My Lords, my Amendment 57 is about the distribution of levelling-up funding. The premise of it is, first, that levelling-up challenges are by their nature long-term and difficult and, secondly, that any attempt to address them must be locally sensitive and not hampered by different government departments approaching the issue from different perspectives.
My contention is that short-term funding which fails on the above counts is counterproductive, causing local people to be pulled in different directions, chasing money which does not properly address their local needs. A report by the Business in the Community’s place task force, Partnerships in Place, on intervention in forgotten places, says:
“Levelling up funding needs to be flexible, long-term, localised and aligned with the levelling up missions to maximise”
the chances of “transformative change”. It praises, for instance, the Welsh Government’s Communities First programme, which operated for 16 years from 2001 to 2017 and helped 52 of the most deprived places in Wales. The report also makes the point that capital funding should have significant revenue streams aligned with it to ensure that the relevant agencies have the capacity to deliver well.
I will give some examples of good and bad practice related to funds for levelling up, to illustrate my argument. In some ways, literacy improvement is one of the more straightforward missions. It is measurable, and after 18 years of appropriate education, most children could expect to be literate. Let me give some colour to how the funding works in Blackpool and Bradford. Both were opportunity areas and under that banner were addressing literacy. These are sensible, multi-year interventions on social mobility and education, grounded in understanding of local needs. However, the programme finished in September 2022. The 12 areas across the country became “priority education investment areas”, with less money.
Blackpool’s aim is to provide targeted literacy intervention, but it still awaits its current year allocation. What the Government think is happening with those children during this academic year, I cannot imagine. If you delve further into the funding, there are some larger pots available. There is something called a safety valve bid of about £6 million for school buildings for children with special educational needs, and another safety valve bid of £3.8 million, reflecting the support needed for the huge proportion of high-needs young people in the community, but right now, Blackpool does not know whether it is getting any of this money.
In Bradford, again, the opportunity area had been focusing on literacy. At Business in the Community, we now have a newly created group to focus specifically on literacy in Keighley. This involves working with the Bradford Literature Festival, the Asian Women’s and Children’s Centre, the local mosques, local business and the Keighley Schools Together group, among others. We hope to devise a long-term approach to make a measurable difference, which can be a legacy of Bradford being City of Culture 2025. The government opportunity area funding, however, has ceased.
The recent community renewal fund epitomised several aspects of bad practice. Locality said that the short-term timescales—where bids had to be submitted
by mid-June and money spent by the following March—coupled with the competitive bidding process, have seriously hampered the CRF’s ability to make an impact. In Norwich, a colleague of mine ran workshops funded by the CRF in the most deprived part of the city, based on local needs such as financial skills. However, given that they had only three months to deliver, there was not time to build the necessary trust and rapport with some of the individual members of the community who most needed the training, let alone provide ongoing support. My sense of CRF was that the policy was broadly fine, but that when it came to implementation, there were unrealistic and un-joined-up requests for outcomes from multiple government departments, which, combined with short timescales, made it dysfunctional.
However, let me congratulate the Government on a few levelling-up interventions which have worked well. First, the town deal programme, providing substantial capital funding to forgotten places, seems to me to be heading in the right direction. It satisfies a few criteria: it supports local ambitions led by a local partnership; the partnership is business-led, with a cross-section of stakeholders providing a degree of market reality and financial and business nous; it is multiyear; and it addresses issues across government departments. What I notice is that where these town deals are governed by a genuine partnership with a credible, non-vested business lead, they are largely effective. Unfortunately, with the desire to get the money out the door, it is possible that the majority do not quite pass this test. The town deals are playing into a tough economic environment. These weaker town deals will struggle and even the strong ones are likely to cost more, but the Government need to stick with them.
Secondly, the department is now undertaking some deep dives into a few places to see whether a strategic alignment between a place and national government can help to shift the dial. This approach is working well in Blackpool and, in particular, is sorting out some of the cross-Whitehall barriers, which include moving the courts off a £300 million regeneration site and focusing different departments on a Civil Service hub. There are further cross-departmental challenges to come. For instance, the DWP pays housing benefit to people living in illegally squalid housing, or there is the money granted to supported housing providers, who anecdotally dissuade youngsters from taking employment opportunities because they then lose the funding.
I finish by saying that I completely understand the difficulty for the Government in addressing all these levelling-up issues. My plea is that the Government do not make them worse with bad approaches and poor implementation from their ivory tower, nor, for that matter, unsubstantiated ministerial or politically motivated preference versus localised distribution decisions. One lesson is that a stop/start approach to funding will never help.