Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (Sixth sitting)

Tim Farron Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Mark. The amendments simply ask that the Government align the levelling-up missions with the United Nations sustainable development goal to end hunger and ensure access by all people—the poor and people in vulnerable situations, including infants—to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round. The amendments also ask that that be measured by tracking the prevalence of undernourishment and moderate or severe food insecurity in the population, based on the food insecurity experience scale.

It is astonishing that in a Bill that attempts to level up all parts of the UK, not once is hunger or food insecurity mentioned, despite the Prime Minister acknowledging that it is not possible to level up the country without reducing the number of children living in poverty. There are 14.5 million people living in poverty across our country. Poverty among children and pensioners was rising for the six years prior to covid, along with a resurgence of Victorian diseases associated with malnutrition, such as scurvy and rickets.

Surely the Government must have grasped that in order for at least five of their own missions to succeed, people need to have access to food. Living standards, education, skills, health and wellbeing are all deeply impacted upon if people live in a household marked by hunger. Pre-pandemic, over 2 million children started their school day with a gnawing hunger in their stomach. No matter how impressive a teacher is, if a child is worrying about where their next meal may come from, they simply do not learn. Overall, the physical, emotional and mental health links to hunger are well documented.

The Government’s own reporting in the family resources survey, which was only made possible after years of campaigning to implement my Food Insecurity Bill, shows that households in the north-east are more likely struggle to afford food than those anywhere else in the country. It would be completely misguided to think that we can level up the country without addressing this issue. Due to the pandemic, soaring inflation and limited Government support to mitigate the impact of rising living costs, those figures will be far worse in the coming years, without concerted and committed Government action.

By making a clear commitment in the Bill to tackle growing levels of hunger, the Government are signalling that they understand and are willing to act, and to be held to account for that action. They signed up to sustainable development goal 2 in 2015, with the aim to end hunger. The Minister for South Asia, North Africa, the United Nations and the Commonwealth—in the other place—recently reconfirmed the UK’s commitment to achieving the goals by 2030, stressing that the SDGs remain a globally recognised framework for building back better from coronavirus, in line with the Prime Minister’s levelling-up priorities. That makes it even more surprising that hunger is missing from the Bill.

If not in this Bill, how will the Government measure the prevalence of hunger in line with their levelling-up commitments? Or are the Prime Minister’s comments just more of the empty rhetoric that we have become so accustomed to from this Government? So far, the Government’s performance has been inadequate to combat hunger and food insecurity. The SDG tracker figures for 2020 to 2021 show that over 4 million people are regularly going hungry or do not have access to nutritious food on a regular basis. The Food Foundation has found that the number of food-insecure households is rising, with figures for 2022 so far show prevalence in nearly 5 million households, with 2 million children suffering. If it were not for the estimated 2,300 food banks in this country, those adults and children would be completely without food. That should be a source of great shame for those on the Government Benches.

The regional disparities that the Bill supposedly aims to level out are most stark when we consider the fact that life expectancy in my part of the world, the north-east, is six years less for men and seven years less for women than it is in the south-east. The pandemic has revealed the serious underlying health inequalities in this country. Increasing healthy life expectancy is a huge challenge, and public health funding was a crucial part of achieving that mission. However, the most recent allocation saw councils receive a real-terms cut—another example of the Government’s actions not matching their levelling-up rhetoric.

The cross-party Environmental Audit Committee reported in 2019 that, when it came to sustainable development goal 2,

“the UK is not performing well enough or performance is deteriorating”.

The Government-commissioned national food strategy found that diet is the leading cause of avoidable harm to our health, but the Government have ignored Henry Dimbleby’s recommendation to increase eligibility for free school meals. Adult and child obesity levels are one of the metrics used to assess the success of the mission to improve life expectancy, yet today, on the anniversary of the Government’s child obesity plan, it has been reported that 70% of commitments have been delayed or have disappeared.

If the Government are serious about levelling up, tackling food insecurity is vital to achieving the levelling-up White Paper’s missions on education, skills, wellbeing, living standards, health and life expectancy. As Anna Taylor, chief executive of the Food Foundation, has said:

“If the Government wants to really get to grips with the issue, a comprehensive approach to levelling-up must tackle food insecurity head on.”

Accepting this simple and cost-neutral amendment would signal that this Government accept, at long last, that people are going hungry on their watch and that they are prepared to do something about it. I sincerely hope the Minister has carefully considered my amendments, and I look forward to his response.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for South Shields on tabling these two really important amendments, which it is right for this Committee and the Government to consider. I want to reflect on the source of food poverty and some of the challenges we face.

Fifty years ago, 20% of household income was spent on food, roughly speaking. Today, again roughly speaking, that figure is 10%. That is not a comment on our leaving the European Union; it is an observation that over the past 40-odd years the UK has effectively subsidised food without ever really debating whether that was a good thing or the correct policy. The fact that direct allocation of funding to food production in this country is being phased out is going to have an impact on the price of food, and if we care about levelling up within and between communities, and about tackling poverty and all the consequences that the hon. Lady has rightly mentioned, we are surely going to care about that impact.

I wonder whether Ministers consider that ensuring the United Kingdom does what it can to tackle the rising cost of food, not least by being able to produce more of it itself, is part of their brief and their mission. It depends on who one believes, but about 55%, roughly speaking, of the food that British people eat is produced in the United Kingdom. If we are moving away from a form of direct payments to farmers and towards payments for producing public goods—which, in principle, I am in favour of—we need to be mindful of what the consequences will be. As the Government seek to withdraw direct payments for farmers as they move towards their new scheme, unless they do so well and carefully, there will be consequences. We will see fewer farmers and less food produced, which will have an impact on the price of food on supermarket shelves across this country.

Also, when levelling up our own country, we surely do not want to be responsible for adding to global poverty in the process. If we by accident or design reduce the amount of food we produce as a country, we will add not only to need in our country, but to our demand for food imported from other countries. Getting on for 100% of the grain consumed by people in north Africa and the middle east comes from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, so we can see a huge problem there. The United Kingdom fishing in the same market as north African and middle eastern countries for its food—food that we could be producing ourselves—is a reminder that if we, by accident or design, produce less food ourselves, we are actively putting the world’s poorest people in an even more marginal position.

I am keen for the Minister to accept the hon. Lady’s amendments and to consider the impact of levelling up as a whole, not just on the poorest people in our communities, but across the world.

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Mark. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields on her amendments and the powerful case she made for them. I agreed with her completely. She is absolutely right that there will be no levelling up if we have hunger in our communities. Just as a child cannot do much hungry, in our communities people will not be able to access those better opportunities that we hope for them, and that we believe levelling up will drive for them, if they are hungry. Measures in her Food Insecurity Bill would do much to tackle such issues. I hope the Minister is minded to reflect on that.

My hon. Friend’s points about the obesity strategy were well made. That is a salutary case, which tells us a little about some of the risks ahead with levelling up. A year ago, I was the shadow Minister in that area, and that strategy was the big priority of the day for the Government—“Don’t worry about us. We’re going to drive that forward and it will make all the difference”—because at the time the Prime Minister had personal investment in it. Now the Prime Minister’s personal focus is considerably elsewhere from whether the nation is overweight. As a result, a number of things have been dropped—every Sunday we find out which more have been dropped—perhaps in recognition of political considerations, rather than public health ones. That is what we risk with levelling up, if we do not get such things on the face of the Bill, instead relying on good will and trust, which today there might be plenty of, but tomorrow different people will be in our chairs and the agenda will have moved on. That is important.

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[Alex Norris]

That is my concern. My biggest anxiety is that the Government have got to this point, after a long time in government and with the highly publicised problems that they face, a little out of ideas and energy. The omissions may amount to a to-do list, which we make when we have loads to do that we never quite get to. We write the to-do list because that is a small step in the right direction. I fear that without concrete, clear, public and transparent action plans, that is what they will be. They will not be in the Bill, but things suddenly will not be on the to-do list anymore, because they have stopped being a priority.

We need a laser-like focus on the problems we face in this country, not imprecise policies with imprecise actions that lead to policy failures and end up devaluing the levelling up brand, breaking public confidence and not delivering for people. That is not what people want. There is expectation across the country that levelling up will happen, will matter and will be different. At the moment, we cannot tell our constituents how and why that will be the case other than in quite a broad and abstract way, which does not mean an awful lot on the street and at estate level.

Sadly, I cannot say to councillors or residents, “This is what they were trying to drive from the centre, and this is your role in it. Don’t just sit back and wait to be levelled up—participate. Here are the things that you get to participate in.” At the moment, we cannot say that and I hope we might be able to do a little better.

[Tim Farron]

Clause 1(4) states that

“levelling-up missions must specify a target date for…delivery”

but without an action plan, we are playing into the hands of people who think that we in this place say stuff and never mean to deliver it. If the Minister were serious about delivering on those missions, an action plan seems a simple request. This feels like a project with no project management. There are end goals but no staging posts to get there.

I have a couple of quick examples. Let us say we were going to try to set a target that I believe we need, and I hope others will agree, of 150,000 new social rented properties every year. For any kind of construction-based outcome that we want, whether housing, industry or environmental projects, we need a construction workforce. The action plan and the project management would include the setting up and sourcing of that workforce, long before the delivery date. The hon. Member for York Central talked about Airbnb in York, which is also a massive issue for us in the Lake district and the rest of Cumbria. If we wanted to give local authorities and communities power to regulate their housing stock so that we had equality and built and kept homes for people to live in, to be part of the workforce and the community, rather than allowing them to bleed out into the Airbnb sector, we would need to do things along the way to achieve that. There would need to be a planning department big enough, with people qualified enough.

These missions, with target dates for delivery, but no action plan to deliver them, is project management without the management. That is foolish. I do not see why the Government will not accept that.

[Neil O'Brien]

I have a mix of bad and good news for the hon. Member for Nottingham North. The bad news is that we will resist the amendment. The good news is that he can, even within this Committee sitting, achieve the legislation that he wants. Let me explain.

The Bill sets out the framework for delivering on our levelling-up missions and places a statutory duty on the Government to publish an annual report on progress, as we have discussed. The Government agree with the principle behind the amendment that the delivery of levelling-up missions must be accompanied by detailed actions from the Government to drive change. Of course it must—that is why we have already published an action plan setting out details of how we plan to take the agenda forward, in the form of our levelling-up White Paper.

That is also why we have specified the importance of having an action plan in the Bill. We will be coming to clause 2 shortly—I hope the hon. Gentleman will support it standing part—and subsection (2)(c) already places a statutory obligation on the Government to produce an annual report on levelling-up, which must include,

“what Her Majesty’s Government plans to do in the future to deliver each of those levelling-up missions.”

That already includes the action plan that the hon. Gentleman seeks. Therefore, while I agree completely with the sentiment behind the amendment, it is not necessary and I ask the hon. Member to withdraw it.

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[Alex Norris]

Clause 3 adds a little more detail to the reporting requirement set out in clause 2, which we have just debated. We support the idea of annual reporting to help determine whether we are on target to achieve what we are seeking as country, but subsections (1) and (3) both state that the reports must be published within 120 calendar days of the end of the reporting period. That is far too long.

The point of reporting is to understand how well—or otherwise—progress is being made, not just so that we can have a political debate about whether the Government are any good. The point is to be able to correct the course, change resourcing or make any number of decisions to ensure that goals are hit. Giving up a third of the year is simply too much. Amendment 7 seeks to reduce that to 30 days, to allow much more time in the following year to correct the course.

I hope that is not an onerous burden; I assume that Ministers and their teams will not wait until the last day of the reporting period to start preparations. I would like to think that Ministers will have a monthly—if not weekly or daily—grip of the progress made, as this is the centrepiece of the domestic programme. That report ought to be a formalising of work already done in the name of good Government. I hope we might find the Minister in listening mode.

[Tim Farron]

There appears to be a bit of a pattern of the Government not having the confidence of their convictions in the Bill. We are not to have an independent review body, we are not specifying the amount of resource for individual missions, and there is no action plan. Now we are to have an annual report a third of the way through the next reporting period. If the Government do have confidence in what they are seeking to do, surely they would not wish to avoid live scrutiny, which they might do for 120 days into the next period. I support the amendments and I hope that the Government will consider at least reducing the amount of time after the reporting period, if not down to 30 days then at least to somewhat less than 120.

[Neil O'Brien]

We will resist the amendments, for reasons of pure practicality. The Bill states that the annual report under clause 2 has to be laid before each House of Parliament within 120 days of the year that the report covers. That is to allow the relevant data and official statistics to be published and any corresponding analysis for the annual report to be completed. That means sufficient time to prepare a quality report.

The statistics covered in the report will include some of the most advanced and up-to-date metrics and methodologies available. That will be an enormous data-driven exercise, building on some of the new institutions I talked about earlier. It is right to give the Government sufficient time to deliver a high-quality report. Reducing the time from 120 days to 30 days risks the annual report being published without key pieces of data being available, from example from the Office for National Statistics. That would undermine the accountability role that the annual report is meant to play. Given those constraints, I ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw the amendment.