Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Birt Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, the challenge for any large organisation, whether in the public or private sectors or within government, is how to combine strategic direction with effective on-the-ground delivery. The Bill sets out many laudable aims, but does it add up to a strategy for regeneration and will it really deliver levelling up?

Among our greatest problems is housing; we have heard a lot about that already. Our social housing stock has shrunk by more than 2 million homes over the past 40 years. In the past decade, we have been building far fewer homes than we did in the 1950s, yet our population has grown by 9 million since 2000, and household growth is rising at an even faster rate; thus we are completely failing to match supply and demand and to meet every kind of housing need. How can we create, over the next decade or so, the many millions of homes we require, while at the same time delivering other public goods, protecting our countryside, constructing well-insulated homes and once again building houses of beauty? How can we combine national direction with local delivery? I hope the Minister can persuade us that the Bill will help us do all that.

I sit on the board of a company which is national in reach but is based in the heart of the north. Like any modern business, it draws on myriad different specialist skills, thus many staff travel long distances daily to work—some have homes hundreds of miles away from their place of work and find weekday lodging. Accordingly, any modern economy needs, nationally, an effective strategic road and rail system and, regionally, metropolitan transportation systems in areas of high population density. Around 6 million people live in the adjoining metropolitan areas of Merseyside, Manchester and West Yorkshire. How will the measures in the Bill enable a concentrated focus on creating an appropriate transport infrastructure to unlock the full potential of that vast population?

There is work to be done. Currently, we are missing a plan to link HS2 to Leeds or Liverpool—and to speed the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds home. The woefully misnamed TransPennine Express takes, plus or minus, one and a half hours to traverse the 72 miles between two great northern cities. Moreover, the M62 is routinely gridlocked, and many small roads between northern towns are overloaded. Just before Christmas, it took me a miserable three hours to travel the 16 miles by road from Leeds station to my destination near Halifax.

Finally, I turn to skills. Despite being on the verge of recession, we have vast skills shortages in every part of the economy—data scientists, financial analysts, digital marketeers, construction workers and every kind of engineer, to name but a very few. I am unpersuaded that the Government have yet analysed the UK’s precise skills needs, now and in the future, or yet identified the means of their delivery. How will the framework outlined in the Bill address this vital issue? My fear is that, absent a clear delineation of responsibility, power and accountability at every level, we will fail coherently and expeditiously to address these critical and urgent issues, and thus continue to fail to achieve the levels of equality and prosperity that, as a nation, we all fervently desire.