Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, some five hours ago the first Government Back-Bench speaker was my noble friend Lord Bourne, which begins with “B”. I am the last Government Back-Bench speaker, and my name begins with “Y”. Can I make a plea for some alphabetical levelling up next time?

In the time available I will make two points, one specific and one general. The specific one, which I raised yesterday, relates to the Government’s proposal to make local housing targets discretionary and not mandatory. For nine years on and off I had ministerial responsibility for housing and planning, most of them under the benign but watchful eye of my noble friend Lord Heseltine, whose contribution was the outstanding feature of today’s high-quality debate. Based on that experience, you will never get the homes the country needs if you rely on the good will of local government. It was not local government that made the commitment to 300,000 houses; it was us—the Government. Local government, with its local electorate, will never deliver that target. Look at all the foot-dragging with local plans. It will opt out of the tough decisions unless there is a target.

However, now the Government are proposing to abandon the one lever that they have to deliver that commitment. Assuring people that new homes will be well designed will not take the trick. The objections will come when land is zoned for development, long before any designs are in the public domain. Therefore, I hope that noble Lords will change the Bill back to what the Government originally proposed before they backed down in the other place. If not, they run real risks at the next election, not just for not hitting the 300,000 target—we understand about Covid—but for not taking seriously an issue rising steadily up the political agenda, not least the need for more affordable housing, as mentioned by so many noble Lords in this debate.

On a happier note, my general point is that I welcome the motivation behind the Bill. A country with stark inequalities between communities will be an unstable one, and there are strong political, economic and social arguments for levelling up and giving equal opportunities to everyone regardless of where they live.

The first sentence of last year’s White Paper stated that:

“From day one, the defining mission of this government has been to level up this country”.


However, turning that mission into tangible policies is difficult. I and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, discovered this on your Lordships’ committee when we heard that levelling up meant different things to different people, if indeed it meant anything at all. I have knocked on more doors than anyone else in this Chamber.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

All right—I have knocked on nearly as many doors as all the noble Lords in this Chamber. I have never met anyone who said, “George, what I really want is to be levelled up.” They want better schools, shorter waiting lists, crucially with priorities differing from place to place. My noble friend Lord Lucas wants a sixth-form college in Eastbourne, while the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, wants better rail services in the West Midlands. I believe the Government can achieve their objective through a different route: by giving local authorities much more autonomy to reflect those varying priorities than what is proposed, and by making this a much more decentralised country.

This Bill was never meant to be called the levelling up Bill. At the beginning of this Parliament we were promised a White Paper on devolution. That commitment was abandoned in May 2021, when we were told that a new levelling up White Paper would be published later, which would supersede it. The White Paper said:

“We’ll usher in a revolution in local democracy.”


It later made the point that local leaders in other countries have

“much greater revenue-raising powers.”

But there is absolutely nothing about that in the Bill. Devolving greater ability to spend central government money with strings attached is not a revolution in local democracy; it is a step change in local administration.

Let me make a radical suggestion to decentralise and to turbocharge levelling up by empowering local democracy. Over the next 10 years, revenue from fuel duty, some £25 billion, will disappear as we buy electric vehicles. The revenue foregone will be met by road pricing, now made possible by in-car technology—a transition that the Government will no longer be able to duck. However, that revenue should not go to central government but should complement the existing revenue from parking and congestion charges and go to the larger units of local government encouraged by the Bill. This would give local government greater autonomy and a sounder basis of local taxation than the increasingly discredited and out of date council tax, which raises the same amount from a mansion in Belgrave Square as a terraced house in Oakham, in Leicestershire. I would expect this proposal to be welcomed by my noble friend the Minister, as I came across a statement released by the County Councils Network calling for

“Full fiscal devolution to counties to create an extra £26bn in GVA”,


signed by the leader of Wiltshire Council, my noble friend Lady Scott.

In conclusion, rather than rigidly following the targets in 12 centrally derived missions, I honestly believe that more people will believe that they have been levelled up if we go down this route of local democratic empowerment.