Levelling-up Missions: East of England

Jerome Mayhew Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend, the chair of the GEML rail taskforce, has hit the nail on the head: this speaks to a fundamental failure in Whitehall, and my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney repeatedly highlighted that. This is the core message that has to be taken away, and that is just on rail. Of course, rail supports economic growth. The west Anglia line is another classic case. With four trains an hour to Stansted airport, it feels like “Mission Impossible” right now. Some proper work needs to be undertaken, and the Government need to support that. We have been successful in getting Emirates into Stansted. We want to get other international airlines, as my hon. Friend said, including from India.

On roads, I have again secured funding, as a Member of Parliament, for feasibility studies on the A12 and A120, but yet again we are going round the merry-go-round of not getting the commitment from central Government to proceed with those schemes. Quite frankly, that is down to inadequacies with National Highways, which fails to operate in a transparent way, to engage with local community or the county council, which has responsibility for the strategic road network, or to engage with the Department for Transport, so we are not getting the road upgrades we need in the county. Those road networks are the economic arteries of the east of England.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

Integration in the planning of infrastructure goes beyond just roads and rail; there is the integration of offshore wind into the national transmission network. Only in East Anglia are there radial connections from offshore wind to the national transmission network. The rest of the country benefits from the holistic network design. Does my right hon. Friend agree that East Anglia should be included in that design and that we should move away from these radial connections?

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will come on to energy shortly for another reason, and I will pick up on that point after I conclude on the issue of roads.

Essex is a net contributor, and the A12 and A120 are literally roads from the dark ages. They are deeply unsafe roads. If we care about road safety and the people who get up every day at the crack of dawn, such as lorry drivers and commuters, to service our public services or to come to London to provide services for major hotels and the UK’s service sector, we must upgrade these roads. It is becoming a joke right now—it really is. It is an insult to commuters and the people who use the roads who have to navigate the potholes and poor quality of the roads every single day. They feel, by the way, that they are getting an unfair deal when they fill up their cars because of the cost of fuel at the pump. This is not a criticism of the Minister’s Department, but it shows the breadth of issues that need to be grasped across Government on integration to provide those levelling-up outcomes. Otherwise, levelling up will just become a slogan.

I would like to touch on a couple of other areas, which are both linked. One is skills and education. I am proud not just to be the Member of Parliament for Witham, but to represent Essex and the east region. When I became the MP for Witham, the majority of my schools locally were in special measures or required improvement. I am pleased to say right now that we have great schools—good schools and outstanding schools—and, as a result, Witham is now a commuter town. People want to live and work there, and some schools are outstanding—that is a great thing. We need not just to give our youngsters great educational opportunities through our schools, but to ensure that they can get jobs and that they inherit skills for life. That could be skills within the region for the great energy coastline that we have developed over the past decade, which has been remarkable, and previous Ministers in Government should be thanked for their hard work on that matter.

Essex is a county of entrepreneurs, and I never tire of saying that. We are the home of small businesses and innovators, and R&D is big in Essex. However, our prosperity masks challenges when it comes to deprivation, as we have heard, but also skills, opportunity and aspiration. We need businesses to work with our schools and get their foot in the door to talk to pupils at an earlier age. I have a careers fair taking place on 24 March on Witham. I never tire of being a champion of those skills fairs, and we are bringing in businesses from former industries I have worked in to those schools. I want to see Government embrace that, because the apprenticeship levy is, quite frankly, not delivering the outcomes it was originally set up to deliver. I maintain that it needs reform. Of course, by getting those skills locally, we can create jobs with skills that focus on areas that Members have touched on already. I feel very strongly about that.

I want to touch on health, which has been raised. My hon. Friend the Member for Waveney said that we do not have a technology campus in the east of England—I agree, and we should work to achieve that—but we do have a university medical school. I was involved in the original bid to do the business case for that, and I am proud that we achieved it. However, I am afraid that our health infrastructure across the east of England is inadequate. Our patient-GP ratio is one of the highest in the country, and we are not training enough students in our medical schools. We need to do much more. When he was Health Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) worked well with us to deliver some good health outcomes, but there is much more that needs to be done. We are an ageing part of the country, but we must work with our young people to grow skills in health and social care. I pay tribute to Essex County Council for the work it is doing in that area.

This is a message to central Government: we cannot have people working in silos in Government anymore. When I was Home Secretary, the Health Department said to me, “Please do much more on health and social care visas,” which I am pleased that we have done—I did that as Home Secretary. However, there is more that we need to do in that area, and we also need more home-grown talent.

Finally, planning is the biggest issue in my constituency casework. Witham has become a building site over the past decade. We are building homes, and it is right that we do that. The question is, are they affordable homes? We have already heard of the high income ratio that is required to live in our fantastic part of the country. This point is specific to the Minister’s Department. Planning is contentious, and we are not getting it right in this country; there is no doubt about that.

In Essex, and in my constituency in particular, we stopped the West Tey development, a proposal for a garden community of 45,000 new homes—which, by the way, was without any infrastructure at all. The entire concept was an absolute scandal and a disgrace. I pay tribute to campaigners such as Rosie Pearson and others in my constituency who worked together to bring that to the Planning Inspectorate and get that proposal overturned. Five-year land supply has also been a problem, along with local councils that have no neighbourhood plans. I want to put on the record the fact that I think it is deeply disappointing that the Department, in its former guise as the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, used taxpayers’ funds to boost and beef up that concept without working in a considered way with the local community on the kind of housing that was required.

I am afraid that this is not specific to the Minister’s Department. We are going through this all over again with another project: pylons. It is less about housing, but it will become a planning issue. The development of pylons across the east of England will, frankly, have a detrimental impact. We are pioneers in offshore grid wind farm development and renewables, and we must absolutely look to invest in that capability, rather than putting up more infrastructure that will bring great blight to our local communities and, I am afraid, agitate them even more.

I know I have taken up a great deal of time, Mr Davies. In conclusion, there are great things about the east of England. We are net contributors to His Majesty’s Treasury, and we cross-subsidise much of the United Kingdom through the hard graft of the great men and women of the east of England, but we are lagging behind on these key assets that are of national significance. My hon. Friend the Minister can only do so much with her remit in her Department. My wider message is about devolution and local government reorganisation, as well as about the size of the state in Whitehall; how bloated and unaccountable that has become, and how detached it is from the good men and women of the east of England who, as taxpayers, contribute to the bureaucracy of Whitehall and get very little back. That is where reform has to start. The devolution train is well under way now—certainly in our part of the country. In Essex, I back it. Quite frankly, we need reform of the core of Whitehall to start delivering for the good people of the east of England.