Town Deals: Covid-19 Recovery

Claudia Webbe Excerpts

Wednesday 14th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Rosindell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Southport (Damien Moore) on securing this important debate.

It is vital that we level up areas left behind by rampant regional inequalities and a decade of austerity. My constituency of Leicester East suffers from structural disadvantages compared with wealthier areas of the country. The average weekly income for full-time employees in Leicester East is £420. That is £130 a week less than the east Midlands as a whole and £160 less than the UK average. The proportion of people claiming unemployment benefits is also higher in my constituency than it is at the regional and national level, as is the rate of food bank use, which has worsened during the pandemic.

I fear that the town deals will not address those severe inequalities. Indeed, the policy has faced repeated accusations of cronyism, gerrymandering and prioritising funding for Conservative-supporting areas. More than 80% of the towns set to receive Government funding through the £3.6 billion town fund are represented by Conservative MPs. Among the 86 towns that have had funding deals agreed so far, 72 are Conservative-held, five are in areas with both a Conservative and a Labour MP, and just nine are in Labour-held seats. That means that so far £1.6 billion-worth of investment has been signed off in Conservative constituencies compared with just over £200 million in seats held by Labour.

The process of selection and the criteria used by the Government have come under scrutiny, with both the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office producing reports that were critical of the lack of transparency and impartiality. Rather than the 100 towns with the highest score being selected, it was decided that the highest priority towns in each region would be eligible by default, with Ministers then free to choose from the others regardless of their need, so some towns that scored very high on need lost out. For instance, my community in Leicester is one of the most deprived areas of the country, yet we were not eligible for funding, so it is hard to escape the conclusion that the towns fund is a vehicle for political corruption that uses the rhetoric of combating regional inequality to mask its nefarious party-political intentions.

Similar concerns exist about the Government’s levelling-up fund. Among 93 English regions placed in the priority group of three tiers to receive money from the £4.8 billion fund, 31 are included while not ranked as being in the top third most deprived places by the average deprivation score. Of those 31, 26 are entirely represented by Conservative MPs, with the others having at least one Conservative MP. Four places are in the uppermost level for funding despite being ranked in the bottom third of English regions by the deprivation score. All those areas have Conservative MPs, including Richmond (Yorks), the Chancellor’s constituency, which is among the top fifth of the most prosperous places in England according to the average deprivation score. That raises severe concerns that the levelling-up fund and the towns deals are not designed to address regional inequality, but instead are designed to benefit the Conservative party.

To assuage those concerns, I urge the Minister to publish the funding metric as a matter of urgency. I would also be grateful if he confirmed how much of the towns fund and the levelling-up fund is really allocated funding, and how much is repurposed funding that was already covered by previous initiatives.

I fear that there is a dangerous pattern emerging with the Government’s strategy. After 10 years of devastating austerity, they are now turning on the taps of public spending in areas that are electorally convenient for them. We cannot allow this hugely cynical pork barrel politics to continue. It is gravely damaging not only for neglected communities across the country, but for the health of our democracy. We need a bold, nationwide and internationalist recovery from coronavirus, including a radical green new deal to rebuild the country with a more just and sustainable economy. Instead of this damaging agenda in which only certain areas are allocated funding based on whether it benefits the governing party, we desperately need a recognition that in our country of deep and unequal wealth, the top 1% should be asked to contribute a bit more in order to fund the services that the entire country relies on.