Levelling Up

Debate between Steve Reed and Eddie Hughes

Tuesday 16th March 2021 Commons Chamber

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

I welcome the Minister to his new role and thank him for advance sight of his statement. The Labour party welcomes funding for every town and region, especially after the Conservatives have held them back with unfair cuts and deliberate disinvestment over the past decade, but this funding is only a fraction of the money the Conservatives took away in the first place. Despite all the Minister’s claims about the levelling-up fund, regions will still be getting less than they got before the crisis. It is a bit like a burglar who sneaks into your house in the dead of night, strips it bare and then expects gratitude for handing back your TV set.

Every region should get the funding it needs to recover, but instead the Government are pitting regions and towns against one another and forcing them to fight one another for funding. Council leaders are furious that millions of pounds are being wasted on consultancy fees for putting bids together. All that money could have been spent on actually levelling up areas that the Conservatives have held back.

Ministers have deprioritised areas that desperately need funding, such as Barnsley, Salford, Bolsover and Ashfield, in favour of wealthier areas such as Richmondshire that just happen to be represented by Cabinet Ministers. It looks very much as if the Government are fiddling the formula to funnel money into wealthier areas and away from the areas that need it most, and the methodology confirms that fear. Despite the Prime Minister’s promise that funding would be allocated to tackle poverty, the Conservatives have removed deprivation levels from the funding formula. That is how 14 areas that are wealthier than average appear in the highest priority category, while areas that need investment the most have been blocked. The Government will not fix regional inequalities by ignoring deprivation when they allocate funding. They are not levelling the country up; they are pulling it further apart and deepening the inequalities that they created in the first place.

I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us why the index of multiple deprivation was excluded from the funding formula, and why Barnsley, Salford, Ashfield and Bolsover were deprioritised in favour of Richmondshire in North Yorkshire. How much is being spent in total on red tape and consultants in the bidding process for these funds? How much of the levelling-up fund is recycled money that the Government have announced before from the local growth fund, the towns fund or other pre-existing funds? The Government only published the methodology after the Good Law Project threatened them with court action, so will the Minister come clean and publish all the data that underlies the methodology, so that taxpayers can see exactly what the Government are doing with their money?

[Eddie Hughes]

Where do I start? I would like to trade analogies with the shadow Secretary of State. He reminds me of a man who has been out for an evening with friends, and at the end of the night, when it comes to splitting the restaurant bill, he is the guy who complains about the division of the bill because he did not have a pudding. [Interruption.] I am here setting out an incredibly bold future for the country in a post-pandemic environment, with a very optimistic and enthusiastic Prime Minister who sees ambitious things for the future of our country, and the shadow Secretary of State is talking about methodologies and whether this constituency or that constituency did not get the funding. I am talking about levelling up across all four nations of the United Kingdom. He is talking about whether individual constituencies get their pudding today. Really, we need to move on. We are talking about significant investment over an extended period and a bright future for this country.

The shadow Secretary of State says that some councils are unhappy about the amount of money that has been spent on consultants. Many councils do not have the capacity to build up a bid of the standard required for this funding, which is why we are providing £125,000 each for those in category 1, so that they can develop those bids.

The shadow Secretary of State says that the methodology has been twisted in some way to benefit one constituency over another; I say tell that to Oldham and Gateshead, which I strongly suspect are very grateful for the funding they are getting and the opportunity to develop bids.

The shadow Secretary of State asked why we excluded deprivation as one of the factors; I say that we decided to leave the criteria to civil servants. We set out the expectation—what we hoped to achieve—and left it to civil servants to decide the criteria so that we did not have any of the political influence that he suggests.

The shadow Secretary of State also asked us to publish all the data associated with the methodology; I am not going to do his homework for him. All that information is freely available. He might be able to get some of his research team to get to work on that.