Fairness at Work and Power in Communities

Mary Glindon Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)]

The announcements made in the Queen’s Speech do nothing to increase the trust that the people of North Tyneside have in the Tory Government, nor to alleviate their concerns about the rising cost of living, which is starting to bite really hard in North Tyneside. I have heard from so many of my constituents who are hurt and angered by the antics in No. 10 during partygate, while they rigidly followed covid rules. They were unable to be with relatives in hospitals or care homes and, worst of all for some, were not able to be with them in the last hours of their lives.

To add insult to injury, included in the estimated £4 billion of fraud in the furlough scheme is the North Tyneside Conservative party, with a furlough claim for a member of party staff who continued to work during lockdown. When I raised this sorry state of affairs with the Prime Minister at PMQs, he simply brushed the issue aside. Fortunately, the incident is now being properly investigated.

In North Tyneside, we have an excellent Labour council, led by our outstanding elected Mayor, Norma Redfearn. Thanks to the hard work of Norma, her cabinet and council officers, the council has fought hard to keep many important and vital services in place, despite fierce cuts from the Government. As a result of Government policy since 2010, North Tyneside has had to make savings of £131 million. The core spending per dwelling is only £1,984, compared with the average of £2,155. In this financial year, the council received £63.5 million of revenue support grant—a cut of 81.4% since 2014.

While the Government are making much of their levelling-up agenda in the Queen’s Speech, the reality is that their levelling-up plan has given North Tyneside—where unemployment runs at 6.5%, almost 2% above the national average—category 2 status while the Chancellor’s leafy Richmond constituency has been given category 1 status. Our area also missed out on the potential of 60,000 new jobs and £2.6 billion in new investment with the Treasury refusing freeport status; that affected the area from Blyth down to Wearside. I will never get over the missed opportunities from that, and nor will the people in our area. Of the 45 towns that received towns fund money, 39 were in Tory areas, leaving behind towns like Killingworth and Wallsend in my constituency.

The Tory Government have already failed the north-east on transport, cancelling the High Speed 2 north-east leg, refusing crucial upgrades to the east coast main line, and scrapping Northern Powerhouse Rail. Along with the North East chamber of commerce, I lament the fact that the transport Bill has no good news for our area. We all know good transport links are key to job creation and investment and surely should be part of any levelling-up agenda.

Despite promises, the Government have not given us a cast-iron guarantee that the electricity cables over the Tyne will be buried below the water or raised to allow world-renowned companies in Wallsend and along the rest of the Tyne to bring in potentially millions of pounds more in contracts and thousands of jobs. Smulders in Wallsend employs 600 people; it is desperate to have something done about the cables, and we have been pleading with the Government since 2017—again, no levelling up here, or, in the case of the cables, levelling down.

Far from levelling up in the north-east, the Government are levelling down the region, as in total we receive less from the levelling-up and shared prosperity funds than we did from the EU per year. With so many doubts and concerns about levelling up, perhaps the Government should listen to the chief executive of IPPR North, who warns that they

“must prioritise turning the levelling up rhetoric into reality… People need to feel the benefit of ambitious action with full accountability on this critical agenda.”

The IPPR is urging the Government to make themselves fully accountable by including in the Bill a new independent body outside London to hold the whole of Government to account against legally binding levelling-up missions. I hope to see that there will be some degree of levelling up and I want to see a level social and economic playing field for North Tyneside and the whole north-east. I doubt we will get that in this Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, but what we will see, I hope, in the not too distant future is a Labour Government who deliver for our area and keep their promises to the north-east.