Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Valentine Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 20th February 2023 Lords Chamber

That seems to lead us precisely in the direction of an amendment such as Amendment 25, where Parliament and the statutory processes would help to institutionalise the missions and the statement that the Government have brought forward. Anything less, I fear, gives Ministers too great a freedom to move from one mission to another and from one priority to another without regard to Parliament. I hope that Amendment 25 will commend itself to my noble friends.

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

I have added my name to Amendments 32 and 38, both of which deal with the independent evaluation of progress against the levelling-up missions. I begin by apologising that I was unable to be present for Second Reading. Levelling up is a subject I care deeply about and, with Business in the Community, I spend much of my time working in or for the sorts of places the Bill seeks to address. Before commenting on the amendments, I congratulate the Government on their levelling-up missions. While one can argue about whether these are exactly the right ones, I personally value the clarity and long-term commitment that these missions convey.

It is in this vein that I support the independent evaluation of progress. The missions need to work across government departments, across political parties and across Parliaments. I would value a statutory board being created to provide independent insight in exactly the way we have the Independent Commission on Climate. It seems to me that the long-term and challenging aspiration to level up socially has a strong parallel to tackling our environmental challenges and is at least as important.

I will finish by quoting two lessons from the LSE’s report on the effectiveness of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, where the parallels are, I think, obvious. The first is this:

“An independent expert body can strengthen climate governance by introducing a long-term perspective, enhancing the credibility of climate targets and ensuring more evidence-based policymaking.”


Secondly:

“To be effective, independent advisory bodies must have an appropriate status. This means having a clear statutory mandate, strong leadership, adequate resources, and sufficient powers to hold Government to account.”

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, this is an important group of amendments to tease out the Government’s intentions as to the scrutiny of the success or otherwise of their actions in levelling up. While I speak to Amendments 24, 26, 32 and 49, to which I have added my name, I also wish to speak to the other amendments in this group.

The key question is how Parliament will know that progress has genuinely been made in reducing geographical disparities. That, after all, is the question at the heart of the White Paper. The only way to judge whether progress has genuinely been made is by using evidence and independence. All the amendments in this group refer to producing independent accountability of the statement that the Government will be making towards the end of a period of time—what that period is is still to be debated.

What is really positive about the White Paper is that it is absolutely full of evidence. There are around 80 different graphs and datasets to establish the evidence base for the purpose of the White Paper: how it is going to change different parts of the country and narrow the gaps. This set of amendments attempts to say that not only do we need the evidence but we need it to be independently assessed. I agree, obviously, with my noble friend and with the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, in talking about an independent commission or board—as we have done with climate change—to assess what is going on, and whether change has been made and, if so, how much and in what areas.

I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, about the missions not being in the Bill, because otherwise, the levelling-up Bill is whatever the Executive define it to be. The Government have set out in a lengthy White Paper what the Bill attempts to do: narrow the gaps, reduce geographical inequalities and disparities, and make a big difference not only to the people who live in certain areas but to the country as a whole. If we do not change the country as it is at the moment, the people who live in those areas will be the ones who are low paid, have poor health and low skills—as a generality, of course. If we can change that, we will change their lives and change the country as well; there would not be such a call on the health service and the benefits system if we had people with better paid jobs, higher skills and better health outcomes. It is in the interests of us all, not just those of some areas of the country.

I fundamentally disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, about research and development. I draw his attention to what the White Paper says—and it is a government White Paper, not mine. It says that the Government need to ensure that there is government investment of a significant degree in these geographical areas of disparity—the spatial disparities it talks about—in order to attract matching private sector investment and create better paid jobs, and deal with all the concomitant issues related to low pay, poor health, poor skills and all the rest of it. That is what it says in the White Paper.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Valentine Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

My Lords, my Amendment 57 is about the distribution of levelling-up funding. The premise of it is, first, that levelling-up challenges are by their nature long-term and difficult and, secondly, that any attempt to address them must be locally sensitive and not hampered by different government departments approaching the issue from different perspectives.

My contention is that short-term funding which fails on the above counts is counterproductive, causing local people to be pulled in different directions, chasing money which does not properly address their local needs. A report by the Business in the Community’s place task force, Partnerships in Place, on intervention in forgotten places, says:

“Levelling up funding needs to be flexible, long-term, localised and aligned with the levelling up missions to maximise”


the chances of “transformative change”. It praises, for instance, the Welsh Government’s Communities First programme, which operated for 16 years from 2001 to 2017 and helped 52 of the most deprived places in Wales. The report also makes the point that capital funding should have significant revenue streams aligned with it to ensure that the relevant agencies have the capacity to deliver well.

I will give some examples of good and bad practice related to funds for levelling up, to illustrate my argument. In some ways, literacy improvement is one of the more straightforward missions. It is measurable, and after 18 years of appropriate education, most children could expect to be literate. Let me give some colour to how the funding works in Blackpool and Bradford. Both were opportunity areas and under that banner were addressing literacy. These are sensible, multi-year interventions on social mobility and education, grounded in understanding of local needs. However, the programme finished in September 2022. The 12 areas across the country became “priority education investment areas”, with less money.

Blackpool’s aim is to provide targeted literacy intervention, but it still awaits its current year allocation. What the Government think is happening with those children during this academic year, I cannot imagine. If you delve further into the funding, there are some larger pots available. There is something called a safety valve bid of about £6 million for school buildings for children with special educational needs, and another safety valve bid of £3.8 million, reflecting the support needed for the huge proportion of high-needs young people in the community, but right now, Blackpool does not know whether it is getting any of this money.

In Bradford, again, the opportunity area had been focusing on literacy. At Business in the Community, we now have a newly created group to focus specifically on literacy in Keighley. This involves working with the Bradford Literature Festival, the Asian Women’s and Children’s Centre, the local mosques, local business and the Keighley Schools Together group, among others. We hope to devise a long-term approach to make a measurable difference, which can be a legacy of Bradford being City of Culture 2025. The government opportunity area funding, however, has ceased.

The recent community renewal fund epitomised several aspects of bad practice. Locality said that the short-term timescales—where bids had to be submitted by mid-June and money spent by the following March—coupled with the competitive bidding process, have seriously hampered the CRF’s ability to make an impact. In Norwich, a colleague of mine ran workshops funded by the CRF in the most deprived part of the city, based on local needs such as financial skills. However, given that they had only three months to deliver, there was not time to build the necessary trust and rapport with some of the individual members of the community who most needed the training, let alone provide ongoing support. My sense of CRF was that the policy was broadly fine, but that when it came to implementation, there were unrealistic and un-joined-up requests for outcomes from multiple government departments, which, combined with short timescales, made it dysfunctional.

However, let me congratulate the Government on a few levelling-up interventions which have worked well. First, the town deal programme, providing substantial capital funding to forgotten places, seems to me to be heading in the right direction. It satisfies a few criteria: it supports local ambitions led by a local partnership; the partnership is business-led, with a cross-section of stakeholders providing a degree of market reality and financial and business nous; it is multiyear; and it addresses issues across government departments. What I notice is that where these town deals are governed by a genuine partnership with a credible, non-vested business lead, they are largely effective. Unfortunately, with the desire to get the money out the door, it is possible that the majority do not quite pass this test. The town deals are playing into a tough economic environment. These weaker town deals will struggle and even the strong ones are likely to cost more, but the Government need to stick with them.

Secondly, the department is now undertaking some deep dives into a few places to see whether a strategic alignment between a place and national government can help to shift the dial. This approach is working well in Blackpool and, in particular, is sorting out some of the cross-Whitehall barriers, which include moving the courts off a £300 million regeneration site and focusing different departments on a Civil Service hub. There are further cross-departmental challenges to come. For instance, the DWP pays housing benefit to people living in illegally squalid housing, or there is the money granted to supported housing providers, who anecdotally dissuade youngsters from taking employment opportunities because they then lose the funding.

I finish by saying that I completely understand the difficulty for the Government in addressing all these levelling-up issues. My plea is that the Government do not make them worse with bad approaches and poor implementation from their ivory tower, nor, for that matter, unsubstantiated ministerial or politically motivated preference versus localised distribution decisions. One lesson is that a stop/start approach to funding will never help.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I rise primarily to speak to Amendment 57, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, which was very eloquently supported in detail by what she just had to say. I also want to speak in support of the other amendments in this group. They are all on essentially the same matter, which is: how have the Government transferred, and how do they plan to transfer, resources from the centre to local government, so that they can deliver the levelling-up agenda that both the Government and local government want to see delivered in those areas?

--- Later in debate ---

This Government are transparent about their use and allocation of public funds, including levelling-up funds, and these amendments are unnecessary. I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

Can I clarify my involvement with the various areas I have been talking about? I work some of the time with Business in the Community to persuade businesses to get involved in levelling up in all sorts of places across the country, including Blackpool, Bradford, Rochdale, Sheffield and many other places.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for that and for the work she is doing in encouraging the private sector to get involved.