My Lords, as we may be about to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, the inequalities which divide our country are deep-seated and long-standing, so the Government are right to act, but there seems to have been a voltage drop between the 240-volt diagnostic clarity of last year’s levelling up White Paper and the flickering 12-volt legislative battery before us today. There is wide agreement in the House this afternoon that this is essentially a misnamed local government and planning Bill, which is strange given the Bill’s preoccupation with naming things. For people who do not like “Acacia Avenue”, it goes to great lengths telling them how to rename their street. It has nine pages telling mayors how to rename themselves “governor” but, on some of the most pressing levelling-up concerns, the Bill has zero pages.
What, for example, will the Bill actually do for people in Shard End, the part of east Birmingham where I was born? It is in the bottom 10% of most deprived wards in the country and is, as it happens, the most pro-Brexit area in Birmingham, so people there want change, but despite the Bill’s length you would be hard pressed to point to much in it that will practically benefit them. So, as well as amendments on housing, infrastructure and the environment, here are three further suggestions for perhaps more radical reform.
First, we could use the Bill to really drive inclusive and sustainable economic growth. Without it, levelling up collapses into a zero-sum redistributive arm wrestle. Taking my cue from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle, I say that a good place to start would be tackling working-age poor health, which today’s Times reveals costs the economy a staggering £150 billion a year, equivalent to 7% of GDP. It is time to get more creative and more radical. For example, at a time when the economy has an acute labour shortage, consider national insurance tax incentives for employers
offering evidence-based physical and mental health workplace support. At a time when the OBR has just hiked its forecast for future incapacity and disability benefits spending by an astonishing £7.5 billion extra a year—which, by the way, far outstrips any earmarked funding for levelling up—it is time to break with the Treasury orthodoxy of AME/DEL accounting. Instead, let us legislate to include a devolution deal option for mayors, combined authorities and local authorities to gain-share with DWP when local initiatives offset future benefits costs.
Secondly, let us use the Bill to help overcome political short-termism, by giving much stronger statutory teeth to the Government’s own levelling-up missions. That might force honest debate about what it will take, for example, to deliver the Government’s public health mission of five extra years of healthy life expectancy—because the Health Foundation says that, with current policy, that will take a mere 192 years to achieve. Or take social care. Last June in a Written Question I asked the Government how they track the required availability of social care across the country. The answer was, “We don’t, and we won’t.” Now the whole country is living with the consequences: ambulances are backed up and A&Es are at breaking point because 13,000 people are stuck in hospital. Instead of 40-plus new hospitals, we have the equivalent of minus 26. Let us use this legislation to make it harder for Governments of all stripes to duck difficult decisions as they wait for slow-burn problems to become national crises.
Thirdly, levelling up will of course take time to be felt, but there are direct levers the Government could use right now, and the Bill could help. They could, for example, legislate to distribute current public funding more fairly across the country. Some local government and policing allocations have not been updated for at least a decade, which the IFS says means that
“the amounts allocated to different places are essentially arbitrary”.
Why wait to do something about that until after the next election?
These are just three ways in which the Bill could potentially be strengthened. Last year’s White Paper in my judgment rightly argued for “root and branch reform”. Unfortunately, the Bill currently leaves the roots and branches of our difficulties largely untouched. In my judgment, it is more like a gentle rustling of the leaves.
6.45 pm