Budget Resolutions

Royston Smith Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Royston Smith (Southampton, Itchen) (Con)]

Levelling up is not about geography, it is about opportunity. When highlighting the deficiencies and challenges of a place, it is a tricky balancing act. When bidding for funding it is necessary to highlight the weaknesses, and when encouraging businesses to locate or relocate we emphasise the strengths.

Southampton has many strengths: it has historic medieval walls and one of the busiest ports in the country; it is home to the iconic Spitfire; and it is from Southampton that the pilgrim fathers set sail to the new world more than 400 years ago. The Port of Southampton and Carnival cruises are large private sector employers, and we benefit from a healthy public sector too, with two world class universities, the National Oceanography Centre, a renowned specialist hospital and a Premier League football club. On the face of it, it all sounds rosy, but if we scratch beneath the surface, we see a different picture. The city and my Southampton, Itchen constituency have some of the most deprived wards in the country. We have too many children in care, our schools underperform and we have generations in the same family who have never worked. The city had a proud shipbuilding and aviation heritage. It produced the famous Ford Transit van until 2013, and was home to Pirelli Cables and British American Tobacco. Those blue-collar jobs have mostly all gone; all too frequently, they have been replaced with jobs in retail, hospitality and leisure, with few, if any, prospects, no job security and notoriously low pay.

If the city is to thrive again, we need to create jobs with security, career prospects and good rates of pay. Our reliance on retail and hospitality was brought into sharp focus when covid arrived. When the country shut down, Southampton and, in particular, its young people, bore the brunt. Construction was quickly back and the port carried on, albeit somewhat differently, but hospitality and retail could not reopen and thousands found themselves either furloughed or redundant. With our major manufacturing gone, Southampton is like any post-industrial city of the north. Where once 4,500 people were employed in the Ford factory alone, and thousands more in Vosper Thornycroft and Pirelli Cables, now we have few manufacturing jobs and few with the job security that our former manufacturing base provided.

Levelling up is not about geography, it is about opportunity. In the first round of the levelling-up fund, Southampton City Council, then controlled by Labour, did not even bother to bid. Thankfully, in May they were kicked out of office and were ably replaced by a dynamic Conservative council, led by Councillor Daniel Fitzhenry and his deputy, Jeremy Moulton. We can be sure that Southampton will bid for the next round of the levelling-up fund in the spring.

To create more secure jobs, we need infrastructure. I agree with the direction of travel on net zero and clean air, but that does not mean that vehicles will not need to access the city—we just need cleaner, greener ones. Our port welcomes 2 million cruise passengers per year. It is the busiest car-export port in the country and the second-busiest container port. More containers and cars are going by rail, but it will never be all of them that do so, or anything like it.

As the Government look north to the red wall seats so dreadfully served by Labour for decades, they must remember to look south to those cities that fared little better from years of Labour representation. Levelling up is not about geography; it is about opportunity. If we do not understand that, we are likely to sleepwalk into a situation in which the rush to level up north will leave the south as left behind as it always was. We simply cannot allow that to happen.