My Lords, this could be a brief debate on this group of amendments. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, in her conclusions on missions and metrics—and I shall come back to that in a moment. I also agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, said a moment ago. I hope I quote him correctly, but I think he said, “The Bill will be useful if it forces a focus on the means of delivering levelling up”. That was particularly helpful, because it is really what these amendments in this small group are about.
In moving Amendment 10, I shall speak also to Amendment 58, to which I have added my name, and I want to support Amendment 48. There has been a lengthy debate on missions and metrics, the existing and the new ones. When I read the White Paper and then the Bill for the first time, particularly the missions and metrics, I concluded that we had to start with how outcomes would be evaluated. The metrics as set out will in most cases be impossible to interpret in the context of levelling up because they cover too large a spatial area. We need to know what exactly needs levelling up and where.
As an example, I take bus services, in the context of services in the past year being cut by 10% across the country. Yet in the document about measuring the progress in levelling up, in figure 16 there are mentions of buses—but it always assumes that there is a bus. It is about whether the bus is running late or not and whether you can get to work by bus on time, whereas the issue is actually whether there is a bus at all that will get, for example, a student in a school doing a T-level to the employer providing the 20% of work experience required for that T-level.
I concluded very early on in considering the Bill that we have to define the Bill’s use of the words “geographical” as well as “disparities”. A lot has been said about “disparities”, so I shall concentrate on “geographical”. Many statistics exist now, but not all the statistics that we would like to have. Some of those statistics that are available now are national, while some are regional and some are local, depending on which body produces them. I propose that we need to assess outcomes with independent assessment of what happens at a very local level, hence my suggestion of using area postcodes—or the first few digits, such as in mine, which are NE3. You cannot get it down to a street level, I concede, and I also concede that another way of addressing the issue is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, said, by doing it by council area and council ward. You could do it by council ward: 40 years ago we were doing assessments and metrics of this kind at a ward level in Newcastle upon Tyne. Most local authorities were able to produce evidence like that.
We have to be much clearer about how we are going to assess outcomes, for we have to do outcomes—it cannot just be about missions. How else will we know that levelling up is actually happening? I have a proposal for the Minister, which is what the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, ended up saying. The Government should take back all the missions and metrics that they have put in the Bill’s documentation and then add to it everything that has been recorded in Hansard in all the excellent contributions that have been made. Then they need to reissue all those missions and metrics by the time we reach Report, which, because of recess dates, will be some weeks hence. I have absolutely no doubt that the department can easily do it in the time before we get to Report. I beg to move.