Queen’s Speech

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, after the remarks earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, it will come as no surprise to anybody that I, as chairman of the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership, start by underscoring that I am in favour of levelling up. I am very pleased that the Minister in her opening remarks recognised what all of us involved have to understand—that it cannot be simply achieved by a single wave of an administrative, legislative or economic magic wand.

If you actually want to do something, the crucial starting point has to be capacity. If there is not the ability to complete the task in hand, it will fail. Capacity, I am afraid, is not universally present either in the centre of this country or across the more economically weak parts of our nation. Within this context, as the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, has just said, the business community needs to be involved and so must be involved. That is why local enterprise partnerships were established a decade or so ago. However, it was unfortunate that there was an insufficiently clear vision and idea of what they might do and how they might work.

Since I have only two more years or so to go in what is known as a level 3 area, I am not going to be affected by many of the changes which will result from the recent LEP review and be incorporated into the thinking surrounding levelling up. However, anyone in your Lordships’ Chamber who has been involved in both these activities will know that they are different in many ways; businesspeople and politicians do not look at things in quite the same way.

It is very important that the way in which the business community and its input is going to be—so we are told—incorporated into the operation of the new local authority era should not be predicated on the basis that the business voice is subordinate to the activities of the local authority members and officers. If that were to happen, collaboration would fail because the business world has plenty of things to do. Despite a great deal of underlying good will, it will not get involved fully if it is perceived to be more or less the running dog of the councils and their politicians.

As was touched on by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, we need to be clear that business has been very hard hit over the last few years. Leaving the single market has caused a lot of economic damage and so has Covid, the war in Ukraine and inflation. In the area I come from, which is very heavily dependent on agriculture, the working of the current agricultural reform is very damaging.

As has already been said, business needs confidence, certainty and encouragement. Often populism does precisely the opposite. It is open to the Government to help or hinder in these respects, and I am afraid I do not think their track record is as strong as it should have been. As has already been said, the Government have to ensure appropriate infrastructure, not least in the context of digital connectivity which is seen—as pointed out by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans—as an absolute sine qua non, especially in parts of the country which are hard to reach.

The Government must get on and do things. For example, I understand that the idea, floated in the context of HS2, of cutting the Golborne link would actually reduce services to London from Scotland and northern England, on the western side, in a post-HS2 world. That seems absolutely crazy. If that kind of thing happens, levelling up cannot be taken any more seriously than it can in the agricultural context, if the effect of the new trade agreements that we will enter into will discriminate positively in favour of farmers outside this country in respect of the environmental, welfare and husbandry standards required of food put into the UK marketplace. Discriminating in favour of foreigners cannot be a good component of levelling up.

Again, one of the greatest contributions of the part of England that I come from to the well-being of the UK economy is public goods, of which frankly no apparent recognition is properly made, in terms of their economic contribution to the local income. After all, we supply and manage the Lake District world heritage site, a large number of important environmental and landscape areas—which are enjoyed by everyone—and supply a huge amount of cultural and other goods to the rest of the country. Currently, quantities of carbon emitted elsewhere are sequestrated there, and there will no doubt be more in the future, but no payments are made or planned in respect of what is being done for free for richer neighbours now. Indeed, much of the water used in Manchester and north-west England comes from our lakes. Whenever a lavatory is flushed in Manchester, this is done with Cumbrian water. If we were Aboriginals in Australia, we would doubtless demand and get massive subventions.

It has been said that skills are very important, perhaps more so than ever before. Certainly, one of the things that puzzles us in the Cumbrian Local Enterprise Partnership is that we are told that we will not be allowed to bid for skills provision in the future. Over the past few years, we were told that this was at the heart of our remit. After all, two-thirds of local enterprise partnerships’ members are from the private sector and understand what is needed in business. In my and a lot of other people’s view, one of the great weaknesses of skills training in the past has been that it has been led by the suppliers of the training too much, with insufficient regard paid to what is actually required in the economy outside.

Equally, we have heard reference to housing. One of the attributes of areas such as Cumbria—it is equally true of Devon and Cornwall—is that shortages of housing are a serious inhibitor of the development of the local economy. But the problem is not solved by building more and more houses. There are plenty of houses in these places; the problem is that the people who actually serve the local economy cannot afford to rent or buy them. We need to think differently about these things and take a leaf out of the book of building preservation trusts and their rolling funds, and things like that. For that matter, the Lakeland Housing Trust, for example—a body of which I have the good fortune to be president—acquires property that exists and then lets it at appropriate levels to local occupants. You can also put an occupancy restriction on an existing house, sell it on and roll it over.

Another thing that is important in the context of levelling up is the fact that we have to avoid the economic consequences of what I might call the branch plant phenomenon, where real profits generated are then expatriated to the head office, which may even be in a different country, and not reinvested in the places where the money has been generated in the first place. This may well have suited the United Kingdom in the great days of the British Empire, but it does not help left-behind areas in England today.

Finally, one important thing that we need to understand is that public goods can be supplied by philanthropic individuals, companies and community organisations, and the good they do has little to do with the ownership and everything to do with the outcomes that are brought about. If the focus of levelling up is solely on who does things rather than on what is achieved, the result will be that the overall outcome will be less satisfactory than would otherwise be the case. Equally, when judging what things to support, the kind of quasi-automatic, ticking-the-box approach that seems to be a characteristic of public evaluation of projects means that, in reality, many small applicants will simply not bother to apply because it is too expensive, too onerous, and takes too much time. As has already been mentioned, it does not follow that competition automatically delivers the best quality, value-for-money outcomes. Indeed, they are and frequently may be suboptimal.

I am sure that we all agree that levelling up is good, but it is not good if it becomes a mere slogan. It has to be a coherent, thought-through and integrated approach which delivers long-term improvements rather than sexy-sounding headlines in the media. It is as simple as that.