Budget Resolutions

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Diolch yn fawr iawn, Mr Dirprwy Lefarydd. May I take the opportunity to congratulate the hon. Member for Peterborough (Paul Bristow) on his marriage?

The Government made a massive rhetorical commitment to levelling up Wales. We would want to support that, wouldn’t we? We would expect the Government, in fulfilling that commitment, to decentralise power from the Treasury, empower decision making closer to our communities and match rhetoric with resources. The Budget once again fails to do that. The Government scorn our Senedd, by which they snub our democracy.

The UK’s regional inequality is hardwired into the economy and the institutional decision making of the British state. While the Prime Minister has claimed that levelling up is about taking the pressure off parts of the overheating south-east, it should be about fixing the investment, income and opportunity inequalities that result in unequal standards of living. To put that into perspective, in London, productivity and earnings are between a third and a half higher than the UK average, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. In Wales, our productivity is at least 15% below the UK average and earnings are nearly 40% lower than those in London. In my home county of Gwynedd, local GVA per capita is nearly 30% below the UK average. We might think that that was deserving of levelling up, but Gwynedd was deemed by the Government to need no levelling up funding whatsoever.

Investment in research and development—we have heard some mention of that—which is a key driver of innovation and increases in productivity, has long been centred in London and the south-east, with expenditure per head in 2019 being £577, more than twice the amount in Wales. That inequality is not just expressed in economic terms. London and the south-east of England’s dominance is expressed everywhere, from the availability and quality of local transport links to support for local museums and galleries.

A startling statistic from the Chancellor, who doubled down on inequality in the Budget, is that between 2010-11 and 2017-18, cultural spending per head in London was £687—nearly five times the average in the rest of England, let alone Wales. Perhaps most important of all, that inequality is reflected not only in the quality of life, but in the very stuff of life itself. Those living in London can expect to live two and a half years longer than people in Wales.

Levelling up is therefore about far more than the economy; it is about improving life itself in those communities all too often dismissed and ignored by Westminster. Against a challenge of such a scale, any Government would struggle, and there were indeed several welcome measures in the Budget. It was a relief to learn that the shared prosperity fund is to happen after all, and that Wales has received investment through the levelling-up fund.

Yet the spending review also confirmed the loss of the £370 million that Wales would have received annually if we had remained part of the EU—funding that this Government are unprepared to match even though they had it in their 2019 manifesto. Sadly, the Budget also confirmed the UK’s indefensible intervention in Welsh and devolved affairs. While of course I welcome efforts to improve numeracy, such a programme, which oversteps into a devolved competency, should be achieved through devolved settlements and not unilaterally decided by one part of the UK. I remind the Chancellor that the EU worked with the devolved nations and let us, rather than some distant Whitehall bureaucrat, set our own funding priorities. We do not need Westminster to teach us that these sums do not add up.