My Lords, this is a short group with just my Amendment 18 in it. I have laid this amendment to probe the reports that the department, DLUHC, now requires Treasury consent for its capital spending. In February this year, the Financial Times published an article stating that DLUHC had been “banned” by the Treasury
“from making spending decisions on new capital projects … after concerns were raised about the ministry’s ability to deliver value for money”.
Lee Rowley MP, a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for DLUHC, confirmed to the House of Commons that the department was now
“working within a new delegation approach”
that involved
“Treasury sign-off on capital spend.”—[Official Report, Commons, 9/2/23; col. 1028.]
Furthermore, in March it was reported that DLUHC had not managed to spend even 10% of the levelling-up fund since its launch in 2020. This media report closely followed news in the Financial Times that
“DLUHC intends to spend £2.42bn less on capital projects in 2022-23 than originally planned”.
This sum includes £1 billion in unspent money from the affordable homes programme, while two government officials the article quoted said that the level of underspend “was unusually high”. Can the Minister give an explanation as to what the ban on capital spend sign-off means for the future of levelling-up projects? It is apparent that the Treasury must have serious concerns regarding the department’s ability to monitor and deliver as it now has to work with the Treasury to seek all necessary approvals.
The department has also acknowledged that it lacks data of sufficient quality about government departments’ expenditure on the full range of levelling-up funds. It also lacks data on combined authority income and expenditure. Can the Minister say how DLUHC intends to measure the success or failure of its levelling-up policies, initiatives and objectives? DLUHC’s solution to the lack of data appears to be the creation of the spatial data unit, the SDU. Having said that, it is unclear exactly what data will be produced and by when. Perhaps the Minister can shed some light on this.
The delay and lack of information regarding what the SDU is working on, what the unit intends to produce and when these datasets will be available are clearly unsatisfactory. Does the Minister think that this is a good use of public resources? For levelling up to be a success, it requires a long-term strategy with a long-term funding plan backed by data, and this is
currently not the case. For the Treasury to take the step of coming in and removing DLUHC’s ability to sign off on capital expenditure is extremely concerning.
My amendment seeks fundamentally to understand what impact this will have on the delivery of future DLUHC-funded projects, particularly future funding under the levelling-up policy. I await the Minister’s response with interest.