My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble and learned Lords, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd and Lord Hope of Craighead, as well as to my noble friends the Duke of Montrose and Lady O’Neill, in addition to noble Lords opposite.
The levelling-up missions have been set by the UK Government but outcomes are a shared interest for the whole of the UK. We fully recognise that some of the missions cover areas where public services are devolved. The purpose of the missions is not to alter existing areas of responsibility but rather to align and
co-ordinate how different areas of government work towards a common goal. As I have mentioned, work is already under way between officials in the UK Government and devolved Administrations to explore collaborative work on various missions.
However, what I want to stress is the point well made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, about working together across the union. We are committed to working with the devolved Administrations to align policy, and towards a goal shared by everyone: to reduce geographic disparities across all of the UK. These amendments provide further assurance of that commitment by making it explicit and binding in the Bill.
To pick up a further point raised by the noble and learned Lord, we are taking specific action in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, including putting local voices at the heart of decision-making through the UK shared prosperity fund, launching an innovation accelerator in Glasgow City Region and establishing a UK national academy to provide a first-class education to all children in the UK.
My noble friend the Duke of Montrose spoke about establishing a framework. My best response to that is that one of the benefits of devolution is that it allows local places to take tailored approaches to tackling common challenges, enabling experimentation and innovation. We want to do more to bring together evidence and insights from across the UK, learning from our different approaches and experiences, so that we can improve our collective evidence base about what works and what does not work in different contexts. That, to my mind, is a win-win and it could be described as a desire to establish, over time, a framework that works for everybody. Ultimately, working together to improve our collective evidence base will help us all deliver better outcomes for people across the UK.