Levelling-up Agenda

Pat McFadden Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

Thank you for your chairmanship today, Mr Robertson. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) for tabling this debate. As he said, he comes to this issue not just from the perspective of a local MP but also as the Mayor of South Yorkshire. He spoke eloquently about the challenges facing his area, which are shared by many areas across the country.

I do not propose to use the time available to go over the familiar ground of what area has been allocated what fund. Those issues have been well aired and the disparities are there for everyone to see. Instead, I want to look at the wider picture and to begin by asking the Minister to define levelling up. What do the Government mean by it? Can she define it in clear and simple terms?

There is a long history to efforts and attempts to tackle regional inequality. In the Government that I served, we launched the new deal for communities. My own constituency received £53 million from this for the All Saints and Blakenhall area, more than twice what the whole city has received under its recent towns fund bid, more than a decade on. We had Sure Start, the Building Schools for the Future programme, rising investment in the NHS, falling waiting times and major cuts in child poverty.

We introduced tax credits to help lower paid working people. We did not cut their incomes by £20 a week, as the Government will do next month, a cut that will affect 12,000 families in my constituency and millions of families across the country. We had regional development agencies covering the whole of England. These were abolished by the coalition Government and replaced by local enterprise partnerships, which we were told would lead to regeneration through private sector-led boards. Who ever hears about LEPs now? How did they become the poor, unloved children of the Conservative Government, created and then ignored by Ministers? What is the Government’s problem with the LEPs they created? Is their crime being too local?

Levelling up has to be considered alongside what local areas have lost over the past decade: billions of pounds cut from local authority budgets; 773 libraries closed in England; 750 youth centres closed; 1,300 children’s centres closed; and school funding per pupil cut by 9% over the past decade, the biggest fall in 40 years, a direct attack on the opportunities and life chances of the very young people who need education the most. There is no greater leveller up than education. It is more powerful than any new road, building or bus lane. It is the platform upon which barriers are torn away. It is the weapon through which glass ceilings are broken. And on this most fundamental of issues, opportunity has been taken away and not enhanced, so before we talk about levelling up, we need to ask: who did the levelling down? The Government would like the public to believe that they have been in power for only two years, but that is not the case; they have been in power for 11 years.

What of levelling up itself? We welcome every new pound of investment and every new job created. We want every part of the country to succeed. We want the best possible opportunities for people, no matter where they live or the circumstances into which they were born. But that will not be achieved by pots of capital expenditure alone. Even when it comes to the money, the new levelling-up fund replaces a local growth fund that was actually worth more, and half of its budget this year is taken from the towns fund. It is the reannouncement of the same money over and over again.

Then there is the basic concept itself, and this is the heart of it. A true levelling-up agenda would focus on people, not just capital expenditure. Unless we help people to succeed—help them to deal with the costs that they face, for example in relation to childcare and the early years, and enable them to make the most of their talent through properly funded, excellent schools and great second-chance education later in life—true levelling up will not happen. We will have some extra infrastructure spending, but that is what it will be.

Let us take the verdict of the Government’s own Industrial Strategy Council, issued shortly before it was abolished by Ministers. It said that

“the proposed approach appears over-reliant on infrastructure spending and the continued use of centrally controlled funding pots thinly spread across a range of initiatives. Evidence, historical and international, suggests this is unlikely to be a recipe for success. Sustained local growth needs to be rooted in local strategies, covering not only infrastructure but skills, sectors, education and culture. These strategies need to be locally designed and focussed”.

The truth is that the Government do not want this to be locally led. They want it to be centralised, controlled by Ministers and given out solely at their discretion—the subject of Friday visits in high-vis jackets. They are not talking about skills and education, because those things are not tangible enough for press releases and election leaflets. They want physical projects that they can point to.

We read today that the agenda may even be used as an instrument of political control inside the Conservative party. Reports suggest that the Government Whips have threatened to withhold funding from Conservative MPs’ constituencies as a mechanism for stamping out potential dissent on the Government Back Benches. The Chief Whip is alleged to have said, “My pen hovered over your name,” to one potential rebel. Why should MPs’ constituents lose out because their MPs had the temerity to exercise their own judgment or the gall to stand up for what they believed in? Public money should not be used in that way. Whips have always tried to get MPs to vote the party line. That is their job. But the allocation of public funds should not come into it. That shows the inherent flaws in trying to do this in such a centralised way.

The challenge for the Government is clear: define what levelling up is; ensure that the definition includes people as well as bricks and mortar; and have a genuine local voice in how this is done, rather than the centralised approach that has been adopted so far. If Ministers do that, we might make some progress, but if they continue on the current path, the danger is that the verdict of their Industrial Strategy Council is what comes to pass.