Devolution for the East Midlands

Luke Hall Excerpts

Wednesday 14th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Regional Growth and Local Government (Luke Hall)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) on securing this extremely important debate. He articulated his points passionately on behalf of his community, and I can certainly assure him that his ambition to secure a more prosperous future for the east midlands is shared in every corner of the Government.

I also take the opportunity to congratulate my hon. Friend on his new role as leader of Nottinghamshire County Council. It is great to see such strong local leadership being provided, which we all recognise is essential to the mission of levelling up. He talked articulately about our passion and commitment to unlocking economic prosperity across all regions of the country, and that is absolutely right. It is why we have made levelling up and the levelling-up agenda a central part of our economic strategy. We plan to address the long-standing economic inequalities, delivering economic opportunity and improving lives and livelihoods up and down the country. Wherever someone was born and wherever they grow up, we believe that they should have an equal opportunity to get on in life, thrive and find the type of opportunity that they want in their life.

As the Prime Minister announced in May, our landmark levelling-up White Paper will be published later this year. It will set out and articulate bold new policies that will improve opportunity, support businesses and boost livelihoods across the country, including in Nottinghamshire and the east midlands. Levelling up is about providing the sort of momentum to address precisely the long-standing local inequalities that my hon. Friend articulated so clearly, providing the means for people to pursue life chances that previously had been out of reach for too many people in too many communities.

We are backing up these ambitions with considerable funding to help to unlock the investments most needed in our communities, particularly as we help local places to rebuild and recover from the pandemic. The White Paper will be a natural continuation of our commitment and support to local places, particularly building on the £4.8 billion levelling-up fund that we announced in the spending review. That fund is enabling local areas across the whole of the UK to invest in the type of infrastructure that improves everyday life. That could be regenerating town centres and high streets, upgrading local transport networks, and investing in cultural and heritage assets—exactly the kind of projects that my hon. Friend said are so urgently needed in towns and places in the east midlands.

We published the prospectus in March and explained how we are welcoming bids from all parts of the country, as everywhere has its local challenges, but we have also been clear about the areas of the country that have the highest category of need based on the fund’s priority themes of economic recovery, transport connectivity and regeneration. We have recognised the need in Nottinghamshire with three districts—Bassetlaw, Mansfield, and Newark and Sherwood—as well as the city of Nottingham being identified as category 1, so benefiting from that £125,000 of capacity funding to help them to work up bids for later rounds of the funds. In Derbyshire, Derby and the district of Chesterfield, Derbyshire Dales, Erewash and High Peak have been identified as category 1, along with the city of Leicester. Furthermore, we are recognising explicitly through the levelling-up fund prospectus the crucial role of Members of Parliament in championing the interests of their communities and understanding their local priorities.

Before turning to devolution, I want to mention the community renewal fund, which sits alongside the levelling-up fund and is enabling places to pilot new approaches, tackling the skills, employment and local business support challenges that are faced in different local communities. Ultimately, the UK community renewal fund will help us to pave the way for the introduction of the new UK shared prosperity fund from 2022, about which we will be saying more in an investment framework later this year.

It is important for local areas, councils and groups of communities to look at the dual opportunities of the levelling-up fund and the UK community renewal fund, which have the potential to complement each other extremely positively. Given that many places in Nottinghamshire and the east midlands are among the high-priority areas for UK community fund investment, and given the excellent work that east midlands councils have done in developing plans for more investment in the region, I have no doubt that they will be grasping the opportunities presented by both those important funds.

Nottinghamshire has submitted proposed sites for the STEP programme—an ambitious plan to design and construct a prototype energy plant—including the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. In March it was announced that the east midlands freeport— based around East Midlands airport, the busiest cargo airport in the country—would be one of eight new freeports. We entirely recognise the scale of the opportunity that that presents for communities in the east midlands. The region’s connectivity to other freeports and the combination of an airport and a rail port create a distinctive offer in comparison with those of other freeports in England, and we are keen to see all partners working together constructively to deliver this for the east midlands.

I am pleased that our officials at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government are currently assessing the proposal from the East Midlands Development Corporation, covering Ratcliffe-on-Soar, East Midlands airport and Toton. I commend the councils involved, including Nottinghamshire County Council, for maintaining the momentum and setting up a companies interim vehicle to show intent. I also note that only yesterday local partners met the Minister for Housing, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher), and engaged in productive discussions on progress to date as well as future plans. I understand that the excellent collaborative work of councils in developing these proposals has led to the formation of an Alchemy Board bringing together local authorities, local enterprise partnerships and universities. They are to be commended for working together. It is no surprise that given all this co-operation, consideration is now being given to what devolution should mean in the east midlands.

As I said earlier, the Prime Minister will publish a landmark levelling-up White Paper later this year, which will articulate the bold new policy interventions that will improve livelihoods as we recover from the pandemic. We have already made huge strides towards rebalancing the economy and empowering local government. That has been supported by our programme of devolution, one of the largest in recent decades, including nine mayoral devolution deals and one non-mayoral devolution deal in Cornwall. Forty-one per cent. of the country is now served by metro Mayors, and nearly £7.5 billion of investment funding is being unlocked over 30 years for those combined authority Mayors. That is already paying dividends, with Mayors delivering the programmes that local people want to see on the ground, accountable to the electorate and shaping local priorities.

We recognise that the country is large and diverse, and that what works for our city regions, particularly those with single-tier local authorities, might not be right for every part of the country. Our plans for further devolution will be included in the White Paper which we will launch later this year. Local support for governance changes is of course a key principle for us, and we will welcome proposals from areas for local government reorganisation where there is strong support. However, we appreciate that reform of an area’s local government is most effectively achieved through locally led proposals which are put forward by those who know the area and which have a good deal of support among the councils and stakeholders.

I wholly recognise the complexities of the east midlands, with its three unitary city councils, three county councils and 22 district and borough councils, but there are already clear signs of their willingness to work together. We want to help the area to build on that potential, and it will be extremely interesting to hear more about the proposals my hon. Friend has highlighted today to allow more decisions to be made locally to better serve residents. I welcome the discussions that he has begun, with vigour and passion, and I look forward to further discussions with him and other local leaders to hear how those proposals can be taken forward.

I am aware that Members and local leaders in other parts of the east midlands are also looking at locally appropriate solutions to help deliver levelling up, and I would very much welcome hearing more about that in due course as well. This is an extremely important area, and I think we can make progress working with my hon. Friend, and we will consider his proposals, which I look forward to discussing in more detail. I thank him for bringing this debate to the Chamber today, and we will certainly reflect on the points he has raised as we continue to pursue our levelling-up agenda right across the UK.

Despite the challenges of covid-19, ensuring that the whole country can benefit from the same opportunities remains a core part of our agenda. We will tackle geographical disparities in key services and outcomes across the UK, improving health, education and skills, increasing jobs and growth, building stronger and safer communities, and improving infrastructure and connectivity. We believe that all areas of the country should have the means to positively shape their own future. This is more important now than ever as we look towards the road of recovery. I look forward to working with Members of Parliament and local council leaders from the east midlands to ensure that we can deliver this for our country.

Question put and agreed to.