Levelling-up Agenda

Debate between Laurence Robertson and Dan Jarvis

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

Before we begin, I encourage Members to wear masks when they are not speaking, in line with current Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission, and to give each other and members of staff space when seated, and when entering and leaving the room.

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Government’s Levelling-up agenda.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Robertson. I am grateful to see Members and the Minister here today. I would completely understand it if the Minister wants to keep her phone on. I am sure we all wish her well with the reshuffle. We will see what the next hour or so brings.

I declare an interest: I am a metro Mayor. I have always supported the Prime Minister’s intention to level up the country, but it is outrageous that the UK has the worst regional inequality of any comparable developed nation. The gap is stark, from life expectancy to income, from unemployment to education, from productivity to health, and covid is making it worse. That is not a small thing. It is an injustice—a stain on our country—and tackling it should be a matter of raging and persistent urgency, not some optional extra in the national political agenda. I continue to want to work with the Government to do that, but as the Minister knows well, it is not words that count but action.

To be fair, it is not that the Government have done nothing. I acknowledge the help that we have had through the transforming cities fund and the getting building fund, among others. There have been some welcome policy shifts too, such as devolving adult education, reforming the Green Book and creating the UK Infrastructure Bank, but tackling deep-rooted inequality requires a special sort of intervention. It demands scope, endurance, resources, a national strategy and local leadership.

So far, the Government have fallen well short. First, transformative ambition needs transformative resources. Instead, we have old money relabelled as new and distributed with more concern for politics than progress. The flagship levelling-up fund, worth £1.3 billion a year on average, replaces a local growth fund that was worth 14% more, and half its budget this year is taken from the towns fund. Even worse, the levelling-up fund puts the Chancellor’s Richmondshire constituency, ranked 251 out of 317 in England’s deprivation index, in a higher category of need than my constituency of Barnsley, which is ranked 38. That is no one-off. A third of English areas due to get funds are not in the top third of the most deprived regions.

Likewise, the shared prosperity fund is supposed to match the historical EU support that it is designed to replace, but EU funds were due to increase sharply this year, so many areas, including my own, will miss out. I ask the Minister: will the Government compensate us for that? Almost a third of the English areas selected to receive money under the SPF’s precursor programme, the community renewal fund, are not among the most deprived local areas. Almost all of them are entirely represented by Conservative MPs. Meanwhile, of the 45 places receiving a share of the towns fund spending, 39 are represented by Conservative MPs. The Public Accounts Committee found that the fund’s earlier selection process was not impartial.

We are starting to see a pattern develop, and it gets worse when we consider that these politicised, fragmented and inadequate funds also come against a major backdrop of cuts elsewhere. As we saw in the Chamber this afternoon, the Government are intent on ending the £20 uplift in universal credit, cutting income for 5.5 million families by more than £1,000 a year and taking billions out of the economies of more deprived areas. That of course follows the £15 billion of cuts to local government in the past decade, which has fallen hardest on the poorest areas.

The Government trumpet their spending through the national infrastructure strategy, but it is unclear how much will go to deprived areas and when it will arrive. What we do know is that the Government are wobbling in their commitment to two of the biggest projects in the north: HS2’s eastern leg and Northern Powerhouse Rail. For them to be postponed or scaled back would make any claim of concern for levelling up utterly risible. I ask the Minister to assure us today of the Government’s commitment to those two huge projects.

When the debate concludes, I will hit “send” on South Yorkshire’s bid for £660 million of city region sustainable transport settlement funding. If the Government want to end the long-standing bias in transport investment towards more affluent areas, I hope that they will back that bid in full, and those of other relatively deprived areas such as mine.

It is not just how much money and where it goes that matters; it is how it is spent. It is alarming that the Select Committee on Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy described levelling-up policy and funding as

“lacking in any overall coherent strategic purpose”

with little clarity about who is responsible, how progress will be measured or, indeed, what the objectives are.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this forward. The Government’s policy of levelling up is to benefit all the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Unfortunately, we do not see that coming our way in Northern Ireland. We believe that, if it is a levelling-up agenda, we should benefit as well. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there should be projects across the whole of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to benefit us all, whether they are specific projects, or businesses that can qualify for projects that are happening elsewhere in the United Kingdom?

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

Order. Interventions need to be shorter. Mr Jarvis.

[Dan Jarvis]

I am grateful for that intervention. My hon. Friend makes an important point. He knows I have a long-standing interest in Northern Ireland. He is right to make the point that every corner of the United Kingdom should seek to benefit from investment coming out of national Government. The Prime Minister has spoken on occasion about levelling up the whole of the country. The reality is that there are particular areas that are more deprived and require additional support to unlock their potential. I absolutely concede that, along with my own region, Northern Ireland is definitely one of those.

There is a very good opportunity for the Government to demonstrate their commitment to do this through the forthcoming White Paper, not just in terms of setting out a plan but linking it, mindful of the COP conference taking place this year, to the green transformation that we need, as well as to other priorities. Critically, that national strategy from national Government must be based around local leadership. Levelling up cannot succeed without local knowledge, engagement and accountability. Levelling up cannot be done from desks in Westminster and Whitehall.

Yet the reality is that, almost everywhere, the Government’s model is to force local authorities to scrap for inadequate, restricted, one-off pots of cash, designed according to the Government’s priorities and not to ours. It seems a long time since the general election, but I remember the Conservative manifesto specifically promised to

“trust people and communities to make the decisions that are right for them”.

They need to have the confidence now to mean what they said then.

In South Yorkshire, we are not waiting for that. With our local authority leaders, we have developed what we call a plan for the north, which sets out a road map to transformation. I invite the Minister to look carefully at the detail of that plan. In South Yorkshire, we have fantastic assets to act as catapults for development, such as the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre but, to translate that into wider change, we need funding and support for a comprehensive local industrial strategy, from skills to finance.

At the same time, levelling up cannot be just about business and infrastructure. It needs to be about investing in early years and education, in housing and health. It is about tax reform and funding local government. It is about the environment and public services. Arts and culture is another good example, which can bring major economic benefits—more than £5 of revenue for every pound of public investment. That also helps to improve quality of life and perception of a region. In the very near future in South Yorkshire, we will lay out how we will support our creative sector with much more than just words. That is the test for any part of levelling up. For all the grand talk, the Government’s actions so far suggest a limited agenda, yet they still have the chance to change that. The forthcoming comprehensive spending review is where we will know once and for all whether the Government’s commitment to reducing regional inequality is serious or merely cynical. There are six weeks to decide which it is. I very much hope that they do the right thing. One way or another, it is by their actions that they will be judged.