Levelling Up

Lord Singh of Wimbledon Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I reassure my noble friend that the Government have established a series of provisional priority outcomes and metrics, which has been published as part of the spending review. Table 2H is a particular example of an outcome that will help to measure the success of the fund.

[Lord Singh of Wimbledon (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the Statement rightly recognises the disparities in wealth and earning opportunities across the country, and it contains some imaginative funding initiatives. What is missing is any quantification of existing disparities and any targets to measure the success of the levelling-up programme. One way of doing this is to state what would constitute success or failure. Does the Minister agree that the initiative will have failed if there is no visible diminution in the need for food banks or in the number of homeless on our streets?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

We can be very clear that the objective of levelling up is to deal with all the issues the noble Lord raises. The metrics are clear: for instance, the performance metric that I mentioned in my previous answer concerns the

“Economic performance of all functional economic areas relative to their trend growth rates”.