My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Foster of Bath for raising this very important issue and for providing an evidence base and powerful argument in support of rural communities in particular. This short but important debate has cast a focus on the confusion at the heart of levelling up, which the debate on Amendment 1 was trying to resolve: what do we mean by levelling up and spatial disparities? What do we mean by improving the lives of people who live in different parts of the country, where for some there is low pay, low skills and poor health and for others there is a lack of connectivity or a lack of opportunities? Because we have not resolved that confusion, we will, throughout the passage of the Bill, get arguments of different natures in support of communities which need levelling up, whatever we mean by it. I hope that levelling up will not mean, or be defined by the Government as, either “rural levelling up” or “urban levelling up”, or that we will level up coastal, rural or urban areas separately. The levelling-up agenda must have a clear definition—which is in the White Paper, as I keep pointing out, but is not in the Bill—about the geographical disparities across this country, be they rural, coastal or urban, that result in people’s lives and the country being poorer. The levelling-up Bill ought to address that, but it unfortunately fails to do so.
I was struck by a really good phrase used by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, about levelling up: we do not want levelling-up ambitions to “blow in the political wind”. That is one of the reasons why I support having both the broad mission statements and the broad metrics for those mission statements in the Bill, so that we can say to whatever Government we have, “This is what we have agreed to, and this is what we are going to demand that you address.” Otherwise, we will come back again to the debate about the difficulties for people who live in rural areas. While noble Lords might think that West Yorkshire, where I live, is a big urban area, surprisingly, the upper Colne Valley could not be more rural; there are scattered farm settlements across the hillsides going up to the top of the Pennines. Its residents understand what it means to not have access to public transport, mobile networks or broadband connectivity.
Let us not go down the route of it being one or the other. I hope the Government will, even if I have to encourage them again, eventually closely define what they mean by “geographical disparities” and then address them through the missions and metrics that I hope we will put on the face of the Bill.