Towns Fund

Steve Reed Excerpts

Wednesday 18th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Secretary of State is accused today of blocking funding from the £3.6 billion towns fund going to the most deprived towns for which it was intended, and instead funnelling it into marginal Conservative party seats ahead of the general election, including to help his own re-election campaign. This clearly is not about levelling up, so let us see whether he will level with the British people about what really went on.

Did the Secretary of State discuss which towns would receive funding with No. 10 or any Conservative party employee before making the allocations, and will he publish any correspondence? Why did he tell his constituents,

“I helped to secure a £25 million town deal which…will…make the town centre a more attractive place to spend time in”,

despite claiming not to have been involved in any decision about Newark on “The Andrew Marr Show” on 11 October 2020? Was he present when his junior Minister made decisions about his constituency, and will he publish all minutes from that meeting, in which they both chose 61 towns that would benefit from funding?

What did the Secretary of State mean when he said that the Government would “only” commit £25 million to Stapleford in the constituency of Broxtowe if the Conservative party candidate, Darren Henry, was elected? Newark and Sherwood District Council removed the Secretary of State from its board “following conversations with Government”. What were those conversations, and did they take place before or after he saw the damning NAO report?

Finally, will the Secretary of State clear this up and publish in full the accounting officer’s assessment of the towns fund and the full criteria that he and his Ministers used to select towns when they chose to override civil servants’ advice? If he refuses to publish, the public can only conclude that it is because they have something to hide.

[Robert Jenrick]

Once again, the hon. Gentleman seeks to sow discord where there is none. We followed a very clear and robust procedure. The permanent secretary of my Department made that very clear when he appeared before the Public Accounts Committee. Again, I think it is disappointing that the hon. Gentleman chooses to cast aspersions upon distinguished civil servants.

With respect to the accounting officer’s advice, such advice is not routinely published. That is a decision not for Ministers, but for civil servants. Once again, the hon. Gentleman is highly misleading in his remarks, because the accounting officer’s advice was shared in full with the National Audit Office when it produced its report for the PAC. The Chair of the PAC asked to see the report and, in line with usual practice, the permanent secretary wrote a comprehensive summary of the advice. I have asked him once again to check that advice, and he says that the summary was comprehensive and covered all the points. The Chair of the Public Accounts Committee has all the information at her fingertips, as I suspect she knows perfectly well, because she is a highly experienced Member of this House.

With respect to Newark, I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman shows such interest in my constituency. Perhaps he could come up and visit us, but he does not like to go north of the M25 very often. If he did, he would know that Newark was the 16th most highly ranked town in the east midlands to be a beneficiary of the fund, and we supported 19 places in the east midlands. There is absolutely no reason why a Minister should disadvantage their constituency. We are both Ministers and constituency MPs, which is one of the great virtues of our political system, but it is right that those decisions are not taken by that particular Minister and, in the usual way, the decision was taken by a colleague.

With respect to the hon. Gentleman’s question about why I had said on the campaign trail that the fund’s future would be in question if there were a Labour Government, I think he has made that point for us today. He does not support the towns fund. The 101 places that are benefiting from it would be poorer if they had been under a Labour Government.

The message from the Labour party is very clear today: while we want to level up, it wants to score pointless political points. The shadow Secretary of State cannot talk about local government because his own Labour council has gone bankrupt with debts of £1.5 billion. He cannot talk about communities, because the committee on antisemitism has called him out, along with the majority of the members of the community team on the Labour Front Bench, for antisemitic incidents—quite how he can stay in position after that, I do not know. He cannot talk about housing because he has said that his team has no housing policies, and it will be years before he produces any. He cannot talk about housing because we are building more homes than any Government have done for the past 30 years. We will keep on building homes, we will keep on levelling up, and we will keep on investing in the communities that need it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Jenrick]

The hon. Gentleman is quite wrong. One only has to look at his neighbours to see good examples of that. I think of Birkenhead, for example, which I do not think was high on the list of Conservative targets at the last election, but which is now the proud beneficiary of the right to bid for a town deal. I think of St Helens, where, as I have said, I met his Labour party colleagues—two fantastic MPs who are working hard on their town deal board to bring forward great proposals for the benefit of their local communities. A small number of places were chosen from what was deemed to be the low priority category, and that was exactly—

[Steve Reed]

Sixty!

[Robert Jenrick]

No. The hon. Gentleman has a bit of a habit of saying things in the House of Commons that are not exactly accurate. Sixty communities were not chosen from the low priority category; 17 such communities were chosen. [Interruption.] From his sudden change of demeanour, I take it that he is apologising for his remarks.