Budget Resolutions

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

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

After the austerity decade, Brexit and nearly two years of covid, the Budget heralds a vicious spiral of low growth, high tax and a cost of living crisis for the working poor. Most concerning is the laser-like focus on squeezing real incomes by increasing unreformed, regressive taxes such as national insurance and council tax. So the poor are keeping the poor, as George Lansbury would have observed.

From Lord Heseltine’s 2012 report “No stone unturned: in pursuit of growth”, it was clear that we needed to boost UK GDP growth by taking pressure off the congested south-east and regenerating the north. However, nine years after that report, seven years after the northern powerhouse was launched and two years after a general election where levelling up promises were made, Hull and our Humber energy estuary awaits the transformative actions needed to deliver those promises. Sadly, the Budget is no game-changer for Hull, and there is certainly no sign of a London docklands experience for the Humber docklands.

I welcome Hull getting some levelling up funding for city centre sites at Whitefriargate and Albion Square, where retailers suffered so much in the austerity years, but—let us be honest—£19.5 million does not claw back the £131 million of core Government funding removed from Hull City Council between 2010 and 2019. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, said that the poorest areas saw the biggest cuts in those austerity years and, as the all-party parliamentary group on “left behind” neighbourhoods pointed out, what most needs levelling up is social and physical infrastructure outside city centres, such as in Bransholme and Orchard Park in Hull North. I am disappointed that the all-party group’s idea to use nearly £1 billion of dormant assets to create a community wealth fund for such neighbourhoods at no extra cost to the taxpayer has not been taken up. Moreover, there is only a third of the £15 billion education recovery funding that Sir Kevan Collins recommended, a three-year wait to return to 2010 per pupil funding and a cut-down version of Sure Start—certainly not levelling up.

On transport, we heard about £50,000 for a feasibility study on reinstating the Hull-Beverley-York rail line. However, if the Government were truly levelling up the Humber with London, we would see a much bolder plan to revive disused Beeching lines, with perhaps a Humber version of the docklands light railway connecting communities. We still await the integrated rail plan, where we will learn whether our freeport city will get rail electrification within the next 20 years—Ministers blocked it five years ago—whether there will be high-speed rail coast to coast across the north and whether HS2 will have any tangible benefits east of the Pennines. They are essential for levelling up the north.

With the Chancellor congratulating himself so warmly on an economic plan that he says is working so well, we can assume that the Government face not as severe an economic challenge as the 1945 Labour Government, which set up the NHS and the welfare state. Why, then, are they failing to invest in levelling up in the north, and in Hull and the Humber in particular? For the communities that I represent, the Chancellor served a dish with a very large bill but hardly any ingredients.