments that are missing from it. I hope greatly that they will want to take them on.

Let me turn to the planning side of the Bill. We welcome planning reform. We want to see the building of genuinely affordable housing. We want communities with good services and thriving town centres. We are glad to see the back of some of the worst excesses of previous policy. This is a much better version than what was publicly announced a year-plus ago. But the reforms could go further to change the system to provide greater support for planning authorities, and to deliver more say and power back to communities. Again, we will seek to do that in Committee. I hope that in his closing remarks, the Minister for Housing might do slightly better than the Secretary of State did on the infrastructure levy. It is an area of significant interest that has come up in a number of colleagues’ contributions, and when the Secretary of State was pressed on it, he was unable to say at what level he thought the levy would be set. That will not do. I understand that that is a complex calculation, but the Opposition ought at least to have heard an assurance that it would not be less than current section 106 moneys, because I do not think that anyone has argued for less money for infrastructure. This “We will tell you later” approach does not work. We do not want to have to get through the whole Bill process only to be told that the level will be set in regulation later.

[Mr Betts]

I want to raise with my hon. Friend an issue about local democracy and local plans, which the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) mentioned. A local plan must be consistent with national planning policies, and correctly so. However, if there is a conflict between a local plan and national development management policy, national policy holds sway and is given priority in any determination. How can it be that a local plan can be drawn up in full consultation with the local community, but if the Secretary of State later decides to change the national policy, it will override the consulted-upon local plan?

[Alex Norris]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important point. There are 200 clauses in this Bill, so if there are 20 words in each, that is 4,000 words, give or take. On the planning side, however, only three words really matter: “to any extent”. They mean that the national plan overrides the local plan under any circumstances if that is what the Secretary of State wishes. I hope the Minister will say in summing up that he does not think that that is the right thing to do, that it is not the Government’s intention and that it will be changed in the Bill. I do not think that that can hold.

We will not seek to stand in the way of the Bill at this stage, but significant changes and additions will be necessary if it is to deliver the change that communities up and down the country are waiting for. After the long wait, it is no great surprise that the Bill is so symptomatic of the Government’s whole approach to levelling up—high on rhetoric, low on delivery. The Government just cannot seem to follow through and deliver properly on levelling up. Perhaps that is because deep down, they are not sure whether everyone on their side really believes in it. They are hamstrung by the Treasury—that is a matter of record—riven by division and drifting towards no defined point. But the Opposition feel this in our bones. It is why we are here, and we will fight tooth and nail to make sure that the Government do not waste this opportunity to deliver power back to the people and communities that we all represent.