Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Robert Halfon

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State is a born performer and he was clearly having fun today. I was glad for him that he could not see the faces behind him when we reached the planning section. I suspect he may need to reach over to this side of the House a little more in the coming weeks and months than he has just done in that performance today.

Even the Secretary of State cannot perform his way out of this one. The Bill has been brought to the House on the day when the reality of the Government’s record on levelling up has been laid bare. New figures published today by the Office for National Statistics show that London alone of the regions of the UK has had a post-pandemic recovery that has far outstripped the rest of us. Our industrial heartlands, once the engine room of Britain, including the west midlands, are performing at 10% below pre-covid levels. That is the brutal reality of a decade of underinvestment, money stripped out of communities and money taken out of people’s pockets. This is what it has done to our communities in every part of this country.

So how is it that the Secretary of State has come to the House with lots of jokes, smart phrases and slogans but nothing in the Bill that will turn that around? The only mention of levelling up in this hefty great tome, apart from in the title, is in the 12 missions that will be written into law. But this is a law not worth the paper it is written on because tucked away in clause 5 is the sleight of hand that has become so characteristic of this Government. The cat is out of the bag. Not only will they not back the country, but they will not even back themselves. In clause 5 is a measure that allows the Government to tear up those missions on a whim—their entire levelling up agenda, the promise made to the people of Britain and on which they won the last general election—presumably when they fail to deliver every single one.

The country simply cannot go on like this.

[Robert Halfon]

rose—

[Lisa Nandy]

I will give way in a moment.

In 19 of the last 20 years, only two regions of our country have been given the backing they needed from their Government to succeed. They cannot try to fire the economy on one cylinder and expect it to work. If the right hon. Gentleman would like to tell me how he thinks that can work, believe me, I am all ears.

[Robert Halfon]

The hon. Lady said that, under the Conservative Government, there has been a lack of investment in the regions. Harlow, as she knows, has a fair bit of deprivation, but under this Government it has been levelling up for the past 10 years: an advanced manufacturing centre, millions of pounds; an enterprise zone, millions of pounds; a new hospital coming, hundreds of millions of pounds; a new road junction on the M11 just about to open up, many millions of pounds; infra- structure improvements; a technical school opened up; and a £23 million town fund. That has not been happening just over the past year; it has been happening over the past 10 years. This Government have been levelling up Harlow for 10 years.

[Lisa Nandy]

That was a superb audition for the forthcoming reshuffle and I am sure we will hear many more of them. I hope that that gave the right hon. Gentleman a better press release for his local paper than the failure to back the hospital that was promised. Let me tell him the reality of what levelling up has done in Essex: £292.5 million taken by his Government from the people of Essex, even when levelling-up funds are taken into account. That is the reality of levelling up for the people he represents. No wonder he sits there with such a glum face, listening to that record.

Our core cities are still far outpaced by London. We are an outlier across major economies. The inequalities between regions are outstripped by the inequalities within them. And even the winners in this system are losing. London is the region with the highest disposable income in the country, but I do not need to tell any of my London colleagues the reality of overheating some parts of our economy and underinvesting in others. Once we take the crippling housing costs that are holding back a generation into account, disposable income in London falls way down the ranking and people are worse off.

The Secretary of State has presented a Bill today that contains more aimed at dealing with housing and planning than it does on levelling up, democracy and devolution. Can he not see the problem? We are one of the most geographically unequal countries of any major economy. As someone once said, when levelling up was a thing:

“for too many people in this country, geography turns out to be destiny”.

If this Government continue to write off the opportunities for many parts of the country—to write off the potential and the assets we have, for lack of imagination and investment—they will continue to cram more and more people into small corners of the country, and that in turn will continue to push up housing prices. Surely the Secretary of State can see, even if he cannot admit it today, that one of the chief ways to deal with the over 120 clauses aimed at dealing with pressures on land, planning and development, is to level up the country. The clue is in the title. Why are they not doing it? Any self-respecting Secretary of State would have brought us a plan to get proper resources spent wisely and invested for the long-term recovery of our local economies.