I remind hon. Members that there have been some changes to the normal practice, in order to support the new hybrid arrangements. The timing of debates has been amended to allow technical arrangements to be made for the next debate. There will also be a suspension between each debate.
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Members attending physically who are in the later stages of the call list should use the seats in the Public Gallery; I can see some Members there now. Once Members have spoken, I would be grateful if they vacated their seats—Members can speak only from the horseshoe, where the microphones are.
That this House has considered the levelling up agenda.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. I am delighted to see the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman), and I thank other hon. Members for being part of this debate. I am happy to forgo my summing-up at the end to get as many folks in for as long as possible, but I would like to talk for 10 to 12 minutes now to outline some arguments.
I have two key points to make to the Minister and I will come straight to them. On the immediate issue, the Isle of Wight Council and I, working together, are putting in what we believe is a very strong bid for a development in East Cowes. I am keen that it reaches receptive ears in Government and among Ministers.
Secondly, I would like to talk more broadly about the levelling-up agenda for the Island and ask the Government to work with us—and even to use the Island as a model, a mini region, to see what a strategic cross-Government agenda could look like. I am most concerned to talk to the Minister about the extent to which the Treasury is leading cross-Government work, rather than the Cabinet Office, and how we are developing cross-Government, coherent, integrated policy making.
However, if there is one critical element that I want to leave with the Minister today, it is that the levelling-up agenda for the Isle of Wight implies many things. That includes not only economic development, important as that is, but training and skills, education, which is critical, health outcomes, greater environmental protection, housing and planning. Effectively, we want a strategic road map for the next 50 years that has more to offer the Island than we have had in the past 50 years.
Order. We have 13 Back-Bench speakers. If there is to be any chance of everybody getting in, we will have to have a tight time limit. I will set it at three and a half minutes at the moment, but that may have to come down to three minutes. I would be grateful if speeches were kept below three minutes.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I congratulate the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing a really important debate.
When we talk about levelling up, there is one fundamental point that the Government would rather we all forgot: we cannot level up the country without properly resourcing local government. Councils up and down the country should be at the forefront of investment and regeneration. Councils, combined authorities and Mayors will be delivering the infrastructure and regeneration projects that will level up our cities, towns and villages, but more than a decade of devastating austerity has undermined them, and damaged our communities. It has hit the poorest areas hardest. The areas that need regeneration the most have been left with the least to deliver it. High streets that need investment to change for the economy of tomorrow have been left behind in yesterday, while local budgets have been decimated.
Barnsley Council has faced some of the worst Government cuts in the country, and has lost 40% of its income since 2010. For the services that have been decimated and the opportunities for investment that have been lost to austerity, the concept of levelling up could be a very welcome one, but one-off pots of money will not change a broken system that leaves behind so many people and so many parts of the country.
There is something wrong with the system when the Chancellor’s constituency of Richmond (Yorks) is prioritised over Barnsley in the Budget, even though, on almost every indicator, Barnsley is more deserving of funding. That leaves “levelling up” as no more than a slogan. We need to look more fundamentally at the kind of country we are and how and who our economy has been working for. The people of this country have been promised better, and deserve better. Our councils and communities deserve the resources that they need to thrive, not just get by.
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Edward. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing this debate. Levelling up, as it has become known, is the biggest challenge that this country currently faces. It is about giving hope to communities that have been ignored for too long, tackling deep pockets of deprivation, giving people the opportunity to realise their full potential and bridging the stubbornly wide productivity gap that has held back the UK economy for far too long.
Levelling up must not be piecemeal, fragmented and short-term interventions. Instead, it must be a set of coherent, sustained and properly funded policy initiatives fully co-ordinated across Government.
One of the pockets of deprivation is in Lowestoft, but I welcome the investment that the Government and councils are making in the Gull Wing bridge, the flood defence scheme and the towns deal, which equates to almost £220 million of public sector funding in the heart of Lowestoft over the next five years. Our tasks locally are to ensure that those schemes are built on time and unleash a tide of private sector job-creating investment.
I also welcome the proposed freeport at Felixstowe, 50 miles down off the Suffolk coast. However, I emphasise the importance of not jumping from one intervention to the next, but instead continuing to see through proven strategies that are already up and running. The Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth enterprise zone, set up in 2012, like other enterprise zones around the country, has been very successful. It has an energy focus that is aligned with the Government’s clean growth strategy. By reallocating the existing footprint of the enterprise zone around Lowestoft port, more than 300 jobs can be created, 40 new businesses can be supported, and between £1 million and £3 million of retained rates can be generated.
Sir Edward, it is great to be here with you and other colleagues, but when it comes to levelling up, today we are a sideshow. The important business is taking place in the other place with the Second Reading of the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill. Putting skills and lifelong learning at the heart of the Government’s policy agenda is absolutely critical, and we must ensure that the ambitions of the reforms are fully realised. Linked to the Bill are local skills improvement plan trailblazers, and the chambers of commerce and colleges across Suffolk and Norfolk have come together and submitted a compelling application. The bid has a focus on the net zero agenda and rebuilding coastal communities. It highlights the workforce requirements across the region in offshore wind, in Sizewell C, in the emerging hydrogen economy and in the freeport.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward.
Clearly, this debate is about a con trick—a gimmick. It is actually the Tories admitting that they have continually let down communities, regions and nations for decades. However, they are now saying, “We’ll give some money back and everything will be better.”
Clearly, additional strategic investment is always welcome, but this investment is not strategic and it also bypasses the devolution settlement. We have heard from other contributors that this investment is far too piecemeal.
When we consider Westminster failures, this levelling-up fund does not even come close to making amends. If we go back to Maggie Thatcher’s flagship policy of right to buy council houses, the fact that initially all receipts went into Westminster coffers meant the erosion of council and social housing stock, with no funds available for new builds. In Scotland, it has taken the Scottish National party Government to try to turn this situation round, with record numbers of new build houses for rent. Unfortunately, England still has an incoherent housing policy that will cause further inequality.
Oil and gas produced £350 billion of revenue for the Exchequer and yet there was no consideration about setting up an oil fund to allow legacy considerations rather than the squandering of those revenues in tax cuts. Yet now we are supposed to be grateful for money coming back.
Look at the devastation of coalmining communities. Where is the coherent strategy for levelling them up? When opencast coalmining companies in my constituency went into liquidation in 2013, they left millions of pounds’ worth of outstanding restoration works and again the UK Government were nowhere to be seen. They did not contribute a penny and even refused to support a coal tax scheme that would have funded that restoration work.
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), my neighbour, on securing this important debate on levelling up. It is a really great opportunity to explore the scope of this call to action. The timing of the debate really could not be better, as it immediately follows the G7 and the joint communiqué published by the Group of Seven developed country leaders, indicating the shared agenda that we have and the central role that the Government’s agenda of levelling up has across those other nations, which are key trading partners and, indeed, key allies.
The issue of levelling up resonates across the nation, and we saw that in the general election. I believe that we need to look not just at regional levelling up, which we heard about so eloquently from my hon. Friend, but at the broader scope and vision that we saw in the communiqué that was published following this weekend’s conference. The G7 leaders agreed unanimously that in reinvigorating our economies we should be levelling up as nations, so that no place or person, irrespective of their age, ethnicity or gender, is left behind. The full power of the applicability of our vision was seen not just at home but in the wider world.
It was important to see gender equality so clearly and explicitly embedded in the G7 communiqué for levelling up. Gender equality has to be embedded into the strategy of the Government’s levelling-up White Paper when it is published later this year. We need to be talking about left-behind people, as well as left-behind areas, particularly when we look at economic underperformance, which is something we are still having to tackle in this country. It demonstrates itself through low pay and low employment levels in some areas of the country, leading to lower living standards and poor productivity. These issues are still particular challenges for women in work. We may see increased numbers of women in Parliament or in high-profile jobs, but despite that, more women, who achieve higher qualifications than men, will still end up underperforming economically through their working life.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. My warmest congratulations to the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing the debate. We in the highlands were disappointed to be put in level 3; the leader of the Highland Council, Margaret Davidson, and I said as much. However, we are where we are.
One of the best ways to level up in the highlands and the islands—the remotest parts of Britain—is through tourism, so I want to speak in support of a bid that will be put to the Treasury in the next couple of days by the Highland Council. The hon. Member for Isle of Wight briefly touched on harbours, and I will as well. Wick harbour was once the herring capital of the UK. When the swell or the wind is in the wrong direction, it can make the harbour unsafe, so the bid is to build a new sea gate to increase the marina potential of the area.
I have often talked about a string of pearls. If we can take rich people who own boats—we call them yachties—up the east coast from the south-east, all the way up to the top of Scotland, and then get them to turn left, go along the top and go down again, not only will they have a great journey but we in the highlands, being canny Scots, would aim to lighten their wallets and their bank accounts on the way round. Doing up Wick would be a major step in that direction. It would accompany improvements to the town centre and to the industrial units next to the harbour.
The second part of the bid that the Highland Council is putting in is related to this. We have a very successful tourism enterprise, of which some hon. Members will have heard, called the North Coast 500. It is a brilliant idea supported by His Royal Highness Prince Charles, or the Duke of Rothesay as we call him in Scotland, and various local businesses. In the last few years it has been a tremendous success and an enormous number of visitors have come north. They have really enjoyed this truly scenic and amazing way around the top of Scotland. However, this has brought infrastructure challenges. One thinks of not enough car parking facilities, the structure of bridges that are starting to fall apart or congestion. If an ambulance in north-west Sutherland has to get in a hurry to the hospital at Wick, it can end up behind a lot of camper vans.
It is a pleasure to speak on this subject today. I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing this very important debate. Much like his patch, Somerset has suffered from a historical fiscal concentration on London and the south-east. A major part of addressing that is for those outside the metropolitan bubble to be given the kind of investment in connectivity and infrastructure that will allow us to properly compete.
As Somerset’s representative on the Heart of the South West local enterprise partnership, I see first-hand the need for investment and the marvellous potential that even quite modest investment can unlock. If we are to rebalance our economy and properly level up, investment in connectivity is key. That means digital and physical connectivity, such as the dualling of the A303— the major arterial road for the entire south-west—which I have been talking about endlessly for many years. I am sure that 4,000 years ago, when the ancient Britons hauled the stones to Stonehenge, they got stuck in queues on the A303. If the A303 was in a decent state, President Biden would have driven to Cornwall, purely to take in the glorious view of Somerton and Frome on the way. The real issue is that so many of my constituents rely on that road to get to work, to get to school and to visit family and friends, and not all of them have a helicopter lying around.
Connectivity also means public transport. I am delighted that, with the Langport Transport Group, we secured the funding for a feasibility study for a new railway station for Langport and Somerton from the Restoring Your Railway fund. At the moment, the splendid people of Somerton and Langport drive miles to Taunton, Bridgwater, Yeovil or Castle Cary just to catch a train, which is faintly ridiculous.
In the 21st century, digital connectivity is as important as physical connectivity. Last week I met Wessex Internet, a local internet service provider—a family business supported by Government investment that is building full-fibre networks across south Somerset. That really is a great example of public and private sector synergy. But much more needs to be done; in my constituency, more than 90% of households do not have access to superfast broadband. There are pockets, such as Isle Brewers, Compton Dundon and many more—too many to mention—where getting a 1 megabit connection is about the best a man or a woman can get.
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“Levelling up” seems a fancy phrase for regional policy—for taking wealth or economic development out of the south-east and trying to spread it around the country as much as possible. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, ours is one of the most unequal countries in the G7 developed nations, which is pretty scandalous.
Specifically on the Island, for nearly two decades we have been making the case for a more assertive regional assistance programme. In 2002, our GDP, our local economy, was 60% of that in the south-east. Things have improved in the past two decades and it is now 66%, but we are poorer than elsewhere in the south-east. Our educational achievements are lower, and our health outcomes worse.
The Island has a unique identity, which those of us who live there are incredibly proud of—frankly, we love it—but there is a downside: the economic impact of dislocation and diseconomies of scale specific to an island. In other areas of the UK, people can be physical islands, cut off, as we have seen with folks in Hartlepool and other places. That is why the attractiveness of the hopeful levelling-up agenda post Brexit rightly has such a hold on many people. What we must do is deliver on that agenda.
The levelling-up agenda, done right, is one of great hope and potential prosperity for this country. If it is done wrong, we will be letting down millions of people throughout the United Kingdom.
I want to make another point. According to all our statistics, the Isle of Wight should be in tier 1—frankly, we should be two constituencies in tier 1. My electorate is double the size of that of the average constituency in the United Kingdom and we are going to be two constituencies in three years’ time anyway, after the Boundary Commission changes. I am slightly concerned that we are one constituency in tier 2 at the moment. I think our case merits a higher priority.
I come to our bid. The bid going in this week is in relation to a series of buildings in East Cowes that we wish to transform. The purpose is to grow the number of high-paid jobs in marine, but also in the tidal, wind and offshore renewable sectors. Our bid will enable us to develop that cluster of excellence further and ensure that East Cowes continues to grow as a shipbuilding composite and green tech hub for the United Kingdom as a whole.
I would welcome a ministerial visit to East Cowes. My right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) visited during the campaign before he became Prime Minister; many people remember the picture that he had taken in front of the world’s largest Union Jack—on the Isle of Wight: where else? We would equally welcome another ministerial visit to see the excellent work being done there.
This is part of a wider agenda, which I want to turn to. The council is new and we are going to work together. It is not Conservative any longer, which is a shame, but we will work closely together and I know we will have a successful relationship. The council and I are not thinking about the next two to five years, but the next five to 25 years, because we want to see a different future for the Island. That has to be primarily around the regeneration of our town centres using the levelling-up and shared prosperity fund bids.
Our regeneration approach, especially after covid, will be focused primarily on Newport. The town centre has a lot of empty shops and Newport harbour is ripe for development as a regeneration hub. As part of that, we want high-quality new house building for Islanders in sensitive numbers to drive regeneration. We need to bring back young people and housing into the town centre to drive economic growth and to provide employment, for start-up companies, for leisure and for higher education facilities, which I will come to. We need space for start-ups and, potentially, a new railway station, depending on how the rejuvenation of the branch-line project goes. If there was a single long-term item that I would interest the Minister in after the East Cowes project, it would be the regeneration of Newport to drive the Island’s economy.
This is linked to many other things, as I am sure the Minister can imagine. We need to continue to develop higher education on the Island. The education revolution that transformed Bournemouth, Brighton, Portsmouth and Southampton has, scandalously, completely passed us by. Only 23% of Islanders go into higher education, compared with nearly 40% of Londoners. That is unacceptable.
Millions have been pledged by the Department for Education—I thank the Ministers for this—to help rebuild the Isle of Wight College. Under the excellent leadership of Debbie Lavin, the college is doing great work aligning with mainland colleges to be able to offer richer and better vocational courses, as well as degree courses. We are getting there in higher education, but more needs to be done.
Regenerating our towns also means that we can protect our landscape much more. We need our landscape—not only for our quality of life, but because it is a critical part of our visitor economy. Our landscape has specific economic as well as emotional and psychological value over and above a competitive price for low-density greenfield housing.
For 50 years, we have not built for Islanders. That situation needs to stop. As part of any levelling-up plan for the Island, we need greater landscape protection and a policy of building for Islanders. That means exceptional circumstance and, preferably, opting out of national targets. We think that the best way to give long-term protection to the Island, depending on what happens with the Government’s landscape review, is for it to have a new designation—a new template to work with Government: to become an “island park”. That could involve marine protection and landscape protection, maybe up to the level of being an area of outstanding natural beauty, perhaps with some opt-out for economic development.
We should work on a new template, and it can be a template for the UK. We can start in England with the Scilly Isles and the Isle of Wight; in Wales, there is Anglesey; and many Scottish islands could benefit from a similar shared model, although I note that Scotland has the special islands needs allowance. I wish we had that in England.
More can be done, but I am trying to show that economic development and educational aspiration need to go hand in hand with other things to ensure that when we regenerate, we do so in an intelligent, sensitive, long-term way that develops our people and gives them greater aspiration, greater hope for the future, and greater education and greater work opportunities, while also protecting our landscape for us and our nation in perpetuity, but also as a critical part of our visitor economy.
I am aware of the time; I will begin to wind up so that others can come in. I will be seeking separate debates on the progress of the island deal. We have made some progress on that, but we need to do more. I stress that there are additional costs to providing public services on an island, and those are not in dispute. I am delighted that the fair funding formula—championed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak), now Chancellor, whom I thank for his excellent work—contains an admission that additional costs are involved in providing local government services.
That same argument is still being played out in the field of health, specifically for the 12 universally small hospitals in England—and St Mary’s on the Isle of Wight is the most unique universally small hospital, because it is on an island; by definition, it cannot grow in any conceivable way. The population is about half of what a district general hospital normally requires for the tariff regime that currently operates within the NHS. I will also have a separate debate on ferries, which is far too big a topic just for here; likewise for agriculture.
Finally, I leave a single idea in the mind of the Minister: regeneration—levelling up, the shared prosperity regional agenda—is, for us, about a lot of things. Fundamentally, it is about making sure that our future is better than our past. It is about focusing on development, education, wellbeing and health, but doing so sensitively and intelligently while preserving our environment. As I say, done right, levelling up can be transformative. I very much hope that I can work with the Minister on a coherent, cross-Government approach for the Island in a way that can help us all nationally as well.
If the Government want to level up for Barnsley, they should implement the recommendations of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee report on the mineworkers’ pension scheme, which had unanimous cross-party backing—not just because it is morally the right thing to do and because the Government should not be in the business of profiting from miners’ pensions, but because the policy would change the lives of thousands of ex-miners, giving them an immediate financial uplift that would boost local businesses and economies when they spend.
If the Government want to level up for Barnsley, they should invest in our young people and their futures by delivering a children’s recovery plan that meets the scale of the challenge. Whereas the Labour party would meet that challenge with an ambitious £15 billion programme, this Government could not even muster 10% of what their own education recovery commissioner said was needed before he resigned in opposition to their failure.
If the Government want to level up Barnsley, they should make sure we receive the investment that towns such as ours deserve for regeneration and new, decent jobs, making sure that hard work gets a fair wage. Under this Government, in-work poverty has increased, long-term unemployment is rising at its fastest rate for more than a decade, and the Kickstart scheme has provided opportunities for just one in 25 young people. One-off pots of money for selected areas will not fundamentally rebalance our country or reverse a decade of austerity. We need good jobs, opportunities and properly funded services for every town. If levelling up truly means anything, it must mean delivering for towns such as Barnsley and investing in communities like mine.
I urge the Government to give this compelling proposal favourable consideration. We need to step up to the plate, so that local people have the skills needed to take up these exciting opportunities.
We know that the levelling-up fund is labelled as money that might otherwise have gone to the EU, but the reality is that the likes of Scotland had to make use of EU structural funds to offset Westminster letting us down. Indeed, the fact that the highlands became an EU objective 1 category area under Westminster rule says everything. However, that did allow the highlands to access funding for roads and bridges, including the upgrading of the last remaining single-track trunk road in the UK. That money funded harbour upgrades as well, which was real, strategic levelling up.
Now, conversely, we have Scottish Tories demanding road upgrades for schemes that Westminster failed to deliver on, and we know that it was the Tories who labelled Scottish fishermen as “expendable”. It is those same fishermen who have now been given a poor Brexit deal, and we know that our farmers will be the next to suffer because of the trade deals that have been negotiated by Westminster.
Even when we consider the electricity grid charging scheme, we see that Scotland faces the highest grid charges in Europe, so the system prejudices development in Scotland in areas that would actually benefit from levelling up. Real levelling up would also have seen the contract for difference procurement process amended to include local content.
To be clear, I will support bids by my local authority if they bring additional strategic investment, and I will also support community groups to try to access funding. But the process is a farce. Like the stronger towns fund, it is likely to be politically managed rather than having a proper needs-based assessment. The fact that the first bids have to be submitted by 18 June and be shovel-ready to be delivered in a year confirms a lack of strategic thinking and oversight. There is a real risk that hurried bids will be accepted, leading to cost and programme overruns later on.
Pitting MPs and local authorities against each other is not the way to tackle structural inequalities. My constituency needs additional support, but this is not the way that it should be managed.
Across all age groups men make up the majority of high and middle-income earners in the UK. Women are only over-represented in the category of low-paid work. Although there are record numbers of women in work under this Government, there is a persistent gender pay gap in the over 40s and an unemployment gap of more than 6% between men and women. The Government have to make levelling up as an agenda work hard for everybody throughout the United Kingdom, wherever they live.
The Government would do well to ensure that their policy focuses particularly on the experiences of women and how we can make sure we level up for women across the United Kingdom. It is important that every single part of our country is performing as it should in economic terms. If we do not give women the support they need, particularly through employment policies supporting maternity leave, we will continue to see an under-representation of women in the workplace.
The bid is “Please, help us to finance improvements that are much needed”. I say again, that sort of enterprise will take money from the south-east and the richer parts of the UK to the poorer parts. That is levelling up without the Government having to do much more than putting their hands in their pockets to help finance the initial capital expenditure. That will include electrical charging points and other improvements.
An example of the success of the North Coast 500, the former Member for South Ribble, who was in her time the parliamentary private secretary to the Prime Minister, and her partner are going to come and stay with me in August. I warmly encourage the Minister and his colleagues at the Treasury; they would have the most enjoyable time coming up north to see where their money would be wisely spent. Of course, I would offer them bed and breakfast—what is more, it would be free bed and breakfast, which for a Scot is pretty astonishing.
One of the greatest threats to the levelling-up agenda and so much more is the continuation of the covid restrictions, which will continue to harm lives and livelihoods across Somerton and Frome, costing jobs, harming the economy and depriving ordinary people of the opportunities they have worked hard to create. Levelling up is an essential component of the country’s agenda, and vitally important for Somerset. Let us get properly connected, up to speed and able to compete with the rest of the country on a level footing.