I support the amendments in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck). This debate has illustrated a central defect in the Bill, to which I will return when I address clause 1.
People going hungry is clearly a product of 10 to 12 years of austerity and deepening division in our society. Somebody needs to get a grip on this. I represent 23 ex-mining villages in the heart of England, in Yorkshire. Cornwall is a very special place, but Yorkshire is God’s own county. The county of the right hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) may have a special constitutional role, but Yorkshire has a divine role.
It is interesting that the Bill has no vision for what parish and town councils can do. Notwithstanding that, parish and town councils in my area are the ones feeding the hungry and, now, opening up warm places for elderly people and families to go to, because of the cost of energy. They are the ones doing the levelling up.
When there was a problem with people leaving their home because of covid, who arranged for people in my village to knock on doors to offer to go to the Co-op? It was the town and parish councils. They organised the churches, the voluntary sector and all the other bodies in the village. I represent 23 ex-mining villages, and it happened everywhere in my constituency. Why are we distributing power away from the centre in a top-down, uniform, homogenous way that is convenient only to the men and women in Westminster, rather than to the communities we represent, which are so different in character?
The Bill is full of constitutional changes, structural changes and processes, but it does not specify the outcomes. Part 1 refers to the mission statements that will be produced, but there is no reference in the Bill to what those mission statements will contain. However, the White Paper has a helpful indication of what the mission statements, which the Minister will eventually organise, will contain. She needs to tell the House what her intentions are in relation to the mission statements, because there is nothing in the Bill.
Clause 1 talks about the mission statements being
“laid before each House of Parliament”.
Does that mean there will be a vote? Will the mission statements be amendable? Laying them before the House might mean putting them in the Library, which is simply not acceptable. If the Bill does not allow the House to discuss the objectives we are trying to achieve, there must be proper scrutiny of the matter in the House of Commons.
The amendments in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) raise the question of outcomes, rather than process. She wants to see young people—in fact, all our people—fed. The Bill does not allow for that, because we are dealing with structures rather than outcomes. I want to illustrate this with two further points that are in the mission statements in the White Paper, but not in the Bill. They relate to bus transportation, which the Minister referred to, and another point. I will talk about them quickly, because there is not a lot of time.
My constituency is the 529th least socially mobile constituency in England. There are 533 on the list, so only four seats have less mobility than mine. What does that mean? A child born in poverty today in my constituency will almost certainly die in poverty—there is no social mobility unless we do something dramatic—and younger than children being born elsewhere. That is not acceptable.
Social mobility is about education and all sorts of other things, but there are two things I want to focus on briefly. One is transport. In a village that has no work any more—remember that the villages were built around coal mines, which have all gone—it is very difficult to find work. People have to move from one place to another, but the way in which we organise our public transport system is not helpful. I met a woman who walks in the dark for an hour from one village to another to work, and then back in the dark at night. That is not acceptable.
There are 24,000 people in my constituency—I raise my constituency to illustrate a broader point—without access to a car. I asked how many people use a bus or a train. Out of the whole constituency, only 3,900 people use either a bus or a train, yet there are 24,000 people without a car. The buses stop early in the evening and start later in the morning. Lloyds bank tell me that of the 650 seats in our country, people in mine rank 621st for how likely we are to use public transport, through our credit or debit cards or however we pay. That is not acceptable. Will the Minister accept that something has gone radically wrong with our public transport system that in a constituency such as mine with no social mobility at all, people are imprisoned in villages with no work and no public transport? Something drastic needs to be done about it, which is not in the Bill.
Another point that is in the White Paper but not the Bill is digital exclusion. The White Paper states that digital exclusion and social exclusion go together. Of course they do, but here is the fact. In my constituency, there is no easy way to move around without a car—using cars is not a great thing anyway for the planet—but the download speed in my village is 46 megabits per second. The average for the UK is 86. We have people running businesses in the constituency who cannot move to a job somewhere, and it is not working. I met a guy—an ex-miner—who had won this wonderful contract to
provide design solutions for the New York stock exchange. Guess what? He was doing the design at work in my constituency but he had to put the computer in the back of the car and drive it home so that he could access the internet in the evening. That is not acceptable.
As for telephones, in my house I cannot use a mobile phone. What I want is a discussion not about my constituency, but about everyone who lives in left-behind or held-back communities up and down our country. The talk of levelling up in the Bill gave them hope. Everybody has clocked those words, but they have also clocked something else: the Government have not willed the means to change what has happened to so many communities, which are locked out of the so-called prosperity of our country. I feel very angry about this, and I am very disappointed with this Bill.
My final point is on local government. I was council leader in Leeds, one of the great cities of the country. We had resources to begin to make a difference, although not enough—we always needed more; council leaders will always say that—but local authorities no longer have the resources to deliver the kind of levelling-up agenda the Government say they want. We see that in every single service—buses, trains, education, feeding people who are hungry. Funding for all those areas has been cut.
There was a discussion earlier in the debate about literacy. My constituency has some of the worst educational attainment figures in the country, and school funding has been cut by 40% during this Government’s time in office. We cannot level up on peanuts or simply by changing structures; we have to will the means as well.