Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill — House of Commons, 2022-06-08
Topic: Mixed Topics
Liam Dominic Byrne (Labour, Centre-left): I think that what unites us across the House is an ambition to avoid the postcode where someone is born defining their possibilities in life. I think that that is something we share, but it is the reality for too many of the people we represent. We now live in a country where it takes five generations for the heirs of someone born in the lowest income group to rise up and even earn national average wages. That is a complete scandal. Social mobility has broken down in this country, and this Bill should have stepped up to address our ambition I wish to say two things by way of my contribution. First, as a former Chief Secretary who drove through the Total Place initiative and someone who has spent 20 years working on devolution—as the Minister knows, there are centralisers and localisers on both sides of this House, and I am resolutely a localiser—I am convinced that the inequalities in this country will be impossible to eradicate unless we create the freedom for local regions to begin developing their own institutions. They should be robust enough to mobilise and co-ordinate the demand and supply sides of ideas and innovation, capital and investment and land, and crucially, to intervene in the labour market. We will continue to fail until local regions have the power to set up radical university enterprise zones, like the Fraunhofer, to translate innovation into the private sector; regional banks; regional land trusts; and local commissions on skills and enterprise. However, there are a few steps we could take now to drive this forward First, we have to take the 149 different local spending programmes which, together, have in them £65 billion, spread between eight different Departments, and put them into block grants for local areas. We have the most ridiculous centralisation at the moment as a result of having to bid against different criteria for 149 different programmes. We have to take a Total Place approach to pooling public sending—crucially, Department for Work and Pensions spending, as well as that of Department for Education and Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. We should go further and create full-time regional Ministers in government and full-time regional Select Committees in this House. Crucially, we have to fix the gross imbalances in public spending that mean that spending per capita in London is 70 points higher than it is in the west midlands Secondly, as chair of the East Birmingham Inclusive Growth Taskforce, I can say that East Birmingham is a city the size of Derby, that it is the land between the two high-speed stations, but that it is also the capital of Britain’s unemployment. The potential is enormous, because of the new jobs that will be created by High Speed 2, but we have to make sure that we are not the oasis of inequality in between that wealth. That is why Bridgid Jones, the Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council, has today written to Andy Street, the Mayor of the West Midlands, to ask that we make East Birmingham the key focus of the west midlands trailblazer devolution deal. We have a number of asks. We want to see: multi-year whole place public funding—pooling budgets between the Department for Work and Pensions and others; a levelling-up zone that would give us tax increment financing, potentially for a new urban development corporation; net zero powers; support for early intervention and preventive work, particularly in health; an enhanced transport package that would allow us to see our metro built through East Birmingham; a lot more funding for schools and for skills; tailored employment support; and greater housing powers We would love the Minister to meet a delegation from Birmingham along with the east Birmingham MPs in order to discuss this devolution deal in more detail. I am confident that we will also have the support of the Mayor of the West Midlands, too.