It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), who has such knowledge of rural matters. It is also a pleasure to follow so many fine maiden speeches from my hon. Friends the Members for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Mohindra), for Blyth Valley (Ian Levy), for Bolton North East (Mark Logan) and for Derbyshire Dales (Miss Dines) and the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne)—they were all fantastic speeches.
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I would like to talk primarily about the impact of the current situation on business, but I will touch briefly on levelling up, which was going to dominate my speech. I have always been a huge advocate of levelling up—we used to call it “a fairer deal for the north”—so the investment spending is welcome. However, I have made the point before in the Chamber that simply public sector spending will not do.
It is said that if all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they still would not reach a conclusion. I will mention two economists who have different views on this subject. Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, said that connectivity is crucial to
prosperity. At the other end of the scale, Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs points to places like Doncaster, which are very well connected, yet their economy is not in great shape. The arbiter on this is another economist, David Smith, who writes in The Sunday Times. He says that public sector spending without private sector investment is a waste of money, so we need to ensure that we encourage and incentivise the private sector to invest.
One way of doing that is through super enterprise zones. We could look at the devolved regions. The Tees Valley is a very good example in my neighbourhood. There are nine devolved regions, each with an elected Mayor, and of all those regions, the Tees Valley comes bottom in terms of average wages and GDP. We could, for example, make the bottom three combined authorities super enterprise zones for their entire area, with enhanced capital allowances and no business rates.