Levelling-up Bids: North Somerset

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

I remind hon. Members that they should clean their spaces before they use them and as they leave, and that Mr Speaker has recommended that we wear masks.

I call John Penrose to move the motion.

[John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered levelling up bids in North Somerset.

It is good to have you in charge of our process, Mr McCabe. It is also good to see my fellow Somerset MP and constituency neighbour, my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), who is here to support the debate and is expecting to speak later, as well as the Minister, who I hope will respond fully and positively to some of my questions and provide reassurances during the course of the debate.

The debate is about North Somerset Council’s bids last week for both the levelling-up fund and the community renewal fund. The bid documentation is somewhere in the bowels of the Minister’s Department and is being gone through in huge detail, so I do not propose to take up an enormous amount of time by dwelling on what it says, other than to summarise briefly and say that my right hon. Friend and I strongly support both bids. It is quite noticeable that, at the moment, North Somerset Council is being run by a rainbow coalition, which is political speak for anybody except the Tories, yet here we are—my right hon. Friend and I, as the two local Conservative Members of Parliament—supporting the bids too. This is a cross-party, non-party political and pretty much unanimous set of proposals, which we urge the Minister to take very seriously indeed.

It is true that Weston has come an extraordinarily long way in recent years. Since I was elected 16 years ago, the place has become unrecognisably better, but even its most ardent supporters—I put myself right at the front of the queue—would say that we still have a great deal more that has to be done. The two bids for the levelling-up fund and the community renewal fund are a key part of taking the next steps in North Somerset’s journey overall, but particularly Weston-super-Mare’s journey.

Without going into too much detail about what is in the detail of the bids, I will highlight three main areas. One is the renewal of our local heritage assets. Weston-super-Mare was primarily built during the Victorian seaside town heyday, and it has some beautiful architecture. It has many beautiful bits of local heritage to it, with some of it going back much further than the Victorian era—for example, there is an iron-age hill fort. However, renewing those assets and making current use of them, so that they can continue to be used and looked after—they should be part of the town’s future, not just its past—is essential. That is a key part of the bid. They give the place its character and its sense of place, and are an absolutely essential part of the bid.

Equally, the bid involves a whole series of proposals for more festivals, activities and attractions—everything from street theatre to buskers—in order to create a sense of theatre, a sense of dynamism and a buzzing atmosphere, which will make the place great not just for local residents to visit and live. As we are a seaside town and a visitor destination, that will also make it a great place for visitors. Of course, visitors have traditionally been one of the town’s lifeblood industries, because we are a tourist destination, so that is an essential piece of the bids.

Last but not least, the bid dovetails with the Weston place-making strategy, which means that we have input from local businesses and residents, and from the council, to try to ensure that Weston as a location has a sustainable mix but also a balanced mix of reasons to live there, to visit there and to do business there and create wealth. The place-making strategy is essential, and it is also a key part of what the council has put together for the two bids.

So, if the bid is so flipping brilliant, why am I worried, why have I asked for this debate and why do we have the pleasure of the Minister’s company this afternoon? The answer is very simple. It is that in spite of the quality of the bid and of the cross-party backing that I mentioned earlier, there is one fly in the ointment. It is that, as the Minister will know, North Somerset Council as a whole—the entire district—is currently designated as a priority 2 area for both the funds that we are bidding into. It is not a priority 1 area, but a priority 2 area. Potentially, that is a problem because it might demote us in terms of the importance—even the urgency—and eligibility of our bids for those funds.

I am here to argue today that that designation is actually a mistake—or it would be a mistake if it were to happen—simply because North Somerset as a district overall is a place of stark contrasts. The constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset is one of the wealthiest constituencies in the country, whereas, to put it simply, my constituency of Weston-super-Mare is not.

For example, we can compare my constituency with two neighbouring district council areas, both of which are designated as priority 1 areas. I am sure that the Minister will be familiar with them; they are Sedgemoor District Council and Mendip District Council. They are right next door to the town of Weston-super-Mare. They are almost identical in terms of their populations to the population of my constituency as a whole. So, if my constituency was a district council, it would be pretty much the same size as they both are. Yet my constituency has a higher proportion of people claiming benefits than either of those two priority 1 areas, even though my area is technically designated as a priority 2 area.

My constituency has a lower healthy life expectancy than either of those two neighbouring districts, even though they are designated as priority 1 areas and my area is designated as priority 2. My constituency has a worse average travel time to employment than either of those two districts, even though they are designated as priority 1 and my area is designated as priority 2.

So I hope the Minister will understand why I am concerned. If my constituency was a stand-alone piece of geography, and not part of the broader North Somerset Council area, we would easily qualify as a priority 1 area. However, because of the accident of postcodes, if I can put it that way, and because of the averaging effect, we do not qualify as a priority 1 area. Of course, that is not to say that the need in my constituency of Weston-super-Mare is not extremely serious or, indeed, every bit as serious as that in the other district councils I have mentioned, both of which are priority 1 areas.

I will go further and say that I have just given the Minister the figures for my constituency as a whole. Within my constituency, the situation is even starker. If we look at two wards in the centre of the constituency, Weston-super-Mare South and Weston-super-Mare Central, they have indices of multiple deprivation that would rank them in the top—or worst, depending on how we look at it—3% or 4% of wards in the entire country; in fact, parts of one of them are in the worst 2%. They are equivalent to anywhere else that is right at the top of the priority 1 areas. It is not just that we would scrape into priority 1 area designation: we would be right at the top of the Minister’s list of concerns, and rightly so, because of those indices of multiple deprivation scores.

So, what do both I and my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset hope to hear from the Minister when he gets to his feet in a minute? The answer is very simple. We hope to hear from him that he is able to give strong weighting to those overall scores—scores that are at a more detailed and more granular level than the scores for the district as a whole—when assessing the bid. As I mentioned right at the start, I hope that it will qualify under its own steam in any case.

We do not want a strong and capable bid to be disallowed because of an accident of postcode and because of the averaging effect. I hope, therefore, that the Minister will be able to reassure me and the residents of the constituency of Weston-super-Mare that that will not be the case, and that the bureaucratic process can be bent and manipulated sufficiently within the rules to allow the genuine need—as shown by the genuine levels of multiple deprivation—to be properly taken account of when these bids are finally totalled up.

If the Minister can do that, I may not be able to guarantee that we will erect a small statue in his name somewhere in the middle of Weston-super-Mare, but I can at least promise him that we will easily be able to carry him shoulder high along the Weston seafront, given the importance of the bids to the people of Weston-super-Mare. I will now sit down to make sure that my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset has an opportunity to add to what I have already said and to explain the perspective from the other part of the North Somerset district council area.