Urban Regeneration (England)

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Westminster Hall

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I shall be brief compared with my hon. Friends, but I do want to add a London perspective to this very important debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) on securing it. It is disappointing to see how empty the Government Benches are. If that reflects a lack of interest on the Government side in regeneration issues, it is a sad state of affairs. I am just making a statement of fact. People can compare the numbers; it is not difficult.

My hon. Friend mentioned the out-of-town areas that people have to have a car to access, and we heard about examples from the north-west and from Wales. I think that all these issues are linked together by the concept of suburbia. I am talking about the suburbs. Those areas are within our cities, so they are not the out-of-town retail parks, but they are on the edges. Often, places such as my own constituency, Ealing Central and Acton, were conceived around transport nodes, and I think that they are suffering under this Government. They were built as an ideal that was in-between the rural idyll and the big bad city; they were meant to be the best of all worlds. However, they can end up being forgotten, because unlike the real rural world, they do not have pressure groups such as the Countryside Alliance to fight their corner; and at the same time, they do not have the urban allure of the cities or the inner cities for regeneration initiatives. So in the end they can up being a bit forgotten and dismissed and derided by urban snobs, who see suburban dwellers such as me as people who live behind twitching net curtains, who live in places that are a bit out of the way: “You wouldn’t really want to go there.” There is that metropolitan snobbish attitude, I think, so I want to speak up for the suburbs in my short contribution to the debate.

Some estimates say that 80% of us now live in suburbs. However, they are always absent from the debate. People may remember that when the late Baroness Thatcher won her third election victory in 1987, her first reaction, probably looking at the electoral results, was to say, “We’ve got to do something about those inner cities.” Nobody ever said, “We’ve got to go to Acacia Avenue. The people there are hurting; they’re suffering.” However, I would contend that under this Government, there is a whole set of suburban problems that my constituents in Ealing Central and Acton face. I am talking about problems such as housing, which my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) mentioned. People face exorbitant housing costs. In my constituency, there are beds in sheds. That is a relatively new phenomenon. We also have delayed transitions—people in their 30s who are still living in the parental home. That is a suburban problem that people have in west London.

My hon. Friends who have contributed to this excellent debate—I restate that I think it is sad that there were not more Members from the Government side and, indeed, more Members from both sides of the House here—described the issue of hollowed-out high streets. That is in the face of rising business rates such that small businesses are collapsing, and we have seen more of a movement towards online transactions, so the idyllic suburbs are looking ugly with those empty shops. Also relevant are rising transport costs that become punitive, and derelict pubs. The public house was part of the suburban set-up, but more and more of those have gone.

Although suburbs are by definition peripheral zones, suburbs should be central to any future regeneration policies. We have heard time and again about urban taskforces that go, with their gung-ho attitudes, to spruce up areas. Is it not time to have a suburban taskforce to look at suburbia in this country?

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[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) on securing this debate on the Government’s failure to secure investment in regeneration in our town centres and district centres away from the main urban centres. I congratulate my hon. Friend on the work that she has done with the community in her constituency in supporting regeneration initiatives that have already had a big impact, such as the Port Sunlight river park, which I believe she helped to open, and the award-winning New Ferry farmers market, which certainly sounds as though it is worth a visit if hon. Members are in the vicinity of the Wirral.

My hon. Friend has also spoken, however, about many of the concerns that her local residents raise with her—the sight of empty shops blighting a previously thriving town centre; the lack of new investment in the area; a general sense of decline that people do not want to feel about the area where they live and bring up their families; and the general lack of opportunities, not only for young people who are growing up and will feel as though they cannot stay in the area but for adults who are already making their lives in such places.

We are not just talking about New Ferry; we have heard many examples from other parts of the country that are suffering in similar ways. We have heard from Cardiff and Liverpool about the success of their urban regeneration projects. Those projects are, on the whole, led by Labour councils that are doing a fantastic job, but the Government have denied them the tools that they need to do even more for the communities that they serve. No one has mentioned London yet, but London is not exempt from this problem.

[Dr Huq]

I did.

[Mr Reed]

I do apologise; of course my hon. Friend mentioned London. No one has mentioned south London, then. I will mention Croydon, which is, like Ealing, in outer London. Because of that, it feels forgotten sometimes. Even in an outer London borough, district centres such as Thornton Heath or South Norwood in my constituency also feel as though they have been forgotten by the main town centres in their boroughs.

I want to draw attention to three areas in which the Government could do better— first, cuts, funding and resources, secondly, the role of local enterprise partnerships and thirdly, devolution. The Government continue to ignore the unfair impact of the way in which they allocate funding across the country. Only last weekend, new figures showed that the reduction in councils’ spending power per head in the worst-off areas has been 10 times higher than in the wealthiest areas. It does not seem fair to penalise poorer areas. Doing so will push areas that are already struggling to succeed into a downward spiral, which does not benefit anybody. In the Wirral, there has been a cut of £228 per head of population in spending power since 2010, which is nearly nine times higher than the reduction in the least deprived parts of the country. How is that helping the Wirral to overcome the kinds of problems that my hon. Friend spoke about so eloquently in her opening contribution?

Let us turn to local enterprise partnerships. I speak as a former board member of London’s LEP, the London Enterprise Panel. LEPs could be much more effective than they are at the moment, but they need two things that they are not fully getting from the Government: a long-term commitment and the resources to do the jobs that they are looking at properly. Regional development agencies, which LEPs replaced, were able to make single three-year funding agreements that offered stability. LEPs, however, have access to far smaller overall budgets and many different funding pots, so they cannot combine them in ways that could be more helpful and beneficial to the communities that they serve.

Labour has proposed rationalising the LEPs where they do not properly reflect functioning regional economies. For instance, they should look at covering a travel-to-work area as an indicator of a regional economy rather than subdividing them as they do in some places, with the result that they cannot work effectively across the whole area. Government need to be much clearer about the core purpose of LEPs, because that would enable them to work much more effectively and build stronger partnerships with local authorities.

I will conclude by speaking about devolution. We believe strongly that powers should be removed from Westminster and handed to communities across the country, but we cannot do that in the piecemeal way attempted by the Chancellor. The Government cannot dump a one-size-fits all model on each part of the country and leave them to it. Devolution deals must properly reflect the different characteristics and needs of the area that they are being set up for. We need to ensure that, when the Government strike a deal with Liverpool, the needs of places on the fringes of that great city, such as New Ferry and Ellesmere Port, are not neglected. I look forward to the Minister addressing the many serious concerns that have been raised by Opposition Members, and I hope that he will reflect on what he has heard and conclude that the Government need to do a much better job.

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[Dr Huq]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Jones]

Just bear with me, because I have very little time. The hon. Member for Wirral South made some important points, and I am doing an awful lot of work to try to introduce proposals on the issues that she mentioned. The structural problems faced by many areas, not just in the north but in pockets across the country, are significant. We need to look at those problems carefully, but we should not go back to the days of the failed regional development agencies. In my region—the west midlands—the RDA failed significantly, with fewer people employed in the private sector after the RDA finished than before it started. Gloucester is a good example of an area where the LEP is embracing its town and city centres. Gloucester city centre is benefiting from the LEP’s work, but we need to encourage the LEPs to take on board the challenges in our towns and city centres and work to support them.

The shadow Minister mentioned Government support, and Wirral South has had significant Government support. There was an £8.5 million investment in the Unilever Port Sunlight research and development project, and there is also the Wirral Waters enterprise zone, which I understand will be the largest regeneration project in the UK. Some Opposition Members fail to understand that these issues are complex. Although money is important in many situations, it is not the only solution. I am looking into the many challenges and working through the different issues that affect our town centres, and I am working with partners to try to secure solutions.

It was good to hear from the hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans), who mentioned Cardiff. It would be good one day to go to see the regeneration that happened as a result of the work of Mrs Thatcher and Lord Heseltine back in the 1980s. The comments of the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) were reasonably negative, but I note that Pitshanger Lane in Ealing has been entered into the great British high street competition, which I welcome. I wish its supporters well in their efforts. The hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) made the important point that the UK Government and the devolved Administrations need to work together on what works well and on best practice.

I find it difficult to accept the shadow Minister’s view on cuts. Before the general election, the Labour party said that it was going to cut local government, so it is difficult for him to say now that the Labour party would not do so. On spending power, the authorities that he mentioned generally have higher spending power than authorities such as the one in the area that I represent. I certainly do not want to go back from LEPs to RDAs, as he mentioned.