Levelling-up Agenda: Tees Valley

Naz Shah Excerpts

Wednesday 25th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Naz Shah (Bradford West) (Lab)]

It truly is a pleasure to be serving under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins. I thank and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) for securing this timely debate.

Other Members have already said that we have been hearing the message of levelling up from consecutive Conservative Governments since 2010. I take the point made by the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison), but this is not about looking in the rear-view mirror. The truth is that if a child does not have the absolute right start in life, that child’s chances for the future are depleted. That is the point that Opposition Members are trying to make. It is absolutely right that we refer back to the era of Margaret Thatcher, which desecrated the north. That was the foundation for where the north finds itself today.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North and other Opposition Members are right to talk about poverty, and as a Member of Parliament for a fellow northern city constituency I share with him the same concerns. We need to level up in education funding, unemployment rates, transport funding and much more. Whether someone comes from Bradford West or Stockton North or Middlesbrough, the barriers in life created by Conservative Governments are, sadly, the same.

Despite the Government’s claim, regional inequality has deepened under the conservatives. A decade of low investment has left the country deeply imbalanced, with towns and cities outside London losing out. My hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) mentioned the 22,000 potential jobs that could have been created with the campus in the north. The list goes on. The north has heard all the promises from the Government, and is still waiting for the current pledges of infrastructure funding to be fulfilled before we turn to the new commitments made.

Today, the Chancellor promised a bank, but the north is still waiting for its rail. Six years on from first being announced, Northern Powerhouse Rail has still not yet been approved, let alone started. The people of Stockton were promised a new hospital building, but it has yet to materialise 10 years later. Today the Chancellor spoke about creating jobs, but we have heard all of that before. At national level, employment figures across the country recovered in the decade following the crash, but there is a big imbalance in where the jobs were created. For every job created in the north-east, 13 jobs were created in London. The record over the last three years of the Conservative Mayor of Tees Valley—creating a single job at a cost of £100,000—is such a disastrous waste of public funding that only his colleagues in Whitehall could do worse with taxpayers’ money.

Time and again, the north of England has been governed by Whitehall and been left second to London. As already outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North, the health inequalities in Stockton-on-Tees are such that the lives of men living in the town centre are expected to be 18 years shorter than their counterparts just down the road. These existing inequalities have put those from the north at higher risk from the pandemic. Even in the pandemic, people in the north have been more likely to have their working hours reduced or to have lost their jobs altogether. As our shadow Chancellor put it,

“They have, bluntly and tragically, been more likely to die of covid-19.”

From the outset of the pandemic, we have continually called for local test and trace. Regional Mayors and local councils have been prepared from day one to assist the Government in building local infrastructure to deliver a localised service. The country was in a time of need and an opportunity to build locally presented itself, but the Government decided to dish out millions to private companies without competition, and without penalty clauses for poor performance. Those with connections were 10 times more likely to get a deal.

As if Tory cronyism could not get any worse, today, the Chancellor’s infrastructure fund is based on agreement from MPs—yet again Tory MPs get in ahead to lobby for their own areas. The 2019 towns fund is just one example that was meant to support struggling towns but, instead, one Minister signs off the next Minister’s request for funds. Out of 101 towns funded, only 40 were on a needs basis, and the other 61 were chosen by their own Ministers. While our nation is facing the largest fall in output for 300 years, the choices this nation needs to make are based on the country’s needs, and not the needs of Conservative MPs and their friends. We have been listening to Conservative jargon on redistribution since 2010. It is just another term now—levelling up—but despite the north and the poorest in society falling further behind, we are still waiting for delivery.

We need high-quality businesses in every town that provide well-paid and secure jobs, so that people do not just survive but thrive. With rising unemployment, lower average wages than the national average, and the biggest increase in child poverty in the past five years, the time is now for this Government to act on the north-east. The Government have a clear responsibility, and it is finally time for them to deliver on it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mike Hill) outlined, this is a generational life-saver.