Economic Growth

Simon Clarke Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Simon Clarke (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Con)]

I warmly commend the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Alistair Strathern) on what I thought was an excellent maiden speech. The movement has a funny way of delivering its ends these days, but I think it has come up with an excellent candidate in him and I wish him an enjoyable career in this place and serving his constituents. As he rightly says, it is the privilege of one’s life to represent where you grew up and I know he is obviously very aware of that, and given that we have all had the opportunity to enjoy Mid Bedfordshire at length over recent months, I share his diagnosis of its charm.

It is an absolute privilege to open the Back-Bench speeches this afternoon on the main topic of our debate, because my community, like the hon. Gentleman’s, is also looking for change. On Teesside, we need no lessons about the legacies of the last Labour Government. Frankly, we have had to live with them for too long: an industrial base abandoned; lives blighted by welfarism and low unemployment; and public services characterised by mediocrity and failure. This comes the week after British Steel announced that steelmaking is coming back to Teesside, which is a decision of huge significance for my local economy and follows a string of major successes, from the SeAH offshore wind factory, the new Net Zero Teesside power station and carbon capture and storage—all the things that our Mayor Ben Houchen, working together in lockstep with the Conservative Government, is helping to deliver for a part of the country that needs this success and opportunity.

I look forward to the autumn statement this week, and I welcome the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott) to her position in my former bailiwick as Chief Secretary. The autumn statement represents an enormously important moment and all of us—on the Government side of the House at least—want to see pro-growth measures, the lowering of the tax burden when possible and a robust commitment not to take us back to the disastrous economic prescriptions of the Labour party. We have to recognise that it is at a time of global challenge here at home that we have some of the most important policy levers to improve our constituents’ lives.

I warmly welcome the Government’s commitment to act on leasehold and renters reform, but I also believe that we need to recognise the need in the housing sector for serious, sustained reconsideration of our planning laws if we are to ensure that the potential of this country is fulfilled. Ultimately, the honest truth is that we need to earn growth and not duck the fundamental reasons why it is so lacklustre. Many of us were aghast at the decision last week to block a new, much-needed £2.5 billion datacentre on the site of an old quarry adjacent to the M25. It was blocked on the basis that it would

“harm the openness of the green belt”

and would have been visible from bridges over the motorway. This is madness. We can delude ourselves all we want about being a science superpower or a new silicon valley, but if we do not will the means, we will not secure the ends that this country needs to see.

Our crippling lack of predictable, secure land supply is testament to a wider political failure. That applies on a cross-party basis. Ultimately, one could point the finger at the Mayor of London and his dismal record on housing just as much as one could at my own side of the House, but we need to move forward on a cross-party basis at local and national Government levels to achieve a better system of planning. Ultimately, the current discretionary system is not delivering for my constituents or for my country, and I believe that a move, as the Growth Commission has suggested this morning, to a zonal planning system along the lines suggested by my right hon. Friend Boris Johnson when he was Prime Minister and by my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) when he was Secretary of State, would be the right thing to do.

Schroders has estimated that house prices are at their least affordable compared with earnings since ’76. That is not the long hot summer of 1976 but 1876, the year Victoria became Empress of India. All our infrastructure capacity is being hamstrung by the underlying problem that we cannot build quickly enough where we need to. Roads, rail, data, energy and, most of all, good affordable homes are being delayed, made more expensive and in some cases being prevented entirely by this British disease.

Apart from the usual Westminster knockabout that a debate like this inevitably engenders, I think there is a serious point for Members across the House to consider, which is that there is a broken planning system at the heart of our society. Whether in central Bedfordshire or in Middlesbrough, we need to do more to make sure we can unlock growth, jobs, homes and opportunity.

Our politics deserves better and the public deserve better. This is not a right versus left issue; it is about growth versus stagnation, prosperity versus poverty or ambition versus relative decline. I hope that, over the months ahead, the Government will do much to take forward an ambitious agenda in this space.