I thank the Minister for her response to the question I posed, which was to try to establish greater clarity on what we mean by levelling up before we start debating the 500-plus amendments to this Bill. Unfortunately, I do not think any of us are much the wiser.
On the one hand, the Minister was quite rightly able to agree what is in her Government’s White Paper, but equally she then talked about spreading the benefits or investment of levelling up away from those areas which the White Paper defined as spatial disparities or geographical inequalities. We ought to have a laser-like focus on dealing with those places, be they coastal towns, rural areas, or areas where old industries have gone and new industries have not replaced them. That is what I wanted to achieve from this short debate. Unfortunately, I really do not think that we are any nearer to knowing what the Government’s intentions are.
What I do know, from long experience and involvement in local government—I should mention, and apologise for not having done so, my interests in the register as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and as a councillor in Kirklees in West Yorkshire—is that, if we just have relatively short-term funding and investment packages, that will not work. The City Challenge; Single Regeneration Budget 1; Single Regeneration Budget 2; the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund; the whole panoply of those investment packages came and went and some of those places are still identified by the Government’s own White Paper as being priority one, in need of—in their terms—levelling up. The Government say in the levelling up White Paper that levelling up should be “broad, deep and long-term.” The Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill in front of us does none of those things, and although I beg to withdraw the amendment, I will be pursuing the aspirations and intentions of the Government in this levelling-up Bill throughout its proceeding.