My Lords, I agree with a great deal of what the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, has said about the need for monitoring and evaluating any government process, but particularly one as deep-seated and far-ranging as this is obviously intended to be.
I will speak to Amendments 24, 26, 32 and 49, all of which appear in this group. They are tabled to explore how the outputs from the mechanism that Clause 1 sets up are to be monitored and, even more importantly, evaluated. Noble Lords will know that Governments are notoriously slack at carrying out timely and effective evaluation of their policies. They are very often launched in a blaze of glory, or, on this occasion, in a White Paper, and what follows is often a serious disappointment. My noble friend Lady Pinnock has shaped that argument very well in the debate on the first group. Avoiding monitoring and evaluation is deep-seated in the government machine, which actively avoids formal monitoring as far as it can and definitely seeks to avoid any public evaluation of what that monitoring reveals. That is not specific to this Government: I would be stretching my memory to think of a Government who have eagerly embraced independent evaluation and monitoring of any of their policies.
Interestingly, the Government’s White Paper is very strong on “accountability” and “transparency”, which it describes as key attributes that will be built into the levelling-up programme. Unfortunately, the Bill completely omits to mention these two essential characteristics of levelling up, and for that matter, it also omits any mention of specific missions. These amendments are designed to tackle that gap. No doubt my amendments and those of the noble Baroness could be strengthened, and I hope we will see how best we can do that. I regard these as quite modest, de minimis amendments to establish the principle of what is needed.
The first of the amendments I have tabled with my noble friend Lady Pinnock, Amendment 24, simply inserts another prerequisite for any mission statement coming into force: that there must first be an affirmative resolution by each House of Parliament, not merely having them laid before us. In fact, that is a really basic
requirement for any such far-reaching policy package: it should have proper parliamentary scrutiny. Without this amendment or something very like it, not one of the mission statements will have ever received any direct democratic endorsement.
The Minister may say that this was in the Conservative manifesto of 2019. The slogan was certainly in the manifesto, but were the missions? No, they were not. Were the metrics of any of the missions in the manifesto? No, they were not. Importantly, bearing in mind that this is a political process, did the Government even have a settled view on what levelling up was during the passage of three Prime Ministers through Downing Street and four changes of Secretary of State last year? No, they did not have a settled view. In fact, except for an unusually hostile reception of a Budget last autumn, levelling up would now be taking off in a completely different direction, with a completely different Administration and objectives. A 2019 election slogan cannot absolve the mission statements from parliamentary scrutiny. Indeed, the Government’s own White Paper makes it clear that such accountability and transparency in the process itself is important.
On transparency, I admit that my claim that it is all in the White Paper overlooks the fact that that was indeed three Prime Ministers ago, and maybe that has been scrubbed in the nine months since. Perhaps the Minister can confirm whether it is still an important principle in the Government’s thinking about levelling up. I therefore hope that I will get a positive answer from the Minister on Amendment 24, and that she will be very quick and willing to accept it.
Amendment 26 points to a critical weakness in Clause 1: the complete absence of accountability of Ministers of the Crown. Clause 1(8) rushes from dealing with the first iteration of statements of mission—those that are in front of us now via the White Paper—to publishing the second iteration, without ever passing “Go”. There is no mention in Clause 1(8) of independently examined evidence and evaluation of what has happened so far and no accompanying analysis, but simply a straight jump to laying it before Parliament, which will be, as far as I understand it, on a take-it-or-leave-it unamendable basis. Again, the Minister may be able to reassure me that these will be open, debatable and amendable by Parliament. I should be very pleased, and totally astonished, if she were to say that.
Amendment 26 requires that independent evaluations be published to accompany the new draft mission statements when they come before Parliament, and that the draft revised missions themselves are constructed by the process set out in Amendment 29, which we will come to later this evening. That requires that such missions shall, prior to their adoption, have been endorsed by the devolved Administrations and by local government within England in respect of their specific areas.
A central part of levelling up has to be a built-in independent evaluation system providing analysis alongside each round of mission statements. Otherwise, we all know what will happen—it happens all the time: targets will be fudged and stretched and outcomes will not be monitored properly, yet the process will still go blithely on, repeating the same errors and omissions
time and again until, in due course, it lapses into history and is replaced by the latest sparkly new slogan. Levelling up will become just another in a long string of non-performing slogans.
That brings me to Amendment 32 in my name and those of my noble friend Lady Pinnock and the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine. I appreciate their support. As it stands, Clause 2(2)(a) only requires that the formal periodic report on levelling up includes the Minister’s own assessment of how well things are going. Our amendment would require that, alongside that ministerial assessment, there should be
“an independent evaluation of the effectiveness of the progress that has been made”.
That is not very challenging, is it? The effectiveness of the progress that has been made should be supported by an independent evaluation.
That is surely the true test of accountability—for the evaluation to be based on objective evidence, not a subjective assessment, least of all a subjective assessment made by the person being held to account. We would not accept in most areas of responsibility that the accountability, assessment and evaluation is done by the person being held to account. I very much hope that the Minister agrees and will accept Amendment 32 in due course.
Finally, Amendment 49, to which my noble friend Lady Pinnock has added her name, which I appreciate, takes these essential reforms forward to apply to all future iterations of statements of mission. This is not just about getting it right now; it is about embedding a process that will continue indefinitely as levelling up rolls out iteration after iteration.
Taken together, these four amendments plug the huge gap between the good intentions and smooth words in the White Paper and the stark, Whitehall-controlled process being set out in the Bill. I look forward to hearing that they find favour with your Lordships and the Minister.