Oral Answers to Questions
Alex Norris Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
It was not just councils that put time and money into these bids; local people put their heart and soul into developing their community’s submissions, only to find that their bid would never have been allowed to win, that their time had been wasted and that they had been taken for fools. The Minister does not seem troubled about wasting Members’ time, and certainly not local authorities’ time, but surely she will apologise to those volunteers.
Dehenna Davison
I have already expressed my admiration for the incredible work put in by local government officials, volunteers and Members across the House, and I have apologised—the hon. Gentleman can read the Select Committee transcript for himself.
I need to make the point that we had £8.8 billion-worth of bids for round 3 of the levelling-up fund and only £2.1 billion to allocate, which unfortunately means difficult decisions had to be made. We are not a Government who shy away from making difficult decisions, and my own county council unfortunately faced a detriment, too. Ultimately, in line with the decision-making framework outlined in the technical note, we were keen to ensure geographic spread so that the most areas possible benefited from the levelling-up fund across rounds 1 and 2.
Levelling-up Fund Round 2: Bidding Process
Alex Norris Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Christopher, and to speak in this debate on behalf of the Opposition. I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) on securing the debate, and on the very powerful case she made. I will cover the point about wasted time that she and other colleagues made, as well as other important points that were raised.
As usual, my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) stole one of my important lines; the point made by the Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, is the place to start:
“this episode is just another example as to why Whitehall’s bidding and begging bowl culture is broken”.
Perhaps Ministers do not want to take it from us Labour Members, but there is clearly the same feeling even within the Conservatives’ ranks. That view must be right, because over a year on from the White Paper, what have the Government got to show for this policy? There have been bodged bidding processes; millions were wasted in “Hunger Games” style bidding processes; bids have been eaten up by inflation; not a single levelling-up director has been appointed; and there have been broken promises on development funding. That is before we get to the fact that regional inequalities are widening, bus services are being lost up and down the country, train cancellations are at a record high, and people cannot get to see their GP or into hospital. Nothing works in this country.
Round 2 of the levelling-up fund would not have solved all those problems, but it would have been a great place to start steadying the ship; however, it has been a calamity. What possible system could exclude Hemsworth, for which my hon. Friend the Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) made the case, but include the Prime Minister’s constituency? As the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) said, how could that not set the Prime Minister’s words echoing around our heads—words that he meant, but that he said when he thought we were not listening? How can that not be what we take away from this process?
I agree with a lot of what the hon. Member for Clacton (Giles Watling) said about coastal communities, and hope that we get a better opportunity to discuss the issue at length. We are pleased for those communities that have been successful. Local government has lost £15 billion since 2010, so communities up and down the country are desperate for investment, but we have to be honest: set against that £15 billion loss, this round 2 gives back £2.1 billion. The Government have nicked a tenner from our wallets and expect us to be grateful for getting not even £2 back, but even those areas that have won individually are losers too. For example, it is brilliant that Norfolk County Council has secured £24 million to improve transport in King’s Lynn. We want that to happen. However, we need to take into account the money that Norfolk has lost from cuts to the local authority budget in the last four years alone—back to the time of the Prime Minister who promised levelling up, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson). Even if we include that £24 million, Norfolk is £146 million worse off in real terms. With levelling up, even those who win are actually losers.
The analysis of why levelling up has failed, is failing and sadly will fail has been around for a while. Subsequent revelations about how the bids were handled only add to the insult. We now know that many local authorities that submitted bids, including mine, never stood a chance of winning, because Ministers later excluded them from selection.
So much went into those bids. We have heard about the financial impact of the internal work in local authorities. There were huge efforts there. There were also huge efforts to engage with our local communities on what they needed, and hope was built up that they might get something back. They never had a chance. It was cruel to put them through that. Any answer from the Minister today ought to start with an apology, and a commitment —as the right hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns) and the hon. Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) said— to real, meaningful feedback, so that we know how things might be different in the future.
It does not have to be this way. My hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) made that point very well. She and I spent a lot of time on the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill. What we put into that Bill will go into our future manifesto, which we will put to the country. We could scrap the beauty parades, the bidding processes, the deals, and the scoring out of sight. Instead, we could have a sustained generational transfer of power and resources out of Whitehall into our local communities, targeted at need and for impact. Without strings attached, we would get resources to those who know best: local people.
The Government have had their chance. We have seen multiple rounds of bidding. It has been over a year since the White Paper. We could ascribe any meaning, value or motivation to what they have done; I am not interested in that. What I know is that they cannot and will not do what they set out to do. It is time that they stepped aside for those who will.
Levelling-up Missions: East of England
Alex Norris Excerpts(1 year, 8 months ago)
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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.
Holocaust Memorial Day
Alex Norris Excerpts(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
It is an honour to speak for the Opposition in this important debate. Tomorrow, we will mark Holocaust Memorial Day and the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, when the full magnitude of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime were revealed to the world.
Holocaust Memorial Day commemorates the 6 million Jews murdered during the holocaust, alongside the millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution and during more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. It is our intergenerational duty to tell future generations the truth about man’s inhumanity to man, so that we can fight to prevent it from being repeated.
I congratulate the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) on securing the debate and on his excellent leadership of it. I was particularly struck by his call for us, as policy makers, not just to reflect—as we have done in this excellent debate—but to do, by acting in the space of misinformation, fake news and the rising hate that we see in our communities. I hope he has seen during the debate, as I certainly have, that we have met his call to shine a light on the hatred we see today. There has been an extraordinary number of tremendous contributions. I will try to cover them all, but I will call on two in particular that illuminated the debate: the speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) and that of the right hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart).
As we have heard, the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day this year is “ordinary people”, and there could not have been a more powerful or poignant introduction to such a debate than that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking, who exhorted us to keep those stories alive so that we can fight hate today. That must be right, and that idea subsequently coursed through the debate.
The right hon. Member for Beckenham commanded the UN forces in Bosnia and, of course, played a leading role in Northern Ireland, so I stop and listen whenever he talks about human rights. I have bugged him personally to ask him different questions about his service. When he spoke today, it felt as if time stopped. It was a harrowing story—one that would be too much to ask anybody to retell or rethink, never mind speak about publicly—but it enriched the debate beyond imagination. We are so grateful that he was able and willing to do that.
On the theme of ordinary people, the other defining feature of the debate has been the extraordinary contributions that colleagues brought to life. I will name all the Members and their constituencies, because it is important to do so. The right hon. Members for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb), for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) and for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers); my hon. Friends the Members for West Ham (Ms Brown), for Bury South (Christian Wakeford) and for Stockport (Navendu Mishra); and the hon. Members for Meriden (Saqib Bhatti), for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) and for West Bromwich East (Nicola Richards) all mentioned stories connected to them, to their communities or to people who they have seen during their work as parliamentarians.
What I took from that is the extraordinary spread across all the nations and regions that make up our wonderful country. Those people came to our country from extraordinary suffering, enriched in their own ways, and kept those stories alive. As the hon. Member for West Bromwich East said, as they start to pass on, that is now our duty. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) talked in the same vein about the Kindertransport, and about Eve Leadbeater, who came to Nottingham as a two-year-old on the Kindertransport. She spent her life in Nottingham as an educationalist improving opportunities for all our children there. She was a loved part of our community. She passed away last March.
I associate myself with the remarks from my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson), and the hon. Members for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) and for Worcester (Mr Walker), about the work of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust. I hope that they have seen today’s debate as an appropriate tribute for the work that they will do not just tomorrow, but on all the other days of the year.
I make special reference to my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) and congratulate him on an excellent maiden speech. I have known him for a long time, not just because of our shared football and cricket preferences, but because he has been a brilliant council leader and someone I have admired for a long time. I cannot wait to see the impact that he makes in this place.
I will make a few points of my own. The numbers can overwhelm you: 6 million Jewish people murdered, more than a quarter of a million disabled people murdered, up to half a million Romani murdered, more than 1.5 million people in Cambodia murdered, and 1 million people in Rwanda murdered. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, those are overwhelming numbers, but each number is a real person: a mother, a father, a son or a daughter. They were people who loved and were loved. They would have been people who would have become their nation’s Picasso or Byron; young people who did not yet know that they loved science but who would have made discoveries that would have transformed humanity; political leaders who would have fought for hope and inclusion; and people who would have started businesses that would have enriched the lives of thousands. All those lives and all that potential was taken away in the name of hate. The hon. Member for Meriden made that point well. It is our most profound responsibility that we remember them and that we honour their memory by each generation telling their story to the next.
That starts with our children. My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) gave a beautiful exposition of Exodus on that theme. I had the privilege of joining the year 9s of the Nottingham University Samworth Academy in Bilborough as they met holocaust survivor Henri Obstfeld, who talked today’s children through his experiences as a child. It was so powerful to see them engage with this wonderful man, to contrast what they heard from him with their own lives and to think about the world as they see it today. It gave me pause to reflect on my visit with friends to Dachau as an 18-year-old and contrast our freedoms as we travelled around Europe with the names and pictures of boys of a similar age who never had the same chances. The educational work that we see at NUSA Bilborough and across schools is a practical demonstration of what we mean by passing knowledge down the generations. I commend Mr Townsend, the teacher, and the school for taking part in the programme and wish them well for the holocaust studies that they are undertaking over the next few days. We need that in every classroom in every school up and down the land. We also need it to be available to all of us.
I turn to the national holocaust memorial and learning centre, which is a crucial way in which we can appropriately memorialise the holocaust and cascade our knowledge down the generations. The project has been challenging to say the least, but I reiterate the commitment that I made in an urgent question on the matter in July on behalf of the Opposition and the commitment made yesterday and previously by my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition. We support the project wholeheartedly. We were encouraged and cheered to hear what the Prime Minister said yesterday during Prime Minister’s questions about imminent legislation for the memorial. That is so welcome. We look forward to supporting that legislation when we see it. I hope that the Minister will say more about when we will see that.
I and hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of others have seen such work done well in this country already. Beth Shalom, the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in north Nottinghamshire, houses the country’s only dedicated holocaust museum. It was born of the Smith brothers—Stephen and my good friend James—who visited Yad Vashem some 30 years ago and identified the need to better understand, discuss and teach issues relating to the holocaust in this country. From that idea and understanding sprung a whole museum and centre with permanent exhibitions, a learning space and beautiful memorial gardens. It is with great joy that I and, I think, colleagues read that funding from the Heritage Fund alongside the Arts Council, the Pears Foundation and many other foundations and individuals will lead to a major redevelopment of that facility so that it can continue to meet the challenges of the current day in telling those stories of the past. I encourage all colleagues to visit and to urge their schools to either visit or engage with its online material. The remarkable Smith brothers also formed the Aegis Trust, which colleagues mentioned, in response to the crisis in Kosovo. They work all around the world to prevent genocide. It is with great pride that I can tell the House that their model in Nottinghamshire was used to develop the Kigali memorial centre, providing a place of remembrance and learning about that genocide. It has been visited by Presidents and Prime Ministers and is an important example of the work that we can do to tell the story as well as of Britain’s place in the world.
When the other place debated the matter last week, it was said that it would be nice to think of this as a debate that we are having in the past tense, with antisemitism consigned to the dustbin of history; with Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities facing no prejudice; and disabled people living without hate. But that simply is not the world that we live in. As colleagues have said, the Community Security Trust’s findings were stark, with 786 antisemitic incidents across the UK in just the first half of 2022: the joint fifth highest it had ever recorded. In addition, there was a 22% increase in university-related incidents to a total of 150 in the last two years. I reflect with pain that we have seen that hate in the Labour party, and I restate our commitment to tearing it out by its roots.
We also see that hate crime against disabled people has increased by nearly 45% and that hate crime against Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities remains under-tackled and rarely understood in this country. As the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) said, we see these risks of genocide around the world, and as she put so powerfully, we must play our role in tackling that in any way we can. When we memorialise the holocaust, we talk about the past, but we feel the echoes in the present day. Tomorrow will be a solemn moment of remembrance, but it should also act as a call to action.
I will finish with my reflection on the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day, “ordinary people”. It is a reminder that while those who author murderous regimes are history’s most evil people, their work is reliant on the mass participation of significant numbers of ordinary people—people who participate, people who turn a blind eye, people who share in the propaganda and people who stand by. That is, as Hannah Arendt said, the “banality of evil”, and that is how such evil acts are committed by such seemingly ordinary people. It is important that our children and we as adults learn about this. I think about bystander training, because there are increasing levels of hate in our community. Having that bystander training means that people know what to do for the best. I still believe, as I know colleagues across the House do, in the fundamental goodness of people, especially our British people. They want to do the right thing, so we must support them by giving them the tools and resources to do so.
To conclude, this has been an outstanding debate: one about humanity’s past, but that calls us to action in the future; one about sadness and grief, but also about the inspirational stories of defiance; and one that tells us about the worst in humanity but spurs in us the best.
Levelling-up Fund Round 2
Alex Norris Excerpts(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to make a statement on round 2 of the levelling-up fund.
The Minister of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Lucy Frazer)
First, Mr Speaker, I apologise; we can always improve on our communications. I believe letters were sent both to MPs and to councils last night and the Secretary of State did make a written statement, but I accept that we can improve on this going forward.
Levelling up is one of the driving missions of this Government as we look to build a stronger, fairer economy. As the Prime Minister set out a fortnight ago in his five people’s priorities, levelling up is how we will grow our economy, spread opportunity across the country and build stronger communities with safer streets for people to live on.
The levelling-up fund is essential to how we will develop that opportunity, which is why we have today set our next wave of investment for projects up and down the UK. The second wave will see up to £2.1 billion-worth of funding, awarded to 111 bids that we know will stimulate growth and benefit communities.
The levelling-up fund is about directing funding where it is needed most. Local leaders and Members across this House have seen the impact of the first round of funding, with 105 bids receiving £1.7 billion to drive regeneration and growth in areas that have been overlooked and underappreciated for far too long. That is why we received a tremendous response to the second round, with more than 500 bids received totalling £8 billion, which is a significant increase on the 300-odd bids received last year.
Across the two rounds of the fund, we have allocated nearly £4 billion to more than 200 bids from communities across the UK. I am pleased that we have been able to work closely with parliamentarians, local authorities and the devolved Administrations in all parts of the United Kingdom.
The levelling-up fund has a clear and transparent process for determining how bids are selected. Each bid is assessed by officials against the published assessment criteria, with the highest scoring bids shortlisted. To ensure that there is a fair spread of bids across the UK, funding decisions are then based on the assessment score and by applying wider considerations such as geographic spread and past investments. A place’s relative need is also baked into the process. In this round, 66% of investment went to category 1 places. As we did for round 1 of the fund, an explanatory note setting out the details of our assessment and our decision-making process will be published on gov.uk. Ministers did not add or remove bids from the funded list, as set out in the note.
There will be a further round of the levelling-up fund, along with other investments. I look forward to working with hon. Members across the House as we protect community assets, grow our local economies and restore pride of place where people live and work.
Alex Norris
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting this urgent question.
The Government are running scared of Parliament and their own Back Benchers—judging by the faces behind the Minister, I can understand why. However, there are serious questions to be answered. Levelling-up is a failure: the Government are going backwards on their flagship missions—they cannot even appoint levelling up directors—and today we see that reach its maximum. There is a rock-bottom allocation for Yorkshire and the Humber, nothing for the cities of Birmingham, Nottingham and Stoke, and nothing for Stonehouse in Plymouth, which is a community in the bottom 0.2% for economic activity, but there is money for the Prime Minister’s constituency and money for areas in the top quartile economically. What on earth were the objective criteria used to make those decisions? How on earth are only half the successful bidders from the poorest 100 communities?
Over the last decade or so, the cut to local government —in cash terms rather than real terms—is £15 billion. Today’s announcement gives back £2.1 billion. The Government have nicked a tenner from our wallets and expect us to be grateful for getting less than two quid back. We are pleased for the communities that have been successful because they have been starved of cash for years, but in reality even those communities will still get back less than the Government have taken from their budgets. The Minister must be honest that, in levelling up, even the winners are losers.
Is not the reality that this “Hunger Games” approach to regional growth creates a huge amount of waste in time and energy? Why will the Government not instead adopt our commitment to end these beauty parades in favour of proper, sustained investment that is targeted at need?
We are to believe that levelling up is to be rebranded as stepping up or gauging up. Let me save the Minister the trouble. It is not levelling up, it is not stepping up and it is not gauging up. It is time’s up.
Lucy Frazer
I would like to correct what the hon. Gentleman suggested about which areas got funding across the country. He mentioned Yorkshire and the Humber, and I would like to clarify that, across rounds 1 and 2 per capita, every region got more than London and the south-east. Of course, the figures can be cut in different ways, but this is funding of £4 billion across the two funds for areas across the country. Combined with what we are doing with our Metro Mayors, it is the biggest transfer of power away from Westminster since world war two. Sixty-five per cent of the north is now represented by a Metro Mayor and, together with significant amounts of funding through other pots of money, we are ensuring that areas such as the north grow and communities get the delivery that they need.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Prime Minister’s constituency. I am proud that we are regenerating a town where there is an infantry base. I am comfortable that we are supporting our country and the people who serve in it. He forgot to mention that the Leader of the Opposition had a successful bid in his constituency and that the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), got £20 million. He also forgot to mention that Nottingham North got £18 million in round 1 and therefore is benefiting from the Government’s levelling-up programme.
Oral Answers to Questions
Alex Norris Excerpts(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Lee Rowley
My hon. Friend makes an important point and the basic principle is that we want to ensure that the ballot box is sacrosanct and that the process has integrity, so when people go to vote, it works.
Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
Happy new year, Mr Speaker, to you and to all of our colleagues.
Alex Norris
You are very welcome.
Those who set the standards for our elections, the Electoral Commission, thinks that May is too soon for voter ID reforms, and those who have to implement them, our electoral administrators, say the same. There are just 115 days until the local elections and the Minister seems to put a lot of stock in a campaign that is only starting today. The Minister did not address in his answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) nor in the statutory instrument debate what it is in his judgment that he believes supersedes the views of those who actually have to make this happen.
Lee Rowley
We will continue to work with everybody in order to deliver this, because the Government have been absolutely clear for a number of years that it is important that the ballot box has integrity. We are bringing forward voter identification to ensure that that happens, and we will continue to work with all organisations to make sure it is successful in the 115 days to which the hon. Gentleman refers.
Draft Combined Authorities (Mayoral Elections) (Amendment) Order 2022
Draft Local Authorities (Mayoral Elections) (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2022
Draft Police and Crime Commissioner Elections and Welsh Forms (Amendment) Order 2022
Alex Norris Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mrs Murray.
As we have heard, the three draft measures before us relate to changing the voting system for combined authority Mayors, local authority Mayors, and police and crime commissioners to a first-past-the-post system—what a way to spend a Wednesday afternoon!
Not that long ago, the Government used to say that they were focused on the people’s priorities.
Alex Norris
The Government Whip perhaps gets ahead of himself. I wonder how long we would have to stand in Parliament Square before we met a person who thought that addressing the issue before us was even in their top 50 priorities—a long time indeed, I suspect.
As we heard from the Minister, the draft instruments flow from the Elections Act, which the Opposition strongly opposed at all stages before it became law a few months ago, and we do so again today—it was bad law then, and it is bad law now. Indeed, the Act is the latest in a long line that have exhibited the very worst tendencies of this Government in recent years, including the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022—remember that one?—the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 and the Trade Union Act 2016.
Underlying all those Acts was a determination to strengthen the Executive at the expense of the legislature and by shrinking the civic space for those who oppose this Government, including through an often complete disregard for the views of those affected as the Government ran through their proposals. That was mirrored in the proceedings on the Elections Act, which had these measures shoved into it halfway through Committee stage and after Second Reading; indeed, Bill Committee members could not even ask witnesses for their opinions about them, because that moment had passed. That is not the way to make good legislation, and these provisions are not good ones. I hope the Minister will reiterate in closing that the Government will make good on the commitments made during the passage of the Act to provide proper post-legislative scrutiny, because the Act needs it.
The measures before us once again seek to solve a problem that we have not yet been able to identify. I cannot think of a point where strong concerns have been raised about the conduct of supplementary vote elections—that they were perhaps too confusing or that the outcome did not reflect the public will—and where there was therefore a compelling case for change. I cannot think of Mayors or mayoral candidates who have raised significant concerns, and we did not hear that from the Minister in his opening speech. For all the noise on the Government Benches, it was a Conservative Government that introduced police and crime commissioners and this system of voting for them. Metro Mayors were introduced under the Government using this system, so it was good enough for them previously. The system has worked; the case for change is weak, and it is a terrible idea.
Putting aside the partisan aspects of this, it is a terrible idea to set the precedent that we in this place can change electoral systems without talking to the general public. I ask colleagues on the Government Benches to think where that could lead. If they are resistant to electoral reform—and I think many of those facing me probably are—they should consider that the approach being taken today is completely out of line with how we would originally have done these things, and it opens a Pandora’s box. I am surprised the Minister is so keen to do so, and I hope he will reflect on that in his closing remarks.
I gently say to the Minister that there is an awful lot that his Department has not delivered: huge regional inequalities that its plans are too modest to address, a housing crisis that has been ignored while the Government have a roll-around with their Back Benchers, and local councils that have been withering away because of Government cuts. It is beyond belief that, with all that in the in-tray, the three nonsenses in front of us are the priorities. That prompts only one question: why are the Government doing this? Once again, it seems that they are doing nothing more than seeking political advantage and moving the goalposts to make life a little easier.
I understand why a preference-based system so discomfits the Government; they know that a huge portion of the British people, if given a second, third and fourth choice alongside their first choice of candidate, would not use any of them for the Conservative party of today. Perhaps it is better to remove that option, but this narrow pursuit of political interest is what political projects do when they are past their sell-by date, unable to tackle big problems and devoid of big ideas.
Mark Fletcher (Bolsover) (Con)
Can I just clarify whether it is now the Labour party’s position that first past the post is no longer the premier electoral system for UK elections?
Alex Norris
That is not the case that I have made. The case that we are making is that these systems have worked for these positions, and we do not believe that they ought to be changed. The irony is that, if we applied my Parliament Square test and asked people outside, “What are your priorities for your democracy?”, they would say that they would like a general election at the earliest opportunity—and we know why. I urge colleagues to vote against these instruments.
Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill
Alex Norris ExcerptsWednesday 23rd November 2022
(1 year, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 View all Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 23 November 2022 - (23 Nov 2022)
Dehenna Davison
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his incredibly kind words.
I thank Members on both sides of the House for the constructive way in which they have engaged with this important Bill. I look forward to hearing their contributions to today’s debate, and I commend our amendments to the House.
Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to speak for the Opposition in these proceedings.
The Public Bill Committee had 27 sittings over four months. The Government enjoyed it so much that they sent seven Ministers and three Whips to share the joy of line-by-line scrutiny. Which was my favourite? How could I choose between those 27 glorious sittings? They were very good debates, as the Minister said.
When it comes to levelling up, we have been clear from the outset that we feel the Bill is a missed opportunity. It ought to have been a chance for the Government finally to set out what their levelling-up agenda really is and what it means for the country. It was a chance to turn the rhetoric and all the press releases into reality. Instead of translating three years of promises into genuinely transformative change, we do not feel the Bill takes as much further forward. After the White Paper and now this Bill, we are still searching for the big, bold change for which the country is crying out and that the Government promised. The Bill has squandered that opportunity, and it seems those premises will be broken.
Levelling up is supposedly the defining mission of this Government but, after all the talk and all the promises, all they could muster was bolting a few clauses on to the front of a planning Bill. It serves no one to pretend that that is not the reality. Where is the plan to tackle entrenched regional inequalities? Where is the plan to unleash the wasted potential of our nations and regions? And where is the plan to get power out of Whitehall and into our towns, villages and communities?
Part 1 of the Bill establishes the levelling-up missions and the rules for reporting progress made against them. The missions are an area of consensus. Who in this House does not want to see a reduction in the disparities in healthy life expectancy, regional investment and educational outcomes? The problem is that, although the Government set out their supposed policy programme to deliver on these missions in their White Paper, it is in reality a mishmash of activity, much of which is already happening. We seek to improve this with amendment 10, as the missions should be accompanied by a full action plan setting out the activity taking place and how it will contribute to delivering the missions. I would hope that the Government already have such action plans, if levelling up really is such a totemic priority, but I fear they do not, because levelling up is not a priority.
Richard Graham
The hon. Gentleman has mentioned a couple of times the important question of levelling up across the country. Does he accept that, under the last Labour Government, one of the biggest challenges for many of us was that, although huge amounts of money were funnelled into metropolitan cities, smaller cities in counties around the country completely missed out? A huge amount of progressive work has been done by this Government to ensure that constituencies such as mine in Gloucester do not miss out on the levelling-up programme.
Alex Norris
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that, when we talk about levelling up, it should never be north versus south or London versus the rest of the UK, and that it should recognise that, across all communities, there are challenges and areas that need support. I think that is an area of consensus.
I stress that the hon. Gentleman is talking about the previous Labour Government, not the last Labour Government. I was at secondary school for much of that period, and I am not sure that relitigating it would advance this debate. I do not see that huge progressive changes have come through in the intervening 12 years, as he sees it, and I do not see them on the horizon either. Conservative Members may disagree with me on this point, which is fine, but if the Government are so sure of their case that this Bill will be very impactful, where is the impact assessment? Its publication is long overdue, and the stream of Ministers who came through the Committee all promised to publish it. It was signed off by the Regulatory Policy Committee on 19 July—what is that, four months ago?—but instead, it is hidden. What on earth does it say that it needs to be locked away in the Department, and what does it say about the Government that they are not brave enough to publish it?
Oral Answers to Questions
Alex Norris Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
The autumn statement confirmed that round two of the levelling-up fund is to be frozen in cash terms, meaning that the Government’s inflation crisis has significantly eroded the value of the fund in real terms. The Government must now either reduce the quality and scope of the winning bids, or accept fewer bids—which will it be?
Draft Police and Crime Commissioner Elections (Amendment) Order 2022
Draft Assistance with Voting for Persons with Disabilities (Amendments) Regulations 2022
Alex Norris Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Cummins.
The two measures before us relate to extending provisions from the Elections Act to the rules regarding police and crime commissioner elections and also assistance with voting for people with disabilities. Let me say from the outset that the Opposition strongly opposed the Elections Act at all stages before it became law a few months ago. It was a bad Bill then, and it is bad law now. Rather than opening up our democracy, it has created barriers to participation, while further weakening it to dodgy finance.
Our serious concerns with the legislation have been shared by civil society and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee in its excellent report on the Bill, when it said that the Bill ought to have been paused. That has been added to by yesterday’s revelations that the Government have not even assessed the security implications of the most prominent part of the legislation, voter ID provision, which is yet another discreditable element to this story. We look forward to the chance to revisit that soon—I think it is coming before us soon.
Happily, however, Members of all parties agreed with the provisions that the Act made in relation to notional expenditure. Following the 2018 Supreme Court judgment that there was no requirement that benefits in kind or notional expenditure would have to be authorised by the candidate or their election agent, the rules regulating that area of election law were a point of confusion and required clarification. It is safe to say there were serious concerns that candidates and their agents could unwittingly be liable for any transgressions that they had no knowledge of and had never authorised, but from which they were judged to have benefited. It was therefore right to tidy up the law in relation to notional expenditure in the Elections Act, and the Opposition did not stand in the way of those measures when the Act was before Parliament. In the same spirit, we will not stand in the way of applying the same provisions to the elections of police and crime commissioners, so that the full benefit of the change to the law can be implemented and operational across all elements.
On the second measure, regarding assistance with voting for persons with disabilities, I praise the work done in the other place by my colleagues Baroness Hayman and Lord Khan, who worked very hard to make sure that it was included in the Elections Act. We raised this issue in Committee and during consideration of the remaining stages of the Act, and stakeholders expressed their concerns about the initial proposals. As I said on Report, we are grateful that the Government have listened to those concerns and worked with advocacy groups to reach a solution, which is what I believe we have in front of us. The Opposition therefore fully support the measure, which will ensure that the regulations can be felt widely across all elections, but like many interested in this space, we will keep a close eye on things to make sure that its practical application works. The collective vision is that all polling stations should have the right equipment, so that people can access their democratic right regardless of the challenges they live with, and we would be very interested to see how that works.
I hope the Minister is able to indicate how he and his colleagues will monitor this issue to make sure that the approach proceeds as intended. Will there be a report after the first iteration? That would be a proportionate way of working out whether it is working. Have the Government committed in the engagement with stakeholders that this will be an ongoing process? That virtuous feedback loop will be a key part of making sure that the legislation works. Finally, there is a funding implication for the Minister’s welcome commitment in the Elections Act and today about making the equipment available, so can he make an on-the-record commitment that that will be met and that local authorities will not be expected to find the money in other ways?