Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill — House of Commons, 2022-06-08
Topic: Housing
Alexander James Jorden Norris (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to close this debate on behalf of the Opposition. When it comes to levelling up, we have had a few rounds of departmental questions, the White Paper, the Bill and, today, nearly six hours of very good debate. There is only one question left in front of us: when it comes to levelling up and the Government’s approach to levelling up, is this it? With our huge regional inequalities, is what is in the first third of this Bill really it? When it comes to the wasted potential of the nations and regions in our country, is this it? When it comes to the over-centralisation of this country, is this really it? The Minister for Housing seems to think that maybe it is, but I say gently to him: if this really was a comprehensive Bill aimed at tackling the regional inequalities that are holding us back, it would not have been necessary to bulk it out with a planning Bill as well. That is the reality: the first third of the Bill is levelling up, and two thirds are about planning. The reality, too, is that there are no answers in here either to the immediate cost of living challenges we face, or to the long-term structural questions that we as a country must address—more evidence that this Government are out of touch and out of ideas Hon. Members should not take my word for it: the Office for National Statistics report clearly shows that, far from levelling up, things are getting worse, and the excoriating report from the Public Accounts Committee shows that the approach so far has been a very poor one indeed. Is this really it This debate has been a good one. I know the Minister is a listener and will reflect on the contributions that have been made, but he will certainly have heard a lot that would improve the Bill. The Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), should have been drafted in to help to write it because his speech was about two fundamental things: first, more money, ending the beauty parades of small pots of funding, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) and my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter) said, and properly funding our communities so they can build their futures; and secondly, new powers for existing Mayors and access to those powers for communities that do not currently have them. That was a really good starter for where we could go with the Bill Some reality was injected into the debate by my hon. Friends the Members for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) and for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), who talked movingly about just how hard things are for people right now and the struggle people are facing just to make the bills work, finding that there is too much week or too much month left at the end for their paycheques to cover. There is not enough in the Bill to address that. Again we see the promise of jam tomorrow, but there is no value in jam tomorrow when there is not bread today My hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss) and for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) also injected some reality around cuts to local authorities. We talk about this on the Labour Benches a lot, but we used to see Government Back Benchers standing up to say how much they had been winning out of levelling up so far. The reality, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) said in her opening speech, is that even those winners, through the levelling up fund, the towns fund or the future high streets fund, are losers because of the cuts to their local authorities. She made those points very well My hon. Friends the Members for York Central (Rachael Maskell), for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake) and for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) also made moving points about decent housing. I hope that we can feature that in Committee, because it is impossible for people to build a life and to build communities, to have that solid foundation to reach their potential and to help their family to reach theirs, if they are worried about their housing, or if their housing is of poor quality or a detriment to their health. We must aspire to much better for our fellow citizens Finally on the Labour Benches, I must refer to the contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova), and the points she made about London. Hon. Members on the Government Benches also said this, but it is important to understand that across every community there are pockets of deprivation. Levelling up fails if it becomes a conversation of north versus south or the rest of the country versus London. That does not serve anybody, and my commitment to her is that she will never see us do that There were an awful lot of very good contributions from those on the Government Benches, particularly those that majored on planning—I counted 27, and I think I got them all—but there were also good contributions in interventions on the Secretary of State and the shadow Secretary of State. For the moment, I think there was contentment that, broadly, the Secretary of State largely seemed to think that he could accommodate all those significant and strongly felt views about local decision making. We want to see that too. I think it will get harder. I say to the Minister, and I know this is his instinct, that he will have to bring people with him on this. There is inevitably a trade-off at some point between reaching the volumes we need to address our housing crisis and having respect for communities and local decision making. Nobody thinks that is easy, and that ought to be dealt with. We will have plenty of time in Committee to do that. If we are not going to do levelling up, we might as well do that in its stead To make a few points of my own, four months ago, the Secretary of State presented the levelling up White Paper to this House. After all the big promises and slogans, before elections and after, it offered little other than the usual: governing by press release, with the reality never quite matching up. The one thing in there was that levelling up, which, as the Prime Minister has reiterated, was defined as the core mission of this Government, would have 12 missions. The hon. Member for Burnley (Antony Higginbotham) made an excellent case for them, although I would gently say to him that they also served to highlight the failings of this Government over the past 12 years on education, housing and crime— 12 admissions of failure to cover 12 years of wasted time in Government.