Oral Answers to Questions

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is a brilliant advocate for Lichfield. It may well be that his impassioned advocacy for the community that he has come to call Lich Vegas has meant that bids for the leisure centre might have been seen as de trop, but Burntwood certainly seems to be one of the communities that would be a prime candidate. I took the opportunity when I was in the west midlands recently to visit Willenhall to see how the levelling up fund was helping to transform communities there. My hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) has done an amazing job in making sure that communities that have been overlooked and undervalued for years are at last getting the investment they need. That is levelling up in action.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

9. What assessment he has made of the adequacy of the levelling-up funding allocated in the second round.

[Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)]

19. What assessment he has made of the adequacy of the geographical spread of the funding awarded in the second round of the levelling-up fund.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Dehenna Davison)]

The second round of the levelling-up fund will invest up to £2.1 billion in 111 vital local infrastructure projects. We prioritised investment in high-quality bids in places that have not previously received levelling-up fund money in order to maximise the spread of overall funding from rounds 1 and 2. In this round of the fund, two thirds of the funding went to those places in the greatest need, which we designated as category 1. In Scotland, across both rounds, the amount of money awarded exceeded our public funding commitments.

[Alison Thewliss]

The Earl of Rosebery said at the opening of the People’s Palace and Winter Gardens 125 years ago that they would be

“open to the people for ever and ever”.

The M8 motorway driven through the centre of Glasgow was called the

“scar that will never heal”.

Can the Minister tell me why Glasgow’s bids to address both of those issues were rejected in a process that she has already admitted to Members of this House was rigged?

[Dehenna Davison]

I ask the hon. Lady to retract that statement, because in no way have I said that the process was rigged. It absolutely was not. The decision-making framework that we use was outlined in full, in writing, in the technical note that we published, and I would be happy to send her a link to it on gov.uk. She has raised the question of the People’s Palace, and I would be happy to sit down with her to talk about the bid once she has received the written feedback, to see if we can strengthen it for any future funding rounds, potentially including round 3 of the levelling-up fund, which will be announced in due course.