Exiting the European Union (Structural and Investment Funds)

Matt Warman Excerpts

Tuesday 19th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

I will not detain the House long, but I want to speak in support of this SI, which secures funding that is vital for some projects in my constituency. Overall, £41 million comes to Lincolnshire, of which about £500,000 is helping to secure a project that protects large amounts of farmland from flooding. This is an important measure from a Government who are taking sensible steps.

The broader but not lengthy point I seek to make is that while money did come back to Lincolnshire, the fact that Britain was a net overall contributor to the EU does mean that, when we set up the funds the Minister spoke about post our exit from the European Union, that will give us the opportunity to do two things. The first is to redress some of the regional imbalances mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke), which have a particularly extreme effect on regions such as Lincolnshire. However, I hope it will also give us a much more serious opportunity to win the argument around funding and what the Government are doing to seek to address regional imbalances. That is an argument the EU totally failed to win or even engage in, which is in many ways why, in a constituency such as mine, even when money came back to Lincolnshire from the EU, we saw no great love for the European Union. That was of course reflected, as it was in Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, in the referendum result.

I therefore hope that the Government, in establishing these new funds, will seize the opportunity not only to redress these imbalances, which is very real work, but to get an advantage from being seen to do what all good Governments should do, which is to move some of these opportunities around the country—in my case, away from the south-east and into Lincolnshire. That is good, sensible work and good, sensible economics, and it will allow us to improve productivity and to grow our thriving agricultural economy.

However, that also needs to be sold to the public. As I said, the European Union encouraged huge antipathy for the European project, and we have enough trouble with people holding politicians in this place in contempt, so we need to sell the work we do to redistribute that money. That will go far further than investing in sensible infrastructure projects such as the drainage project I referred to, and will allow people to see that we do fundamentally good work in this place that addresses things our constituents want done. Ultimately, that is about not just economics but good democracy, which is why I will be supporting this SI.