Levelling-up Missions: East of England

Priti Patel Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) on securing the debate. I pay tribute to him and to the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) for their leadership of the important all-party parliamentary group. It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Giles Watling). I am very fond of Clacton. I have been a resident of the east of England for nearly 17 years, and I know my hon. Friend’s constituency well. We campaigned on a by-election together, with good long-term results.

It is important to say that the contributions so far have included some serious issues that need to be addressed, which I say as the Member of Parliament for Witham for just over 12 years. My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton is the chairman of GEML, which for the benefit of Hansard is the Great Eastern Main Line taskforce. I co-set that up nearly 10 years ago: GEML was all about getting infrastructure investment into that main line. We have been successful, though I will touch on some elements that have not materialised. There are important areas, highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney, that speak to lamentable actions across Government and the low confidence that my hon. Friend touched on. I want to speak specifically about those.

First and foremost, infrastructure clearly covers road and rail. That has frankly become a joke in the overall way that Whitehall has failed to integrate. That is not to do with the Minister’s Department; it is a failure of the Whitehall system to work across Departments and integrate funding. Basically, securing investment in our infrastructure is one example of how we can support levelling up. It is a statement of the obvious.

We have new rolling stock on our line—part of the GEML taskforce—for a very good reason. A decade ago, I and colleagues across that network went to the Treasury and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, the former Member for Tatton, and put forward a business case. Some of us are capable of putting together presentations and business cases. We put that forward in conjunction with Network Rail and it secured £600 million, linked to a nine-year franchise that was very much about delivering rolling stock, improvements on productivity, performance and so on. We achieved that, but it is only one example.

The failure to secure funding for Ely junction and Haughley junction was not the fault of the taskforce but of Whitehall, and its lack of integration. Those sites are not in my constituency, but they are east of England infrastructure projects that would unlock the economic potential not just of the east, but of the nation. It is interesting that, at a time when HS2 is again being vilified for a range or reasons, such as being over budget and not on time, we have to stick the course with infrastructure projects.

The problem is that the Armitt process has not been published. That is the funding mechanism, which sits in the Department for Transport, for securing these major infrastructure projects. The other problem, as we have already heard, is that the east of England is a net contributor. Our main line has been subsidising the rail network for the rest of the country for decades. That money goes to the Treasury. The revenue base sits with Treasury, and the Department for Transport is deprived of the funding stream to help with the financial pipeline of rail investment.

[Giles Watling]

Does my right hon. Friend not believe that the investment in Haughley and Ely is relatively low? We are not asking for a lot of money. It would unblock the blockage; it would take the cork out of the bottle of the entire east-west connection.

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend, the chair of the GEML rail taskforce, has hit the nail on the head: this speaks to a fundamental failure in Whitehall, and my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney repeatedly highlighted that. This is the core message that has to be taken away, and that is just on rail. Of course, rail supports economic growth. The west Anglia line is another classic case. With four trains an hour to Stansted airport, it feels like “Mission Impossible” right now. Some proper work needs to be undertaken, and the Government need to support that. We have been successful in getting Emirates into Stansted. We want to get other international airlines, as my hon. Friend said, including from India.

On roads, I have again secured funding, as a Member of Parliament, for feasibility studies on the A12 and A120, but yet again we are going round the merry-go-round of not getting the commitment from central Government to proceed with those schemes. Quite frankly, that is down to inadequacies with National Highways, which fails to operate in a transparent way, to engage with local community or the county council, which has responsibility for the strategic road network, or to engage with the Department for Transport, so we are not getting the road upgrades we need in the county. Those road networks are the economic arteries of the east of England.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

Integration in the planning of infrastructure goes beyond just roads and rail; there is the integration of offshore wind into the national transmission network. Only in East Anglia are there radial connections from offshore wind to the national transmission network. The rest of the country benefits from the holistic network design. Does my right hon. Friend agree that East Anglia should be included in that design and that we should move away from these radial connections?

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will come on to energy shortly for another reason, and I will pick up on that point after I conclude on the issue of roads.

Essex is a net contributor, and the A12 and A120 are literally roads from the dark ages. They are deeply unsafe roads. If we care about road safety and the people who get up every day at the crack of dawn, such as lorry drivers and commuters, to service our public services or to come to London to provide services for major hotels and the UK’s service sector, we must upgrade these roads. It is becoming a joke right now—it really is. It is an insult to commuters and the people who use the roads who have to navigate the potholes and poor quality of the roads every single day. They feel, by the way, that they are getting an unfair deal when they fill up their cars because of the cost of fuel at the pump. This is not a criticism of the Minister’s Department, but it shows the breadth of issues that need to be grasped across Government on integration to provide those levelling-up outcomes. Otherwise, levelling up will just become a slogan.

I would like to touch on a couple of other areas, which are both linked. One is skills and education. I am proud not just to be the Member of Parliament for Witham, but to represent Essex and the east region. When I became the MP for Witham, the majority of my schools locally were in special measures or required improvement. I am pleased to say right now that we have great schools—good schools and outstanding schools—and, as a result, Witham is now a commuter town. People want to live and work there, and some schools are outstanding—that is a great thing. We need not just to give our youngsters great educational opportunities through our schools, but to ensure that they can get jobs and that they inherit skills for life. That could be skills within the region for the great energy coastline that we have developed over the past decade, which has been remarkable, and previous Ministers in Government should be thanked for their hard work on that matter.

Essex is a county of entrepreneurs, and I never tire of saying that. We are the home of small businesses and innovators, and R&D is big in Essex. However, our prosperity masks challenges when it comes to deprivation, as we have heard, but also skills, opportunity and aspiration. We need businesses to work with our schools and get their foot in the door to talk to pupils at an earlier age. I have a careers fair taking place on 24 March on Witham. I never tire of being a champion of those skills fairs, and we are bringing in businesses from former industries I have worked in to those schools. I want to see Government embrace that, because the apprenticeship levy is, quite frankly, not delivering the outcomes it was originally set up to deliver. I maintain that it needs reform. Of course, by getting those skills locally, we can create jobs with skills that focus on areas that Members have touched on already. I feel very strongly about that.

I want to touch on health, which has been raised. My hon. Friend the Member for Waveney said that we do not have a technology campus in the east of England—I agree, and we should work to achieve that—but we do have a university medical school. I was involved in the original bid to do the business case for that, and I am proud that we achieved it. However, I am afraid that our health infrastructure across the east of England is inadequate. Our patient-GP ratio is one of the highest in the country, and we are not training enough students in our medical schools. We need to do much more. When he was Health Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) worked well with us to deliver some good health outcomes, but there is much more that needs to be done. We are an ageing part of the country, but we must work with our young people to grow skills in health and social care. I pay tribute to Essex County Council for the work it is doing in that area.

This is a message to central Government: we cannot have people working in silos in Government anymore. When I was Home Secretary, the Health Department said to me, “Please do much more on health and social care visas,” which I am pleased that we have done—I did that as Home Secretary. However, there is more that we need to do in that area, and we also need more home-grown talent.

Finally, planning is the biggest issue in my constituency casework. Witham has become a building site over the past decade. We are building homes, and it is right that we do that. The question is, are they affordable homes? We have already heard of the high income ratio that is required to live in our fantastic part of the country. This point is specific to the Minister’s Department. Planning is contentious, and we are not getting it right in this country; there is no doubt about that.

In Essex, and in my constituency in particular, we stopped the West Tey development, a proposal for a garden community of 45,000 new homes—which, by the way, was without any infrastructure at all. The entire concept was an absolute scandal and a disgrace. I pay tribute to campaigners such as Rosie Pearson and others in my constituency who worked together to bring that to the Planning Inspectorate and get that proposal overturned. Five-year land supply has also been a problem, along with local councils that have no neighbourhood plans. I want to put on the record the fact that I think it is deeply disappointing that the Department, in its former guise as the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, used taxpayers’ funds to boost and beef up that concept without working in a considered way with the local community on the kind of housing that was required.

I am afraid that this is not specific to the Minister’s Department. We are going through this all over again with another project: pylons. It is less about housing, but it will become a planning issue. The development of pylons across the east of England will, frankly, have a detrimental impact. We are pioneers in offshore grid wind farm development and renewables, and we must absolutely look to invest in that capability, rather than putting up more infrastructure that will bring great blight to our local communities and, I am afraid, agitate them even more.

I know I have taken up a great deal of time, Mr Davies. In conclusion, there are great things about the east of England. We are net contributors to His Majesty’s Treasury, and we cross-subsidise much of the United Kingdom through the hard graft of the great men and women of the east of England, but we are lagging behind on these key assets that are of national significance. My hon. Friend the Minister can only do so much with her remit in her Department. My wider message is about devolution and local government reorganisation, as well as about the size of the state in Whitehall; how bloated and unaccountable that has become, and how detached it is from the good men and women of the east of England who, as taxpayers, contribute to the bureaucracy of Whitehall and get very little back. That is where reform has to start. The devolution train is well under way now—certainly in our part of the country. In Essex, I back it. Quite frankly, we need reform of the core of Whitehall to start delivering for the good people of the east of England.

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

I call the last, but not least, of the Back Benchers, James Wild.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Dehenna Davison)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, I think for the first time.

Huge congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) on securing this vital debate. I echo the sentiments that have been expressed across the Chamber to mark 70 years since the terrible storm that took far too many lives.

Huge congratulations to the APPG for the east of England, that incredible cross-party body, on producing an incredibly insightful report, which my officials and I have been pleased to read and look into. It shone the brightest possible light on the region’s towering strengths: energy and clean growth, with the east of England producing more than half of the UK’s offshore wind and power; exports and global trade, with Felixstowe alone accounting for more than 40% of national container traffic; and the life sciences sector, which my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney mentioned. AstraZeneca’s R&D facility is rightly cited in the APPG’s report as an exemplar of the region’s booming sector, not least for its leading role in producing the life-saving covid-19 vaccine, for which we are all incredibly grateful.

For all those brilliant strengths, the report also highlights how the east of England faces its own challenges, too. As my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney highlighted, last year the Government published their levelling-up White Paper, where we outlined 12 key levelling-up missions between now and 2030. I fear, as my hon. Friend did, that I might scratch only the surface of the issues, but I will endeavour to cover as much ground as I can.

I will start with devolution—something very close to my heart and within my brief, so hopefully I have an advantage on my first point. As I read the report, I was a little troubled to find only medium confidence in delivering devolution. I clearly want that to be high confidence, so I will address a few of the points raised today.

We are pleased with our progress on devolution, particularly in the east of England with the historic deals we recently signed with both Norfolk and Suffolk. We all know that local areas know best what they need; they know better than Whitehall and we Ministers in Westminster ever will, and that is what devolution is all about. Transferring money and powers on housing, regeneration and skills will empower new directly elected leaders to drive local growth and focus on their priorities to level up their own areas.

That comes on top of substantial devolution and local growth commitments that we have already made through investments such as the £500 million city deal with Greater Cambridge and the £600 million Cambridgeshire and Peterborough devolution deal, and wider investment across the region through the getting building fund and £1.5 billion from the local growth fund. To reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney and others, devolution deals are only one of the areas where my Department works in co-ordination across Government to deliver on levelling up. That is what the White Paper with its 12 missions was all about: recognising that levelling up has to be a whole Government effort.

An inter-ministerial group was recently established to pull together Ministers from across Government to focus on core levelling-up outcomes and missions to make sure there is a co-ordinated effort. Without such effort, we never will achieve the levelling up that this country deserves.

For years the east of England has been a region that punches above its weight, but arguably below its potential. If we want to realise the full potential of the region, we need to level up skills provision—the region currently falls below the national average. I was concerned to read in the report that participation and academic achievements in the east of England were among the lowest of all regions in England. As we would expect, where there is a lack of skills and too few decent jobs to go around, there is inevitably deprivation as well. That remains a real challenge for the region, which has pockets of significant poverty, including in coastal towns, as highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Giles Watling), such as Jaywick, Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth.

I was pleased to see the recommendation in the report that the Government should promote skills devolution—something on which we are very much focused. In the current academic year, the Government have devolved approximately 60% of the adult education budget to nine mayoral combined authorities and the Greater London Authority, and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough received £11.9 million in the most recent financial year. As set out in the levelling-up White Paper, devolution of adult education funding has been a core part of all MCA devolution deals to date.

The Department for Education has committed to devolving adult education functions and the associated core adult education budget to new areas from 2025-26 as part of new devolution deals. We have worked across the country with new areas on devolution, including Norfolk and Suffolk, as I have already referenced. We will fully devolve the adult education budget in Norfolk from the academic year 2025-26, subject to readiness conditions and parliamentary approval of the required legislation.

We are also ensuring that everyone, irrespective of their age or background, has access to high-quality education or training, while prioritising the needs of employers. We are investing £3.8 billion more in further education and skills—

[Priti Patel]

Before my hon. Friend moves on to further education, let me ask about skills devolution; we in Essex have wanted this for a long time, so we must have it. What work is taking place to bring businesses into skills devolution? Local authorities, like Whitehall, can only do so much. This is all about ensuring that businesses are connected with a potential pool of labour and a talent base, so that this can come together.

[Dehenna Davison]

My right hon. Friend will recognise that that does not fit within my brief, but I can reference the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022, local skills improvement plans and work that is being done on our trailblazing devolution deals to further devolve skills powers, which would take into account local skills needs as outlined by local businesses. More on that will be coming soon, when we announce further details on those deals. We are investing in further education skills over this Parliament to ensure that people can get on the ladder of really good, high-quality training and education that leads to good jobs, addresses skills gaps, boosts productivity and, ultimately, supports levelling up.

Having skills really is not the end of it. Without stable and reliable jobs to go along with those skills, areas such as the east of England could lose their newly skilled and experienced workforce, which we of course want to avoid. The region already boasts incredible companies, particularly in life sciences. The Cambridge Biomedical Campus is the largest centre of life sciences and medical research in Europe, employing over 20,000 researchers, industry scientists and clinicians. I have referenced internationally significant companies such as AstraZeneca, with their £1 billion state-of-the-art global research and development facility, and GlaxoSmithKline.

There is always more to do to make sure that people have the necessary skills and adequate jobs. That is why, in the autumn statement last November, the Government reaffirmed their commitment to Sizewell C, which, once operational, will generate 7% of the UK’s energy needs. This investment is vital to the Government’s net zero strategy, which is connected to the east of England’s 13th mission, which we are working across Government to ensure we deliver. The Government’s £700 million investment in the project marks a further step towards energy independence for the UK, while providing a boost to the local economy in Suffolk, with over 10,000 highly skilled jobs set to be created during the plant’s lifetime. The skills investment and devolution is on top of other education investment—for example, the £294.9 million extra being provided for mainstream schools in the east of England this year, as well as the three priority education investment areas in the east of England.

As hon. Members from across the Chamber have highlighted, the issues go beyond skills shortages. Poor connectivity is holding the region back. A lack of decent rail and public transport connections between towns and cities means that a lot of people are forced to drive, not just for their commute but for hospital appointments, to go shopping, and to visit friends and loved ones. Transport East estimates that well over 40% of the region’s carbon emissions are down to private car use. There is a long way to go to bring that figure down over the medium to long term. That throws into sharp relief the need for the Government to redouble our efforts on levelling up when it comes to transport.

I have heard much, loud and clear, about the Ely and Haughley junctions, and will elbow colleagues in the Department for Transport to meet you guys who raised the matter to discuss it further. It is vital that we continue to improve roads across the region, as has been mentioned by a number of hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton and my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel). We have invested £462 million in local roads maintenance between 2022-3 and 2024-5, and £88 million in transport improvements across the east of England. We are going further to ensure that we improve capacity on the railways and bus services, because that rail capacity is crucial, as we all know.

East West Rail plays a vital role in boosting connectivity and unlocking productivity in the Oxford to Cambridge area, supporting access to jobs, education and other opportunities. It plans to create a direct rail link between Oxford and Cambridge, significantly improving journey times, and delivering benefits for passengers and businesses regionally and nationally. The Government have provided £1.3 billion towards the delivery of connection stage 1 of the project, which will provide services between Oxford, Bletchley and Milton Keynes. In the autumn statement the Government affirmed their commitment to plans for transformative growth for our railways, including East West Rail, and I am told that an update on that project will be provided in due course.

On buses, DFT is providing over £100 million of bus service improvement plan funding in the east of England, with £49.6 million going to Norfolk County Council. That will make a significant contribution to local public transport connectivity in the region. The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority received £4.3 million funding from the zero emission bus regional areas scheme, for 30 double-deck electric buses to be introduced on park and ride bus routes in Cambridge.

Let me turn to the APPG’s recommendation that simpler, long-term funding mechanisms are required to support the priorities set out in the strategies of the region’s two sub-national transport bodies. DFT seeks to ensure that all local transport authorities have stronger plans and capabilities to deliver enhanced local public transport. DFT is currently developing guidance and options to incentivise the refresh of local transport plans, so that places have an up-to-date plan for improving connectivity.

As previously mentioned—this is a bit of a pet project of mine—devolution of powers and funding is an intrinsic part of that work. The recently signed devolution deals in the east of England mark a new relationship between Government and Norfolk and Suffolk. A directly elected leader for each county will be responsible for a devolved and consolidated integrated local transport budget for their area, consisting initially of the local highways maintenance funding, both the pothole fund and highways maintenance block, and the integrated transport block, helping to provide strong local leadership and better transport outcomes for local people.

I was pleased to read in the report that the APPG agrees that living standards, especially when it comes to pay, employment, research and development, and wellbeing within the region, are all trending in the right direction. In the same breath, I was disappointed by the report’s assessment of digital connectivity and pride in place, as I know that my Department, and Departments across Government, are working incredibly hard to ensure we make progress on those areas.

My hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild) raised the issue of gigabit broadband coverage. In the east of England alone, that has increased from 5% in November 2019 to 61% in January 2022, and since then that coverage has been expanding rapidly, with forecasts predicting it should reach 70% to 80% by 2025. Ensuring that areas in the east of England with the poorest fixed and mobile connectivity are improved is a big priority for my Department and for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. In terms of mobile connectivity alone, the majority of 4G coverage uplifts from a shared rural network will come from the industry-led element of the network, which will target partial notspots in areas where there is coverage from at least one but not all mobile network operators.

As all hon. Members will know, growing people’s pride in the places where they live and work is at the heart of the investment we are making through the levelling-up fund. On that basis, I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Clacton and for North West Norfolk on their successful bids, on which I know they and their local authority teams worked incredibly hard. I reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney that full written feedback will be provided to local authorities and the MPs who supported the bids, with the option of follow-up verbal meetings to go through the bids and see how they can be strengthened to secure potential future funding.

Our flagship levelling-up funding investment is helping people in a huge number of overlooked and under-appreciated communities in the east of England. Some £253 million has already been allocated; of that, £87 million was awarded in round 1 and £166 million was awarded in round 2. Almost £48 million was awarded to redevelop the station quarter in Peterborough and nearly £60 million-worth of bids were successful in Tendring, Harlow and Colchester. On top of that, the east of England has been allocated a total of £97 million from the UK shared prosperity fund.

I should highlight that the UK shared prosperity fund is one measure that the Government have taken to simplify funding streams and give more autonomy to local areas to deliver, without having to go through competitive funding processes. I hope that will reassure the hon. Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin). That is just one of the measures we are taking, and a funding simplification plan is coming incredibly soon.

We all recognise that significant population growth in any area will have an impact on vital and speedy access to healthcare for all residents, as highlighted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham, my hon. Friends the Members for Waveney and for North West Norfolk, and the hon. Member for Bedford. That is why, in the autumn statement, the Government made up to £8 billion available to the NHS and adult social care in England in 2024-25, including an additional £3.3 billion in both 2023-24 and 2024-25.

The Department of Health and Social Care works closely with NHS England and regional teams to distribute that funding settlement as needed, in order to reflect and address the needs of local populations, including through the agreement of annual plans for each NHS trust. Healthcare funding allocations are weighted heavily towards deprivation, which in turn correlates strongly with need. Per capita, funding for the most deprived local authorities is on average about 130% more than for the least deprived.

Finally, to ensure that we are improving capacity and capability in the healthcare system in the east of England, we are continuing to build five new hospitals as part of the Government’s commitment to build 40 new hospitals by 2030. That includes the rebuilding of James Paget University Hospital and the West Suffolk Hospital, a new cancer hospital at Addenbrooke’s, a new high-tech healthcare campus to replace the ageing Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, new hospital buildings at Watford General Hospital and the refurbishment of Hemel Hempstead and St Albans City Hospitals.

I hope that has given a rough flavour of just some of the work that is going on right across Government to ensure that we are focusing on levelling up, obviously with specifics for the east of England. I know how hard the APPG and all Members present have worked on preparing this incredibly insightful report, which my Department and others have valued a great deal. As well as the challenges, some of which we have touched on, it reinforces that the region really is a true economic success story. As has been highlighted, it is a net contributor to the Treasury; few regions can boast of that, and it is something that the region should rightly be proud of. It is an international gateway for global Britain, and it boasts some of the highest levels of employment, pay and productivity anywhere in the UK.

Our shared challenge now is ensuring that the huge benefits of these tremendous assets and opportunities are shared more evenly across the region and that it ultimately achieves its true potential. As my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney and others have rightly highlighted, ensuring that the east of England reaches its potential really is core to the prospects of the UK as a whole. I believe that there is every chance we can ensure the east of England reaches its potential.

The report illuminates the significant progress we have made on our levelling-up mission so far, but it also shows that there is clearly room for improvement. To reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton, we know that the job is not done; we set out those missions to aim towards by 2030 to ensure that we are levelling up in the east of England and right across the UK. The only way we can achieve that is by ensuring that we are working cross-Government, cross-Whitehall and, of course, cross-party to ensure that we are achieving what we need to achieve to truly level up the UK.

On that basis, I look forward to continuing to work cross-party with Members across the House, and with Ministers across Government, to unlock the east of England and the UK’s true potential.