My Lords, this is an important group of amendments to tease out the Government’s intentions as to the scrutiny of the success or otherwise of their actions in levelling up. While I speak to Amendments 24, 26, 32 and 49, to which I have added my name, I also wish to speak to the other amendments in this group.
The key question is how Parliament will know that progress has genuinely been made in reducing geographical disparities. That, after all, is the question at the heart of the White Paper. The only way to judge whether progress has genuinely been made is by using evidence and independence. All the amendments in this group
refer to producing independent accountability of the statement that the Government will be making towards the end of a period of time—what that period is is still to be debated.
What is really positive about the White Paper is that it is absolutely full of evidence. There are around 80 different graphs and datasets to establish the evidence base for the purpose of the White Paper: how it is going to change different parts of the country and narrow the gaps. This set of amendments attempts to say that not only do we need the evidence but we need it to be independently assessed. I agree, obviously, with my noble friend and with the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, in talking about an independent commission or board—as we have done with climate change—to assess what is going on, and whether change has been made and, if so, how much and in what areas.
I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, about the missions not being in the Bill, because otherwise, the levelling-up Bill is whatever the Executive define it to be. The Government have set out in a lengthy White Paper what the Bill attempts to do: narrow the gaps, reduce geographical inequalities and disparities, and make a big difference not only to the people who live in certain areas but to the country as a whole. If we do not change the country as it is at the moment, the people who live in those areas will be the ones who are low paid, have poor health and low skills—as a generality, of course. If we can change that, we will change their lives and change the country as well; there would not be such a call on the health service and the benefits system if we had people with better paid jobs, higher skills and better health outcomes. It is in the interests of us all, not just those of some areas of the country.
I fundamentally disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, about research and development. I draw his attention to what the White Paper says—and it is a government White Paper, not mine. It says that the Government need to ensure that there is government investment of a significant degree in these geographical areas of disparity—the spatial disparities it talks about—in order to attract matching private sector investment and create better paid jobs, and deal with all the concomitant issues related to low pay, poor health, poor skills and all the rest of it. That is what it says in the White Paper.
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We are not going to take away from the Oxford and Cambridge areas of excellence, but we want to create new areas of excellence. This has been done before, which is why it is so astonishing to me that we are revisiting this issue again. The Government did not like the regional development agencies, but certainly the one with which I was involved—Yorkshire Forward—achieved exactly the R&D investment that they talk about. For example, an advanced manufacturing unit has now been built on the site of the Orgreave coking plant. This has attracted BAE and other cutting-edge companies doing advanced manufacturing and has brought new, highly skilled jobs to that area of South Yorkshire. It also brought Siemens to Hull to invest in wind farms and wind technology. So it can be done, but it needs a Government to do it. They cannot sit
down and just hope that change will happen. The small amounts of funding available in the levelling-up fund will not achieve this. I have rather moved away from the topic of scrutiny in this group, but I wanted to respond to what the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, had to say.
In essence, what we need is evidence-based, independent scrutiny of statements of missions and metrics that are defined on the face of the Bill—otherwise, I fear that we will be debating this very same thing in five or eight years’ time and coming up with another programme to try to bridge or narrow the gap between the better and worse-off areas of this country. As I live in one of those worse-off areas of the country where there are spatial inequalities, I can tell your Lordships that we are not going to wait any longer.