Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Horam, with his strategic policy on land and housing, and the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, with his history of largely ineffective aims, in the end, to rearrange devolution within England. My first ministerial job in this House was to defend the plans for regional government brought in by the Labour Government in 1997. I still think that English regions of roughly the size that we proposed would have been a good idea, but when we tried it out in the area that we thought would be most susceptible, the north-east, the people did not want it. They saw it as a vehicle for yet more politicians.

We must ensure that levelling up, which is a great concept, is delivered by a structure of governance in this country that actually works and which the people support. By and large, the devolution that has happened in recent years has been only partially supported by the population. It has brought some benefits in some cases, such as to areas with elected mayors—those that do not have them feel somewhat jealous—but, either way, the stranglehold of Whitehall has remained and the resources allocated to local government from the centre have been deeply constrained, such that even the most effective areas of local government have been unable to deliver for their people.

This levelling-up strategy must be seen in the context of both the financing of local government and other forms of finance. Housing, transport, education and health policy all contributed to the failure of previous levelling-up initiatives. Part of the levelling-up process was stimulated by the end of what was a sort of substitute levelling up: the allocation of resources through the regional fund and the Social Fund of the European Union. The shared prosperity fund which was supposed to replace them has not seriously contributed towards levelling up in its distribution of funds within England, and nor have the rest of our agendas.

I am anxious that levelling up have some cross-reference to our programme for decarbonisation and net zero. But I saw a graph this very morning showing that the vast majority of green jobs in England have been created in London and not in the parts of England that so lack employment in the more traditional industries of these days.

When this Bill was first proposed and the White Paper came out, I was reasonably confident that the Government had at least grasped the concept. The White Paper, which is quite thick, contains many interesting ideas and its technical annexe enclosed a number of metrics and targets. The contents of this Bill, which is equally massive, do not appear to be as ambitious as the White Paper. In some ways, it is contradictory to it. I think the Bill will require a lot of scrutiny from this House.

I was going to comment primarily on housing and the environment, but I need to reflect my disappointment at the nature of the Bill overall and to mention one other thing, which I am stimulated to do by the reference of the noble Lord, Lord Horam, to his representing both London and the north: levelling up needs to happen within areas as well as between them. We should not be defined by our postal codes, but some of the poorest and the poorest quality of life exist within some of our more affluent areas. There are significant numbers of poor and deprived families and communities in London and Bristol, as there are in the more affluent rural areas of our country. We must ensure that, whatever levelling-up policy we adopt, it levels things up for everybody rather than simply transferring a bit of the rates support grants or the proposed shared prosperity fund from one area of the country to another.