Safe Streets for All

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

As today’s theme is “Safe streets for all”, I start by paying tribute to Humberside’s former police and crime commissioner, Keith Hunter, who worked hard to develop the PCC role and reversed the post-2010 Tory and Lib Dem cuts in police numbers. I fear that Hull’s inner-city policing challenges may be less of a priority for his successor. There is little in the Queen’s Speech that will help us in Hull to combat antisocial behaviour which blights the lives of so many after the austerity decade in areas such as Orchard Park, Beverley Road and Princes Avenue.

As we face the economic challenges post covid and post Brexit, Hull people will be looking to the Government to make good on the promises of levelling up. After a decade of talk about the northern powerhouse and rebalancing the economy, we have little to show for it that has not actually been achieved through local effort. In fact, in those years, Tory Ministers blocked Hull getting rail electrification and imposed some of the country’s deepest public sector funding cuts on the city. Now, the various pots of levelling-up funding available, even to favoured areas, do not amount in scale to the sustained investment that would be really transformational —as seen, for example, in London’s Docklands in previous decades. These pots of money, which set towns against cities and regions against regions, do not even compensate for the funding cuts since 2010. In Hull we need investment but not the gerrymandering of the towns fund or the one-size-fits-all, made-in-Whitehall mayoral model of devolution that Ministers insist on. I agree with genuine devolution in principle, but we must let the people of Hull and the East Riding have their say on what they want devolution to look like for it to be meaningful.

I want to conclude with a couple of positive suggestions that I hope would command cross-party support. First, one step forward on levelling up for the most deprived areas would be to strengthen the Dormant Assets Bill that was introduced in Parliament last week and to use the £880 million of capital liberated for a community wealth fund to improve life chances, skills and the quality of life in neighbourhoods such as north Hull’s Bransholme.

Secondly, I welcome the promise in the Queen’s Speech to honour and strengthen the armed forces covenant, placing it in law and hopefully extending good work with veterans. However, working shoulder to shoulder with our armed forces this past year to get the country through the covid pandemic and roll out the vaccine has been our brilliant NHS and social care workforce. We should remember that by December 2020, nine months into the pandemic, some 850 NHS and social care staff had died from covid. Never again should these staff face the prospect of needlessly risking their own health, even their own lives, in the course of doing their job through a lack of PPE or failings in testing. The Home Secretary talked about the police covenant in her opening remarks. I hope that the Government will consider instituting a national health, social care and emergency services covenant on similar lines to the existing armed forces covenant—enshrined in law, fully funded and in place as soon as is practicable. These workers deserve much more than a hand clap on the doorstep on a Thursday night, a medal or, now, the prospect of a real-terms pay cut. They have been there for us—all of us—and now we need to be there for them.