Industrial Strategy

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

I am most grateful to my noble friend, who played a considerable part in helping to put this industrial strategy together. I am grateful to him for reminding the House of the need to move the dial on productivity, as he puts it, and for underlining the fundamental nature of those four grand challenges. That is repeated again and again in the White Paper, and the Government are committed to it.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the industrial strategy, which, like my noble friend Lord Fox, I think is extremely helpful in the most part. I want to ask the Minister about inclusive growth. One of the foundations of the industrial strategy is places. What consideration has been given to the level of intervention required for large towns, as opposed to cities, that have very low productivity rates, often because they have no university nearby? How local will the local industrial strategies be? I hope they will not simply be at the level of the local enterprise partnerships, which often cover a very large geographical area.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, the noble Lord speaks with great knowledge of the north-east, I believe. I know the north-west—or rather, the north-north-west—pretty well, and I know the sort of problems he is talking about, not just in the cities but in the large towns. We see them in my part of the world in west Cumberland, in Workington and Whitehaven. We certainly need to look at what we can do. The noble Lord also spoke about LEPs and the role they can play, and on some occasions it is more than what the LEP can do. I hope that the noble Lord, in welcoming the White Paper, will accept that the important point is that one of the five ideas behind it is identifying the importance of place. That is why, particularly in relation to productivity, again, I wanted to re-emphasise the fact that there are regional imbalances and that they need to be addressed. LEPs can play a very valuable part, but there will be more that can be done, and I hope that the industrial strategy sets that out.