My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for bringing forward this probing amendment. When we look at the Bill, we need to consider what the Government mean by “levelling up” and whether the beginning of the Bill is sufficient to support the aims that were laid out in the White Paper. As we heard at Second Reading, much of what was in the White Paper is not here—including, as we have heard, the actual missions, which seems to me quite remarkable.
As we have previously discussed, the Bill does not really look like a levelling-up Bill. It looks more like a planning and devolution Bill, and planning and devolution on their own will not deliver the kinds of levelling up that our country needs. So we support this amendment for doing what needs to be done—probing exactly what the Government are intending. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, reminded us of the words of our former Prime Minister and of the Secretary of State, and of the ambitions of the White Paper, which we need to be discussing in future amendments that we will have in Committee. That context is very important.
So how do we define levelling up? It can mean an awful lot of different things to different people. It will also take an accumulation of good understanding and good investment if we are to come close to meeting the different agendas laid out by the Government in the White Paper. For example, social infrastructure has to be equally invested in, alongside physical infrastructure, if we are to make a positive and sustainable impact.
Is levelling up a genuine policy or just a catchphrase—which is sometimes what it feels like? As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, asked, is this just a branding exercise? We need confidence that the Government are serious about this: if it is a genuine policy that they want to make a reality, it will need an awful lot more cash than currently seems to be on offer.
The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, talked about funding. The Centre for Inequality and Levelling Up is based at the University of West London. It calculated that the levelling-up funds total £20 billion, but clearer
criteria for defining what constitutes a levelling-up fund are needed. The centre suggests that this should include only funding allocated after 2019, which is four years ago. Of the funds specified in June 2022 by the department, three were allocated before 2019. We really need much more clarity about the new investment that will come in from the Government to support what they are intending to achieve through this Bill.
Another thing I want to talk about is the relationship between funding and the missions. The levelling-up funds have only a tangential relationship with the 12 missions. Out of the 10 funds available, only one, the shared prosperity fund, mentions the missions directly, and the levelling-up fund itself just references the missions’ metrics.
While the Government continue to insist that areas have to bid against each other—with mounting evidence that this is an inefficient way of delivering funding—how can the Government ensure that all areas that need funding for levelling up receive adequate support with the bidding process and subsequently receive adequate funding?
Regional disparities are deeply entrenched, and the Bill seems to see devolution as a way to crack this and solve the problems. But so much needs to be done to tackle inequalities: they will not be solved just by a few missions, some of which are not even in the Bill, and the somewhat confusing devolution proposals.
What about the challenges that our NHS is currently facing, with enormous waiting lists and staff going on strike because they are so desperate? Why are the Government refusing to properly engage with staff over their deep concerns, which are leading to even further strike action? Just today, Professor Farrar has warned that health workers’ morale and resilience are very thin, and of the vulnerabilities facing our health services if we have another crisis like the pandemic.
If the Government are serious about closing one of the worst gaps of inequality—the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor that my noble friend Lady Lister mentioned—they have to properly support and fund not just the NHS but social care. How will the Bill deliver this? How does levelling up properly relate to those huge challenges? This relates to the following mission in the White Paper:
“Narrow the gap of healthy life expectancy between the areas where it is lowest and highest”.
I cannot see how that will be achieved with what we have in front of us.
I will also look very quickly at mission 3:
“Eliminate illiteracy and innumeracy by refocusing education spending on the most disadvantaged parts of the country”.
Will part of this refocusing of education spending deal with the gap between real funding per head in state and private schools? This gap is widening and letting down our state-funded pupils.
We have heard that the Bill fails to meet the aspirations of the White Paper, but the existing missions will not, as currently drafted, properly solve many of the inequalities in our society. We will be debating the existing missions and the new missions in a future group, so I will not say anything further at this stage. At the moment, we feel that the Bill is lacking in many areas and there is much work to be done.