Urban Regeneration (England)

Steve Reed Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Westminster Hall

[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.