Regeneration (South-east Wakefield)

Jon Trickett Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

It is good to see you in the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker, and to see the Minister in her place. It is a great privilege to be allowed to lead this short debate on the regeneration of south-east Wakefield.

I suppose that everybody who has been a Member of this House and represented a constituency would say, genuinely, how proud they were to represent the area for which they were elected. I feel enormous pride as the representative of about 23 villages in south-east Wakefield, most of which to some extent had a strong link to the coal mining industry in the past.

The industry bred a particular kind of person, and I want to describe some of the attributes of the people I represent. They are tough-minded, extremely independent and resourceful, as well as overwhelmingly honest and straightforward individuals. Because the mining industry was so dangerous, they learned how to care for each other. After all, down the mine your life might depend on a neighbour, and his might depend on you. Strong and caring communities therefore emerged and quite often, both below and above ground, when times got tough, people stuck together. Frequently, it was the women who were the strong and tough characters who bound so many of our communities together.

I want to emphasise one thing above all, which is my constituents’ passionate commitment to hard work. How could it be otherwise? These people went down the pits into the dark in the most dangerous conditions, and they helped to create the wealth that made our country such a rich and powerful nation. Mining is part of our heritage. I am pleased to say that the first deep mine in a generation is about to be sunk in my constituency, but to be honest, we have on the whole moved on from the coal mining industry. Yet the qualities that I have described have not gone away. They are still there to be seen every day in all the villages I represent.

When I think about the regeneration of our communities, so much of which has taken place in the past few years, I think about Fitzwilliam or Frickley, where the coal mines were left derelict when the mining industry simply closed down overnight. Hundreds of acres of land were, in effect, abandoned by the National Coal Board. The land was polluted, and left with dangerous coal pit formations. In those two areas, it was primarily but not exclusively the women who said, “We’re not going to have this sort of despoliation of our community for generations to come.” They came together and, with the support of many other agencies, created two wonderful country parks on those two pitheads. At another, South Kirby pit, local entrepreneurs and business people are now creating new industries and businesses, and the same is taking place at Dale lane in Upton.

When I think about regeneration and community spirit, I think of the library in my home village of Ackworth. The council had to withdraw from it because of a lack of funding, but members of the community said, “No, we’re not seeing the library close.” With the help of the parish council, we now have an active community library. I also think of the Westfield lane centre, which is a true community hub. It provides cheap food for people who are finding it difficult to pay their way, and there is a food bank and training for people who need skills.

When I think about communities and regeneration, I think about the brass bands, the male voice choirs, the rugby league clubs—I know that is a subject close to your heart, Mr Deputy Speaker—the pensioners’ Christmas dos and the sports facilities. Those community facilities are found in every village and almost around every corner. They were created by miners, who paid 6p at the end of each week from their pay packet to sustain them. When the mines closed so precipitately, all those sixpences—there were thousands of men working down the pits—were gone, but somehow or other, the communities managed to hold on to the facilities and they continue to this day.

I think, too, about the food banks that are beginning to re-emerge because things are getting tough again. In some cases, they are being led by the same women who ran the soup kitchens at the time of the strikes. I think of the successful business people who used to be miners, who will dig into their pockets, often unasked, when there is a community problem. One business man who used to be miner came to me one day when he heard that a local woman had lost two children in a tragedy and could not afford to bury them. He asked how he could help to pay for their burial, because he understood that the woman did not have the money that he did. He wanted to do so anonymously. All those things make up the rich communities that I represent. Obviously, each of us knows the communities that we represent best.

There are other forms of regeneration going on, particularly through house building. Large housing estates are being built in South Elmsall and Featherstone. I welcome that because it will bring fresh blood, money and jobs into those villages, which are desperately needed. However, I do not think that housing on its own is sufficient to regenerate the communities that I represent.

We have done much to regenerate our communities locally, which shows how resilient those communities are. Above all, what I want to say about Yorkshire mining communities is that they do not want to live on handouts from the state, but they do occasionally need a helping hand up. When I was first elected in 1996, I went to the local secondary schools in Minsthorpe and Hemsworth and asked the children how many of them would go to university. Barely one person in those two huge schools said that they would go to university. However, through the excellence of the teachers and the support of the parents and the wider community, a process of helping those young people to reach their potential was gradually arrived at.

I went back in 2010 at the end of the Labour Government and asked the new generation of children how many of them would go to university. Almost all of them put their hands up and said, “We hope that we can.” That happened because of a helping hand. They were not living off the state and were not dependent on anybody, but had somebody standing alongside them—teachers and schools, with some Government and council money—helping them to achieve what they wanted to achieve.

I want to refer to a couple of matters that trouble me because, from time to time, we need the state, an institution or an agency to stand alongside us and give us a helping hand. The first relates to the green belt. I represent 23 villages. I have described their similarities, their history and their economics, but the rivalry between them can be quite intense, as Members might imagine. Frequently, the gap between one village and the next is just one or two fields. There is a danger that ribbon development will creep into one field and then into the next and, before we know it, two ancient communities, with their own histories and cultures, and perhaps their own antagonisms, will be merged into one.

I know that the Minister cannot speak about particular planning applications, but there is an application at the moment for green belt between Fitzwilliam and Havercroft. I am worried that it will begin to bridge the divide between those two communities. I ask the Minister to reflect—perhaps not now, but in a subsequent letter—on whether the powers that the Government have given the council to protect the green belt are strong enough to ensure that our communities remain independent.

I want to reflect on where we have got to. As I have said, we sometimes need agencies, institutions and the Government alongside us to help. One of those institutions was the Coalfields Regeneration Trust, which, over the past 15 years or so, has been working side by side with coalfield communities throughout the country, helping us to regenerate our areas. Now it is being brought to an end. That is premature, because the job that it was asked to do has not been completed. Two fifths of neighbourhoods that make up the most deprived communities in the country are in coalfield areas, so the work of regeneration has not been achieved.

As Members would expect of an area such as mine, which is solidly in the middle of the Yorkshire coalfield, there are ongoing problems in spite of the CRT’s work. One in five of all children in my constituency live in poverty, and equally disturbing is the fact that a male child born today in the most deprived area of my constituency is expected to live 10 and a half years less than a child born in the least deprived area.

The job is not done, and let us be honest, as much as we can do locally, national issues are causing us to have continuing problems, because we are a grossly unequal country. That problem of inequality goes to the heart of the problems facing the communities that I represent. The problem is not that there are not enough jobs but that the jobs are generally agency, part-time or temporary work or full self-employment, with low pay.

There are shocking regional disparities in pay. I do not have time to go through all the details, but wages and salaries in my constituency in Yorkshire have declined substantially—by more than £2,000 a year per person since 2008—and the decline continues. It is extraordinary to compare the average salary in my constituency with that in the Prime Minister’s constituency. We discover that average pay is £100 a week more in Witney than in Hemsworth, or £5,000 a year for each working man and woman. If the same pay were provided in Hemsworth and Witney, an additional half a billion pounds a year in salaries and income would come to Hemsworth. As Members can imagine, that would be sufficient to complete the process of regeneration. The problem of inequality needs to be tackled.

I believe that there is also a moral debt to mining communities—it is a kind of social compact. We asked men to go underground and help to create the wealth of our country, then we closed the mines in the most brutal manner imaginable. It is not sufficient for us simply to walk away from those communities with the job only half done, yet the Government give all the impression in the world of walking away, uninterested. There have been cuts to the CRT; our local council has lost £185 million; 180 local NHS staff have gone; the bedroom tax affects 1,500 people in the area, and so on. The job is not finished.

The Minister might say that there are fiscal problems, but the Prime Minister, before he was elected, said, “We will not cut front-line services. We will only cut waste.” I am a hard-bitten Yorkshireman—I do not like spending money, and I hate the idea of waste. I agree with cutting waste, but that is not what is happening in my constituency. Agencies that should be standing alongside communities are being made to walk away because money is no longer available to them.

We know what has happened from the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the man who sits next to the Chancellor. He has said that the Tories are

“ideologically wedded to continuous cuts as the route to a smaller state.”

There we have it—an ideological commitment to a smaller state.

I do not want a large state for the sake of it, and I certainly do not want a Government who act like Big Brother. I want a Government who are active and who stand alongside individuals and communities and help them to achieve their aspirations. This Government have broken the social compact. We should recognise that ties of obligation bind us together, and it is a basic, British, moral and ethical value to suggest that if someone, some group, or one community or another, falls behind through no fault of their own, the rest of us should turn round and help. The Government give the impression of having neglected that social compact and idea of not letting people fall behind, and that basic British value.

It is not too late for the Government to change course, and I appeal to the Minister to go away and look at what is happening in the coalfield communities—perhaps not this evening—especially in my area but also more widely, and see what else might be done. If the Government continue to be as hard-faced as the impression they give, they will be swept aside by a Government who will express more clearly the true values of the British people in the general election next year.