North of England: Economic Support

Simon Fell Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Simon Fell (Barrow and Furness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford, and I thank the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) for securing the debate.

Walking around communities like ours, it is clear that businesses are struggling and are worried about the future where once, really not that long ago, they felt optimism. Furness’s economy has thrived in the past, almost in spite of its infrastructure—our roads are terrible; our rail network, although improving, is a branch line and not fast with it. People live in Furness for the amazing community, and businesses stay there because of its deep pool of skills and knowledge—from advanced manufacturing to life sciences and green energy—but it is not hard to think that we are running with our shoelaces tied together. We are achieving not because of our environment, but in spite of it; we are achieving because of those people.

In some areas we are not achieving. There are wide and deep economic and health disparities between wards that neighbour each other. We have excellent teachers, doctors, nurses and public servants, but our geography—it takes two hours to get from Barrow to Carlisle—means that those same public services are stretched, and covid has only made those challenges worse.

This Government were elected to level up, and there has never been a more pressing time to do it. Let us be clear that we are not asking for handouts; we are asking to be put on a level footing, and to be given the chance to stand on our own two feet. If we want to tackle some of those economic and health disparities in our communities, we need to trust those communities. We need to use covid as an opportunity to open up and empower civil society to step in, to start focusing on families now and not when they hit crisis points. We need to focus on prevention and not cure.

Some villages in my constituency do not have broadband of any type. They often cannot get phone signal, so let us level them up. Let us redouble efforts to get the infrastructure they need. Let us focus on the areas where we can meaningfully grow skills and recover. Cumbria is ideally placed to be the beating heart of a green industrial revolution. Let us think what an industrial strategy looks like and build on a base of offshore wind, nuclear and gas—and build towards hydrogen and tidal energy too. We have the skills, so enable us to do it. A northern economic recovery plan is what we need from the Government, for communities and constituencies across the north, so that we can build our way out of this pandemic.