Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Patricia Gibson and Alex Norris

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Alex Norris]

Q Thank you. I have just one more question, turning to your work and your previous response on regional growth. You have been part of a really successive triangle of work in Cambridge that brings together business and academia and has had great development success—success that we are seeking to see elsewhere in the country. What are the features of a local economy that really motors like that? What do we need to have elsewhere in order to see that success?

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser: This is a topic of tremendous interest in UKRI: how do you build clusters of activity that create self-sustaining positive feedback cycles that really grow things, anchored in a place? A lot of work has been done examining this over the years, in many places. As usual, it is a combination of factors. In many cases there is a lot of evidence that anchor institutions seed a lot of that activity, be that an excellent university, some kind of prime industrial presence or an excellent research institute—for example, a public sector research establishment or a catapult. Some kind of anchor activity fuels a critical element of the cycle, which could be on the research side or the innovation side, or hopefully a combination of the two. That is one of the key components.

The other absolutely critical element is about people—skills and people. A local environment anchors people there by providing the kind of living and working environment that attracts people to a region. Anchor institutions contribute to that, but so does the skills environment—the skills, training and opportunities that are available. For me, joining all those things up is particularly important. In the context of people, such an environment is one in which people go for a particular reason for a particular job, but the opportunities around that environment are such that there are other jobs that are also exciting.

It is about getting that dynamic mobility of people between, say, the university sector, the SME sector—small and medium-sized enterprises—and the more prime business sector, with people moving around and all the allied activities needed to fuel that, such as the local policy and the investment communities that go with that. Joining all that stuff up in the local ecosystem, through strong leadership locally—a critical element—and those key anchor institutions, provides exciting opportunities for people to build a whole variety of careers, working through that ecosystem.

Those are the key ingredients, and UKRI obviously has a role in supporting several of those, but they can only be successful in the context of that broader alignment between local leadership and the wider attractors needed in a local environment to bring people in and keep them there: transport networks, cultural institutions—those kinds of things.

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

Q You will be aware of the allegations—the suspicions in certain quarters—about how transparent and impartial the allocation of the towns fund awards were. Given that similar concerns have been expressed by the Public Accounts Committee about the potential for this with levelling-up funds, what measures do you think would be helpful to allay the fears that distribution of levelling-up awards might be open to similar charges of lack of transparency and of impartiality?

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser: I am not sure exactly which funding you are referring to. From the point of view of the funds that are being allocated through UKRI, as I mentioned earlier, the funds that are explicitly placed—targeted—are not a very large proportion of our overall funds. For me, the key goal is to think about it in the context of the capacity-building element that I said is so important. There should be local empowerment and local consideration about what would be the best interventions in those places.

We have run the strength in places programme for a while, and it has run on a fully open competition. One of the advantages of fully open competitions is that they provide an equal opportunity for everybody to begin with, which is good. On the other hand, they are slower and more bureaucratic, in that you have to run the open competition. There is an interesting balance to be struck between that process and the ability more rapidly and fluidly to allocate money to places, so that they can use the money in a way that targets their local priorities.

We are in the process of working out how best to work to deliver the new funds that have come through the recent spending review, which are being targeted specifically at three regions. Those regions were selected based on evidence that that kind of injection of cash could really drive the capacity building that I described. There are very high-quality objective measures of how you can consider that capacity in different places and, therefore, the impact of the funding that goes in. I would absolutely agree with you that it is really important, in the context of a levelling-up agenda, that funding is seen to be allocated fairly with the opportunity for everyone to access the benefits of those funds.