Because so much of the Bill focuses on England only, I will concentrate my remarks on amendment 14. The fact that this amendment has to be tabled at all shows that the Government cannot, and do not expect to, meet their own expectations raised in the Bill. There is nothing more dangerous than raising expectations that will not be met.
This is not just a Bill in the usual sense; levelling up is not a run-of-the-mill promise that can easily be broken and forgotten. According to the Government, the very concept of levelling up is a flagship policy—a policy designed to change the face of the UK, genuinely to seek to spread prosperity and opportunity, and to make our communities better right across the board. Anyone who has such expectations based on what the Government have said about the Bill and its aims will, I fear, be disappointed. The very fact that amendment 14 exists illustrates that they will be disappointed. It is not credible that a Government so in love with austerity can be trusted to level up in any meaningful and sustainable way. Growth in the UK has been fatally undermined by both incompetence and Brexit. That is why amendment 14 matters and why we in the SNP support it.
In the absence of growth and grown-up and frank conversations about the damage of Brexit, we have instead vague missions, with no real plans for delivery—missions that are, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, of dubious quality. Yet still the Government have reserved to themselves the power to change the goalposts. That demonstrates that the Government are not even clear about how they will measure the success or the progress of the very missions that they have set themselves.
An annual report can apparently make everything all right, but it simply will not be enough to keep the Government on track to achieve their objectives. There is also a lack of ownership and accountability for each of the 12 levelling-up missions by individual Government Departments. None of this is news to the Government, of course, which is why they have retained that authority to move the goalposts and change their own targets if they are not going to be met. This is like someone marking their own homework and reserving the right to change the pass mark of the test that they have set themselves. That does not sound like a Government who are confident about their own delivery, even though we are talking about a flagship policy.