Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (Sixth sitting)

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

If we are levelling up, surely we are addressing hunger, and amendment 29 would be a welcome way of doing so. If we are going to do that, and I reference previous discussions, we need to be honest about the scale of the problem. Amendment 30 does that well. The level of denial across the Government on this issue is staggering. Hunger is happening every day, and it is avoidable. Reading the same tired, discredited stats about it, which the Prime Minister will do tomorrow at Prime Minister’s questions, and saying, “We’ve never been doing so well economically,” will not do, frankly. We need to be honest, and amendment 30 would do that. This pair of amendments would move us forward considerably, and I hope the Minister is minded to listen.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Neil O'Brien)]

Let me start by addressing some of the wider and important points made by the hon. Member for South Shields and then move on to the narrower issue of the amendment. The hon. Member made an impassioned speech and some important observations about the big differences between life expectancy in different parts of the country. The differences were also highlighted in our White Paper. We are doing a number of things to directly tackle those problems, both on the income side that she talked about and the health side.

With regard to help for poorer households, the universal credit taper rate cut will help lower-income families keep more of their earnings. It makes nearly 2 million households about £1,000 better off if they work full time. The increase in the national living wage introduced by this Government makes full-time workers about £1,000 better off, and as it goes up towards two thirds of medium earnings, it will be one of the highest minimum wages in the world. We are investing about £1.1 billion over this spending review for employment support for the sick and disabled, and we have the £1 billion support fund for those households that are most in need during this difficult period.

We are all keen to do everything we can to try to reduce the reliance on foodbanks. That is why we have reviewed the role of sanctions in the benefit system. There will always be sanctions and rules in the benefit system, but we need to ensure that they are proportionate and avoid people unnecessarily finding themselves without benefits. We have expanded free school meals to all five to seven-years-olds, benefiting about 1.3 million children. We have spent £24 million on extending school breakfasts.

We are taking action on the health side of the ledger. The introduction of the soft drinks industry levy—the sugar tax, as some call it—has led to the average person consuming the equivalent of one fewer 250 ml sugary drink per week. It has been a huge success, and one of the most successful of its kind anywhere in the world. Through the forthcoming health disparities White Paper, we will continue to go further on that issue. Community diagnostic facilities will be a part of the story, as well as the overall increase in NHS investment. There are a lot of things happening on the vital agenda that the hon. Lady talked about.

Likewise, the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale made a profound point: the fundamental questions of food security and production, and the way they have been framed for the last 40 years, have changed. There is now a global under-supply challenge. He was quite right to say that that must make us rethink, and that is why we are investing heavily in our farm transition plan, spending about £270 million on innovation to help farming communities and farmers. However, there was a bigger and more profound point in what he said.

The hon. Member for York Central talked about the need to integrate the agendas of the sustainable development goals and the levelling-up missions. We are doing that, although in a different way from that suggested in the amendments. The country is committed to delivery of the UN sustainable development goals by 2030, including the goal to end hunger and ensure access by all people to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round.

The Bill is designed to establish the framework for missions, not the content of the missions themselves. The framework provides ample opportunity to scrutinise the substance of the missions against a range of Government policies, including the sustainable development goals and health data. All Departments are responsible for aspects of the sustainable development goals that relate to their respective remits. Departments articulate how they are working towards those goals in their outcome delivery plans.

The last outcome delivery plan from Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office included information that is relevant to the goals raised in the amendments. The next iteration of those departmental outcome delivery plans will also include information about how Departments are working towards their levelling-up mission. Those documents will simultaneously address progress on the UN missions and on our levelling-up mission, so we will have an integrated view. We think that is the appropriate place in which to make the link mentioned by the hon. Member for York Central between levelling-up missions and the UN sustainable development goals.

Mission 7, which addresses healthy life expectancy, is already linked to nutrition and food. The Government’s food strategy, for example, committed to reducing the healthy life expectancy gap between local areas, where it is highest and lowest, by 2030; to adding five years to healthy life expectancy by 2035, as I said earlier; to reducing the proportion of the population who live with diet-related illnesses; and to committing to increasing the proportion of healthier food that is sold. In its forthcoming health disparities White Paper, the Department of Health and Social Care will set out missions to address, among other things, diet-related ill health.

All those measures will feed through to healthy life expectancy data, which already underpins the health mission. As a consequence, the amendment is unnecessary, so I ask the hon. Member for South Shields to withdraw it.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I will keep my comments brief as I do not wish to detain the Committee too long.

The Minister listed ways in which the Government are helping, but I politely remind him that people on universal credit have a five-week wait with no money at all. Pensions, benefits and wages are nowhere near keeping pace with inflation. The fact that the Government have had to put in emergency support funds to help families is indicative of their failure to help the hardest hit for such a long time.

I will not press the amendments to a vote on this occasion, but this is not the last time I will talk about this topic in Committee. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

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This amendment is essential to ensure that we have a clear understanding of what the legislation is about and a context in to focus its work, and so that we are able to deliver exactly what the people of our country need in order to level up.

[Neil O’Brien]

I hope that I can make the hon. Member for Nottingham North happy—that is my main goal in life—but I do have to point out that there is a tension at the heart of the amendment. On the one hand, he wants us to commit to saying that our levelling-up missions will be the levelling-up missions, but his amendment changes those missions in a number of ways, to add in, as he said, various things that were in his mind at the time as he was drafting it. He said he could not see the case for diverging from the levelling-up missions and I agree, which is why we will not be able to accept this amendment, which seeks to change the missions.

We have said on numerous occasions that the missions in the White Paper are our missions for levelling up and uniting the country. It has always been the Government’s intention—this is where I hope I can make the hon. Member happy—that the first such statement would contain the missions from the levelling-up White Paper. If that is the intent of the amendment, I am happy to say that I can reconfirm that that is what we are doing here.

The hon. Member also asked about public bodies. As he will probably remember, we committed in the White Paper to introduce a requirement for public bodies to have an objective of reducing geographical variations where they are relevant to their business area. The Treasury and Cabinet Office are taking that objective forward as part of the public bodies reform programme. That work is ongoing.

It is not that we disagree with some of the objectives in the amendment; we want to stick to the missions that we set out in the White Paper, rather than change them via the amendment. For example, it is worth picking up his point about Northern Powerhouse Rail, a project that is hugely dear to my heart, and the hon. Member for York Central also made an important point. When we make these huge improvements and major investments, particularly in the section between Leeds and Manchester, the benefits radiate out to a much wider area—everywhere from York to Liverpool, up to the north-east and across, for those of us coming up from the midlands as well.

The wider story about what happened with rail in the north is that we inherited a situation where the rail franchise for the north had been let in 2004 on a no-growth basis, based on pessimistic assumptions about growth in the north. As a result, we had this scenario where someone would be at the top of the escalators in Leeds station looking down on a “Ben-Hur”-style crowd of a huge number of people, and a tiny train with two carriages would turn up and they would all try to cram on it. It was unsatisfactory, and we put that right in subsequent franchises.

We also had the infamous Pacer trains from my childhood still rattling around the north, giving northerners a second-class rail service. I am glad to say that, through ministerial direction, we got rid of those unsatisfactory trains and now have sleek bullet trains running the trans-Pennine service. Of course, we are now going further through the integrated rail plan and building an entirely new line between Warrington and Marsden as part of the £96 billion investment, which will cut journey times between Leeds and Manchester from 55 minutes to 33 minutes.

As part of the wider investments, we will cut journey times between Leeds and Bradford from 20 minutes to 12 minutes, and there will also be big improvements between the midlands and the north. For example, journey times between Leeds and Birmingham will go from 118 minutes to 79 minutes, but the improvements go right across the north. It is not that we do not share the exciting objective to improve northern rail, as first set out in the then Chancellor’s speech in 2014, but we want to do the other thing that the shadow Minister asked us to do, which is to stick to our levelling-up missions, as worked out with great care in the White Paper. That is why we oppose the amendment.

To take on some of the wider points that have been made, it is true that missions may need to evolve over time, and we may talk more about this in subsequent parts of today’s session. If the missions were to appear in legislation—I know that the amendment talks only about the first statement—the process to adjust them in the future would become unhelpfully rigid and time-consuming, potentially meaning that they would not be revised and would become less relevant to policy. Previous Governments have known this too, as public service agreements were not set out in law but were still a powerful tool to organise Government policy.

Flexibility is about ensuring that missions remain relevant and ambitious. Missions should ratchet up, not down, as performance improves. For example, fantastic progress is being made towards the gigabit broadband mission, with more than two thirds of homes and businesses covered—up from single-digit figures just a couple of years ago—so it may well be appropriate to increase the ambition of that mission in the future as our certainty levels increase.

None of the missions we talked about earlier is necessarily bound by the spending review period, so they will need changing over time. As drafted, the Bill gives Parliament and the public the opportunity to scrutinise the missions when the statement of levelling-up missions is laid. The hon. Member for Nottingham North implied that there would be subtle changes without anyone debating them, but we would have to make a statement to Parliament, so Parliament will debate them; there is no lack of transparency whatsoever. I hope that by recommitting to our levelling-up missions, I have put his mind at ease, and I hope that I have also explained why we oppose the amendment, which would change our levelling-up missions.

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful to colleagues for their responses. My hon. Friend the Member for York Central made a good point about focus, but she also mentioned revenue spending, which I know is something that Ministers understand. That is part of understanding that these things will be not just a priority of the day, but a priority for the years ahead, which means having them written down. I asked only for a day, but I am sure we could a little better than that. There is still a strong case for them to be there in statute for all to see.

My hon. Friend also mentioned York to Hull, and the arguments that she made are similar to arguments that I could make about Nottingham to Leicester or Coventry, but they also make me think of other broken rail promises. The midland main line electrification has been announced, unannounced and re-announced so many times, and HS2 involves broken promises. The Minister talked about these being programmes delivered from first promises in 2014, but the reality is that it feels like some of the promises are coming on Pacer trains up to the north, and they do not all get there. That is what leaves me with a slight lack of confidence.

My hon. Friend the Member for York Central talked about the laying of the jigsaw, which was an elegant way to put it. That is what we are trying to do here. It is not a series of disparate engagements, but one collective one. She also talked about Marmot, and that is why we should put things in law rather than just have reviews and advisory exercises. If we spent the time implementing Marmot that we have spent debating the outcomes—and not seemingly disagreeing very much—goodness me, we would be levelling up from a much higher platform.

My hon. Friend made a point about the environment, Dr Benwell’s evidence was so important. It is one of those little things that I wish I could just click my fingers and do for my community. I represent the outer estates of a big city which, like many cities in the midlands and the north, is surrounded by country parks and former pits, and there are so many that we cannot get to from the estate because there is no way of getting in. I wish we could just do those things. Those are the kinds of simple interventions that would really make a difference if we really committed to them, and I am sad that we have not got that in statute.

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[Tim Farron]

Clause 1(4) states that

“levelling-up missions must specify a target date for…delivery”

but without an action plan, we are playing into the hands of people who think that we in this place say stuff and never mean to deliver it. If the Minister were serious about delivering on those missions, an action plan seems a simple request. This feels like a project with no project management. There are end goals but no staging posts to get there.

I have a couple of quick examples. Let us say we were going to try to set a target that I believe we need, and I hope others will agree, of 150,000 new social rented properties every year. For any kind of construction-based outcome that we want, whether housing, industry or environmental projects, we need a construction workforce. The action plan and the project management would include the setting up and sourcing of that workforce, long before the delivery date. The hon. Member for York Central talked about Airbnb in York, which is also a massive issue for us in the Lake district and the rest of Cumbria. If we wanted to give local authorities and communities power to regulate their housing stock so that we had equality and built and kept homes for people to live in, to be part of the workforce and the community, rather than allowing them to bleed out into the Airbnb sector, we would need to do things along the way to achieve that. There would need to be a planning department big enough, with people qualified enough.

These missions, with target dates for delivery, but no action plan to deliver them, is project management without the management. That is foolish. I do not see why the Government will not accept that.

[Neil O'Brien]

I have a mix of bad and good news for the hon. Member for Nottingham North. The bad news is that we will resist the amendment. The good news is that he can, even within this Committee sitting, achieve the legislation that he wants. Let me explain.

The Bill sets out the framework for delivering on our levelling-up missions and places a statutory duty on the Government to publish an annual report on progress, as we have discussed. The Government agree with the principle behind the amendment that the delivery of levelling-up missions must be accompanied by detailed actions from the Government to drive change. Of course it must—that is why we have already published an action plan setting out details of how we plan to take the agenda forward, in the form of our levelling-up White Paper.

That is also why we have specified the importance of having an action plan in the Bill. We will be coming to clause 2 shortly—I hope the hon. Gentleman will support it standing part—and subsection (2)(c) already places a statutory obligation on the Government to produce an annual report on levelling-up, which must include,

“what Her Majesty’s Government plans to do in the future to deliver each of those levelling-up missions.”

That already includes the action plan that the hon. Gentleman seeks. Therefore, while I agree completely with the sentiment behind the amendment, it is not necessary and I ask the hon. Member to withdraw it.

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful for the responses. I agree with everything that the spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale, said about the steps. Looking to 2030, we need to know what the incremental moments are, what we need to prepare and what skills people might need to access those jobs. That was a point well made.

I am also grateful to the Minister, though my opinion differs significantly. I do not think that the White Paper presents an action plan. I think the third chapter is anything but, and I would be slightly anxious if that is what action plans are likely to look like in the future. Most points have no date on them and no sense of what contribution they make. It is a list of things that might contribute; a plan of actions, maybe, but it is not an action plan.

The Minister’s point on clause 2 is helpful—that is partly why we laid this probing amendment—but if what comes with that report is the series of actions that are in the White Paper, that is likely to cause disappointment. I hope that when we do see a report, it will be a bit more detailed on contributions and timeframes and, critically—this is the bit that will be hard for the Government to do—on saying which areas are doing well and which are doing badly. I suspect that may be a point of difference.

I do not think there is a need to labour the amendment any further. The point has been made. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

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[Alex Norris]

Yes, and it is reasonable to ask that these long-term commitments be sustained for that period of time.

The goal here is to ensure that promises are acted on and implemented in a timely fashion. The fear is that these subsections just give a future Government with less interest in levelling up—a Government who find themselves distracted by other matters of the day, or who prioritise other things—an easy out to junk the missions wholesale. They will say, “These need to be refined into smaller, more focused missions.” That is how it will go, and then they will slowly get broader and less meaningful and we will not have the longer-term action plans on statute and slowly they will just disappear.

Subsections (4) and (5) are a real risk to delivery. Ministers may just be too tempted when times are difficult. The journey over the eight years to deal with the missions is going to be very difficult; there will be moments when it feels very hard, even hopeless, to deliver on them. Having the temptation to withdraw may be too much. The missions are too important. We have to have a stronger check.

Secondly, there is the issue of accountability. If central Government and Parliament are entering into a partnership with our communities to level up our country, how does that partnership work if one party can just walk away without consultation, without engagement and without explanation? There would be a political bunfight. We have lots of political bunfights here, so I am not sure it would register. The whole thing would just get lost in the downward spiral of political discourse. We should not support that.

Local areas would be planning. The great thing about levelling up, the slightly longer-term vision and the commitments made in the White Paper, is that we have sent out a call to communities saying, “This is what is going to happen in future.” The Minister has mentioned research and development. The White Paper says to communities, “Prioritise this sort of work. We will seek to invest in you. Prepare the ground for that investment in your community, because we are going to do things differently and you could benefit from it.” What a great thing to say to local communities.

How will that work if the next week the Minister can suddenly say, “Actually, we don’t want to do that any more; that is not what is good for the country and we are not going to do it”? Suddenly, what they were planning on is no longer a priority. That is just another way that this is not a partnership of equals.

If we allow these easy outs in the Bill, we are once again risking not meeting the expectations of our constituents. That would be a disaster for the goals, but it would also be a disaster for trust and confidence in this place. The annual reports are such an important part of the driving progress—in my book, they are probably the most important part. Why not do them without the opt-outs? That would be a much stronger position to take.

[Neil O'Brien]

The purpose of giving the Government the ability to discontinue a mission is to allow for policy to adapt to changing circumstances, not to avoid scrutiny. If our purpose was to avoid scrutiny, we would not have written into the Bill the requirement for a statement to Parliament when they are changed. Missions are long term by definition. That is an important feature, but it does not alter the fact that the world, and with it what are good policy objectives, can change.

By allowing the Government to discontinue a mission, subject to setting out the reasons for doing so, the Bill gives necessary discretion to Governments to adjust policy priorities over time. There may be very good reasons for wanting to discontinue a mission. The Government may want to be more ambitious. For example, we are making fantastic progress on our digital mission and we want to push ourselves harder to deliver more of what is needed. We may want to respond to changing events, such as the unprecedented pandemic, to tackle the most pressing issues facing the country, rather than being forced to deliver missions that are no longer appropriate.

Subsections (4) and (5), which the amendment would delete, make that clear. They stipulate that if a Government no longer intend to pursue a levelling-up mission, they must state that intention clearly in the annual report and, crucially, provide reasons for its discontinuation. That level of transparency allows both Houses of Parliament and the public to scrutinise the decision and determine whether it was reasonable. If a Government were seen to be abandoning a mission for poor reasons, they would be held to account.

[Rachael Maskell]

Will the Minister give an example of why one of the 12 missions he has set out in the White Paper would be abandoned?

[Neil O'Brien]

I gave an example earlier of the R&D mission, which is specific to this spending review. It says we will increase R&D spending by a third over the spending review period. That mission will no longer have meaning after the spending review period, because it will have happened, so we will need to change the mission.

Let me give the hon. Lady another example about which I am optimistic. On local leadership, the mission at the moment is that by 2030 every part of England that wants a high-level devolution deal will have one. There is a lot of work in getting the devolution deals ready, as she knows better than most, but it is possible that we will be able to go even further.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

On a point of clarification, the Minister has been talking about changing the missions, but subsections (4) and (5), as I read them, are about scrapping the missions. Surely some rewording is needed here.

[Neil O'Brien]

There is a continuity between those two things. We might get rid of something and replace it with something that is in the same space. The subsections just give a clear framework for how that works—transparency, the statement to Parliament, the debate, and so on and so forth. I am not totally clear about the policy intent behind the amendment: is the idea that missions should be changeable only through primary legislation? Is that the concept here?

[Alex Norris]

indicated dissent.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

On another point of clarification, subsection (4) clearly states

“no longer intends to pursue that mission”,

but the examples the Minister is giving are about changing missions, and perhaps improving them. They are very different things.

[Neil O'Brien]

Once we have delivered our commitment to increase R&D spending outside the greater south-east by a third over the spending review period, it will no longer be possible logically for us to continue that mission. That will just not be possible, as a matter of logic, so we will discontinue the mission. I hope that puts the hon. Lady’s mind at ease.

The hon. Member for Nottingham North has the look of a man who is about to intervene, but I will take an intervention from the hon. Member for York Central.

[Rachael Maskell]

I am more concerned now than I was. We know that levelling up is going to take a concerted effort over a significant period of time, but it sounds as though this is now a list of initiatives that are being ticked off and which are short term, as opposed to achieving the transformation that Labour wants to see. It seems almost as though we have a disparity of language between the two sides. We would see missions evolving so as to develop the parity that we long to see across the country, whereas the Government are just talking about short-term initiatives. Is this really levelling up? I question that. Are we going to see the opportunity for significant investment to bring about the transformation our communities desperately need?

[Neil O'Brien]

I respect the hon. Lady enormously, but the Government are setting out a series of ambitious, long-term missions over the horizon to 2030 and publishing unprecedented detail on how we will analyse progress on those missions, which is not something I remember the Labour Government doing at any point during their time in office. There is a degree to which I am happy to listen to criticisms, but I note that there is a track record that we can discuss as well.

Members of the Committee have a sense of why we oppose the amendment. If we are serious about having a long-term agenda, which we are, we need the flexibility to adjust, tighten, ratchet up and go further on all these things, because things change over time. That is necessary for an ambitious mission to 2030 to endure.

The hon. Member for Nottingham North raised the prospect of me still being here in 2030—in his eyes, a grisly prospect, and possibly a grisly prospect in my eyes as well—but he knows in his heart of hearts, as I do, that a degree of flexibility needs to be built in if we want to have a long-term agenda and to adjust to changes in circumstances. Over such a period, things change.

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[Alex Norris]

I wish briefly to ask the Minister a question that relates to the second part of the evidence from Will Tanner—I mentioned the first bit earlier. He said:

“In a second but similar way, I think there is a missed opportunity in terms of not aligning that reporting framework against a Treasury set of fiscal events. Ultimately, levelling up is so interdependent with tax and spend policy that if the Treasury is reporting at different times, particularly around changing tax measures or making large public spending decisions through the spending review, there is the risk that levelling up falls through the cracks of the way the Government make major decisions, rather than being completely aligned as a whole of Government mission”.––[Official Report, Levelling-up and Regeneration Public Bill Committee, 23 June 2022; c. 144, Q179.]

For my understanding, I want to ask the Minister when he thinks the reports tabled under clause 2 are likely to fall in the year, and whether he is minded to align them with financial events—either the one that happens in the spring or the one that happens in the autumn.

[Neil O'Brien]

That is an important question. I will not answer it today, and it may depend on the circumstances. Will Tanner’s point is the same sort of point that I was making about R&D and the spending review commitment. There needs to be an introduction of costs to do this. Fiscal events and spending reviews are hugely important events, in terms of achieving all the things we are trying to achieve. It is not something that I can answer today. It is a sensible question, and we will think about it further.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 2 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 3

Reports: Parliamentary scrutiny and publication

[Alex Norris]

I beg to move amendment 7, in clause 3, page 3, line 28, leave out “120” and insert “30”.

This amendment would reduce the period of time by which a report under section 2 must be laid before each House of Parliament to 30 days.

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[Tim Farron]

There appears to be a bit of a pattern of the Government not having the confidence of their convictions in the Bill. We are not to have an independent review body, we are not specifying the amount of resource for individual missions, and there is no action plan. Now we are to have an annual report a third of the way through the next reporting period. If the Government do have confidence in what they are seeking to do, surely they would not wish to avoid live scrutiny, which they might do for 120 days into the next period. I support the amendments and I hope that the Government will consider at least reducing the amount of time after the reporting period, if not down to 30 days then at least to somewhat less than 120.

[Neil O'Brien]

We will resist the amendments, for reasons of pure practicality. The Bill states that the annual report under clause 2 has to be laid before each House of Parliament within 120 days of the year that the report covers. That is to allow the relevant data and official statistics to be published and any corresponding analysis for the annual report to be completed. That means sufficient time to prepare a quality report.

The statistics covered in the report will include some of the most advanced and up-to-date metrics and methodologies available. That will be an enormous data-driven exercise, building on some of the new institutions I talked about earlier. It is right to give the Government sufficient time to deliver a high-quality report. Reducing the time from 120 days to 30 days risks the annual report being published without key pieces of data being available, from example from the Office for National Statistics. That would undermine the accountability role that the annual report is meant to play. Given those constraints, I ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw the amendment.

[Alex Norris]

I agree with the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale that a pattern is emerging. The Government seemingly want to reserve a huge amount of leeway when reviewing the success, or otherwise, of the programme. At every stage there seems to be broad reserved powers for how they will explain what is and is not happening. That is a real shame and it projects a lack of confidence and, I suggest, assertion in this agenda.

[Alex Norris]

I find it hard to believe, too. I believe in the brilliance of the British civil service. I think this could be done.

[Neil O'Brien]

A point to bring out is that it is not merely about the resources of Government to pull together the information; a lot of the ONS data that Opposition Members want to see will simply not be available, because the ONS publishes things on the lag—we do not get the year’s data for a particular thing on the day the year ends, so there is a time lag. We are extremely interested in producing more granular and useful data, reducing those time lags, but there are time lags and the report would simply not contain the information that we all want to see if we reduced the amount of time available, because we would be eating into the ONS time lag.

[Alex Norris]

That, however, is set against the point that was made in the opening debate about the annex to the White Paper, which was presented to us as a suite of impactful metrics, updateable as we proceeded, and with which we could keep score—it was even suggested at one point that we might even be able to do it ourselves, but the Minister said, “Don’t worry, the Government will do that.” Ironically, given the nature of the clause, I feel that the goalposts are starting to move a bit on this point as well. We have a lot of time left in Committee and the Bill generally has a long way to run, so I hope that the Minister will reflect on the debate and see whether there is a compromise somewhere in the middle. At this stage, I am happy to give him the room to do so, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 3 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 4

Changes to mission progress methodology and metrics or target dates

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

[The Chair]

Does the Minister wish to speak to clause 4 stand part?

[Neil O'Brien]

Move formally.

[The Chair]

Does the Opposition spokesman wish to comment?

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[Neil O'Brien]

The clause provides the ability to amend the methodology and metrics that support the levelling-up missions, or to amend the target dates for delivery in between the normal reporting cycle. The intention is to allow the metrics that support the levelling-up missions to be updated if the relevant data sources change or improve.

Although the technical annex to the White Paper represents the state of the art as of the start of this year, we are actively working to improve all the different data sources in it. For instance, the ONS might publish a new data source that is relevant to one of the missions, and it may be relevant to formally add that data source to the list of metrics that the annual report will monitor.

Indeed, as we heard in oral evidence, the ONS is, for the first time, working on a single metric for the whole of the UK, so that we have a single multiple deprivation index. That is exactly the sort of data source that we might want to use. The country and Parliament would expect the Government to use the latest, best and most granular data in evaluating their progress towards delivering the levelling-up missions.

Under subsection (2), the Minister of the Crown “must publish a statement” setting out reasons for the change, and

“lay the revised statement of levelling-up missions before…Parliament and then publish it”,

so that it is all done in an entirely transparent way. I commend the clause to the Committee.

Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

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[Rachael Maskell]

I wish to make a couple of quick points at this juncture. The amendment goes to the heart of whether this is an autocratic or democratic Government. Enabling Parliament to bring forward a motion to debate and discuss, and giving it the opportunity to reform and bring forward new missions, is surely at the heart of what the Bill is all about. That is particularly the case because the impact is not just on Government Departments, but on all of the agencies across our country and our communities themselves. Therefore, being able to scrutinise that process, and to have a debatable motion in Parliament, is really important to ensure that we get it right.

My second point is a bit of learning from me on what is behind the White Paper. My understanding is that if we are to address inequality in our country—which we absolutely must—and the disparities experienced across our communities, which frustrates us all, then we have to look long term at how we achieve that. What the Minister has said clearly today is that the process is more about ticking boxes on a few manifesto pledges than actually getting to the heart of the issues that have been driving inequality across our communities for decades. Thus, this is not really a levelling-up Bill; it is a manifesto-check Bill. It does not really address those entrenched inequalities that I am sure Members across the House want to see addressed. I do not believe that can be achieved unless it is the goal at the heart of the Bill. The Bill, as it stands, is about short-termism, rather than the sustained investment we require.

I therefore urge the Minister to accept the amendment, not least because—going back to what Dr Benwell said—there is a very important omission in the legislation about our natural environment. Climate change is the biggest driver of global inequality, as well as a massive factor in national inequality, and the biggest challenge facing us all—something that one day the Treasury will have to address. It is essential that we enable Parliament to have a say over the direction of the levelling-up missions.

[Neil O'Brien]

The Bill already provides for significant parliamentary oversight. This is the first time in any regional policy that the Government have set clear long-term missions in this way. It is the first time there has been a clear statement of how those missions will be monitored, evaluated and judged. The Bill requires that statements of levelling-up missions, the annual report, revisions to the missions, and indeed revisions to the metrics supporting the missions, are all laid before the Houses of Parliament. That provides numerous unprecedented opportunities for Parliament to debate and scrutinise the activity of the Government pertaining to levelling up.

It would be disproportionate also to require that both Houses of Parliament approve the addition or discontinuation of missions. The hon. Member for Nottingham North said that the upper House would not be keen to hold things up, but it is all about proportionality. It is a concern that is already addressed in the Bill, because clause 2 stipulates, in subsections (4) and (5), that if a Government no long intend to pursue a levelling-up mission, they must state that very clearly in the annual report and, crucially, provide reasons for its discontinuation. That will allow both Houses of Parliament and the public to scrutinise the decision and determine whether it is reasonable. If the Government are seen to be abandoning the mission for the wrong reasons, then they will of course be held to account.

The Bill strikes the right balance between explaining and justifying changes to missions in a transparent and accountable way, without requiring both Houses of Parliament explicitly to approve them. I therefore ask the hon. Member for Nottingham North to withdraw the amendment.