We are laughing but in the end, it is no joke. It means that people are isolated and unable to get to employment. It is not just rural areas such as the noble Baroness’s. In one of the villages in my area—an urban area of west Yorkshire—you cannot get a bus after 5 pm. Come on! If we are serious about narrowing these gaps, we have to be serious about public transport. Many of those of us who live outside London will applaud that measure, because once it is part of a regular public reporting process, it will force change both in funding and in governance models.
I will not go through all 12 missions, you will be very pleased to hear, but that gives noble Lords a thread of an idea of what needs to happen if we are serious about helping parts of the country that suffer from not just one area of poverty, but which are deprived in all of these “capitals”, resulting in a serious negative pull on their lives and the lives of their communities.
The question for the Government is: are they serious about levelling up? If they are, the missions will be in the Bill, as in Amendment 7. If they are, the metrics should be included—in headline form, because I take the point that you cannot put in the Bill every way in which you are going to measure. All I have put in the amendment is that we will measure healthy life expectancy —about which we have had a bit of debate—which can be measured in a variety of ways.
If we do not include missions and metrics, we are not being serious about this. I feel very strongly about it, as perhaps you can tell, because unless we do, we are not being serious about helping people who do not have the same advantages and lifestyles as others are able to enjoy. We have to something about it; it is not acceptable.
I know this puts the Minister under pressure, but I want the Government to just say that they are serious about this and want to put this in the Bill, because these spatial disparities scar our nation and affect it negatively, through unfulfilled talent, lost opportunities and the cost to the public purse in subsiding low wages.
5.30 pm
As party spokesperson, I would just like to comment on one or two of the other points made today. I will not delay the Committee too long. I have said already
that on these Benches we totally support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman; we must put this in the Bill.
We had a really good debate on health disparities and the social determinants of health, which we may be able to do something about if we put the missions in the Bill. Obviously I support what the noble Lord, Lord Best, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds said on their concerns about how we measure that. I am open to whatever measure we think will work to improve the healthy lives that people can lead.
It is all tied up in these wider determinants of health, as is housing, which my noble friend Lord Stunell ably explained when speaking to Amendment 20. We are anxious for safe homes. If the cladding scandal has taught us anything—it should have—it is that we need to really focus, even more than the Building Safety Act has, on creating safe homes for people. It is not just safe buildings but safe environments for those homes. I hate the word “affordable”, so we will get that changed if we can.
I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that we all agree we need more houses, but there is too much focus on numbers. The number of new homes is important, but so is the type of homes we build—for example, homes for extra care or small family homes, rather than large, executive four-bed homes, which are what developers always want to build. I look forward to having a debate on that.
We should remember that house prices in some parts of the country, such as my own, are not anywhere near those in London. If anybody is short of cash and wants to cash in their London home and move north, near two great national parks, you can buy a house for £100,000 near where I live. It might be a bit colder, but you get the national parks to enjoy. I hope we can have that debate as well.
This has been an excellent debate on something I feel strongly about. I look forward to the Minister’s response.