Levelling Up

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

The noble Lord has pointed to one of the solutions in his question. In some circumstances, it might be appropriate for government to provide support to those councils or areas that struggle the most with the process to give them the capacity to engage with it in the first place. However, there are also things that we can do to try to simplify the processes that local authorities go through, while still ensuring that quality is maintained. We can simplify them—or, for example, in our approach to monitoring and evaluation of a lot of these projects, we have taken the decision to remove the local obligation to undertake that and will provide a central function to do it. So we can provide central support for local government and we can provide direct funding to local government to be able to engage and participate, but we can also simplify the process to try to remove the costs and drive value for money.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

I am so glad to see the noble Baroness in her new place. Do the Government agree with the analysis of Andrew Haldane, the former chief economist of the Bank of England and now director-general of the Royal Society of Arts, that one reason why Britain’s growth and productivity performance is not as good as it should be is the widening regional differentials in England between London and the south-east and the city regions of the north? If the Minister does agree, what conclusions does she draw about what kinds of policies are likely to be most effective in closing that gap?

To speak personally, when I look at quite a lot of the projects that have been approved, they are smallish-scale projects worth £10 million to £20 million, a lot of which are designed to improve town centres. I am in favour of repurposing town centres, but I do not think that we can ever take them back to where they were. Should we not be looking for big, transformative projects? Of course, that is why the cancellation of HS2 was such a big blow.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with that central point: that is what is driving the whole mission behind our work to level up. We need to do both of the things that the noble Lord talked about. We need to fund projects that restore pride of place to towns where people live and give a strong sense of local community, but we also need to fund those larger-scale transformative projects. The amount of funding, for example, that has gone into transport projects in mayoral combined authorities and other areas over recent years is very significant. We also have projects to develop investment zones and freeports, for example. So we should not see the levelling-up fund, and the projects that take place through that, as the only way in which we are delivering our agenda.

On the point about funding, whether it is for large or small projects, I will just add that it is also about devolving power—something that the noble Baroness mentioned at the very outset. Today, in the Autumn Statement, we have confirmed four new devolution deals for Greater Lincolnshire, Hull and East Yorkshire, Cornwall and Lancashire. We are also deepening the settlements for our existing institutions, because we need both power and money to flow down to local areas so that they can level up.