Better Jobs and a Fair Deal at Work

Dan Jarvis Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab) [V]]

The welcome retreat of covid masks the enormous damage it leaves in its wake and the colossal underlying problems it displaced from the public consciousness. Amid an almost unprecedented economic contraction, more and better jobs is perhaps the most urgent of those issues, but it is far from the only one. The giants of deprivation, division and environmental crisis have not slept while we fought the pandemic. They have grown ever greater to the point where they threaten to do unprecedented damage and perhaps even disintegrate our country. What this Queen’s Speech has again made clear is that this Government lack the ambition and the vision to meet this great challenge as they should. This Administration are about show more than substance, about politics more than purpose. They give the impression of action, while offering half measures so compromised and politicised that they are all too likely to fail.

That is especially evident in South Yorkshire, which already has large areas of deprivation. The long neglect of my region is a great injustice, but it is also a waste of colossal potential and an act of national self-harm that harms us all. In response, we have developed a road map for genuine transformation: not just recovery from covid, but a fundamentally stronger, greener and fairer region. It is the ambition we need for the whole country. We have leveraged devolved funding to create a £500 million renewal fund. We will be investing massively in everything from active travel and buses to our businesses and our young people. But transformation, at least with the urgency we deserve, needs the Government to do their part, too. They say that they are, but scratch the surface and things look different.

The Government’s flagship levelling-up fund is worth significantly less than the local growth fund it replaced. It puts the Chancellor’s Richmondshire constituency in a higher category of need than places such as Barnsley and Sheffield. A third of the English areas it will support are not among the top third of the most deprived regions. The vast majority of them are Conservative areas: penny pinching, pork barrel politics dressed up as transformation. It is a confidence trick.

It is not just about the money, however. We cannot level up without a clear goal and a coherent plan to get there. The Government are yet to even define levelling up beyond vague aspiration. Their investments are scattershot, not strategic. It is welcome that they have appointed a levelling up adviser and are planning a White Paper, but the fact it took them 18 months to do that speaks volumes. We need a fundamental rethink of levelling up.

Critically, that needs to happen alongside a fundamental strengthening of devolution. Even senior Conservatives such as George Osborne agree that we cannot recovery from covid or tackle deeper challenges from Whitehall, but the Government seem to have forgotten their promised devolution White Paper, along with their commission on wider constitutional change. Their fundamental lack of interest is evident in their imposition of piecemeal competitive funding pots, which open the door to politicisation, are poisonous to long-term strategic planning, and force local authorities to dance to Whitehall’s tune and not the needs of their own local community.

Devolution is needed as part of a much wider renewal of politics. The election in Scotland, while not the mandate the SNP is claiming, means the risk of the country disintegrating remains very real, but disillusionment cuts across the whole country. Rather than fight the problem at its roots with a genuine national conversation on reform, the Government are pushing voter ID and undemocratically forcing first-past-the-post voting on mayoral elections out of naked electoral self-interest. Responsibility for the country appears an afterthought compared to staying in power. Amid deprivation and division, our future really is on the line, and our Government are playing politics. I ask them to change course before it is too late.

North of England: Economic Support

Dan Jarvis Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered support for the economy in the north of England.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford. I declare an interest as a metro Mayor.

Today’s debate takes place amid an unprecedented economic crisis affecting the whole country, but covid has only reinforced an argument that was already undeniable. We need to level up the north—not by tinkering at the margins, but through a full-scale transformation; not just for the sake of the north, but for the sake of the whole country. The question is, of course, whether the Government will make it happen.

Covid has hit the north hard. We have a disproportionate number of cases and hospitalisations, and the pandemic has affected deprived areas more—and the north still has far too many deprived areas. Our economy has been equally exposed. In South Yorkshire, the level of people claiming unemployment-related benefits is now higher than at any time since the mid-1990s, when we were in the aftermath of the pit closures. We risk undoing a quarter of a century of painful progress. The brutal reality is that the north is now on course for levelling down, not levelling up.

Meanwhile, the issues that made the case for levelling up in the first place have not gone away. The UK has the worst regional inequality of any comparable nation. We have unacceptably unequal education and health outcomes. Many northern council areas are among the most left behind in the UK. In the five years following the launch of the northern powerhouse, the number of our children living in poverty went up by one third, to 800,000.

Policy choices have made, or threaten to make, the situation worse. Planned cuts to universal credit could leave one in three working-age households in the north £1,000 a year worse off. Under austerity, public spending fell by £3.6 billion in the north, even as it rose by £4.7 billion in the south-east and the south-west.

Therefore the need for levelling up is clear, but there is a flipside to all this—the great potential and the strengths that make the positive argument for levelling up. We are still the heartland of British industry. South Yorkshire, for example, has amazing companies such as ITM Power, helping to build a hydrogen-fuelled clean energy revolution, and Magtec, developing contactless magnetic gears for wind turbines. Those enterprises reflect the north’s storied history of manufacturing prowess, but we also have huge strengths in culture, sport and tourism; incredible natural beauty; and world-class universities with fantastic strengths in research and skills. Together, we really can create a better economy, not just for our regions but for the whole UK, and help to drive the transformations that we all badly want to see. It is estimated that if we do rebalance national investment, that could add £97 billion to our economy by 2050.

However, we have not just shown our potential; we have also shown that we can use it. We can do our bit if we are given the tools; as the only MP with the somewhat unusual privilege of also being a metro Mayor, I know that at first hand. Since I became the Mayor in 2018, we have created or protected 15,000 jobs in South Yorkshire; our pioneering Working Win programme has helped 6,000 people with health conditions who want to get back to work; we have leveraged £319 million of investment and awarded more than £100 million for regeneration and redevelopment; and we have just committed £5.5 million of our own funds to kickstart nine flood prevention projects. We are putting our skin in the game and laying down a challenge for the Government to do their part, rather than waiting for them to take the initiative. I can safely say that we stand ready to be levelled up, and I know that my counterparts across both sides of the political divide in the north would say the same.

We are not coming to this debate today with a begging bowl: we have the need and the potential, and we have shown that we are ready. The north, perhaps more than anywhere, is where we will do the job of building a better Britain for all of us. What we are asking for is the tools to get on with that job, but we have not received them yet.

We have been quite successful recently in attracting funds into South Yorkshire, but none of that money, apart from the £30 million of gainshare that we are getting following our devolution deal, represents new resources specifically targeted at South Yorkshire, the north or even disadvantaged areas more widely. These are existing funds that have come under our control, such as the adult education budget; or a share of national funds that we have been allocated or successfully bid for on the same basis as any other region, such as the Transforming Cities fund. Do not get me wrong—it is hugely important that that money is being spent under local control and we are grateful for it, but this is not levelling up.

There is a similar picture across the north. There are a few exceptions. The towns fund is perhaps the most obvious, but it leaves out hundreds of very deprived towns in favour of some wealthier areas, and it is only a one-off £3.6 billion fund spread across the whole country. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm today how much new money the Government have put into levelling up since they took office, because the overall picture is one of tinkering and not transforming.

An indication of what we need is the UK2070 Commission’s recommendation: to triple the new UK shared prosperity fund to £15 billion a year for 20 years, which would be a total of £200 billion of new funding. That is for all deprived areas, but it shows the scale that we should be talking about. The moment to do that was at the comprehensive spending review, but in the current crisis is understandable that the Government are carrying out a more modest one-year review instead. However, that must not become an excuse to delay the transformative investment we need if levelling up is really to mean something.

Already, over two thirds of northerners believe that the Government will not follow through on levelling up; that is a concern that the 55 Conservative MPs who wrote to the Prime Minister last month—we will hear from one of them in a moment—seem to share. We all have an interest in proving those fears wrong, and here is where I think we need to start.

In the short term, we need better covid emergency support, including adequate funding for hard-pressed local authorities, but the key issue is that the reduced spending review should retain real ambition. First, it must extend the local growth fund, which expires in March. The LGF has been absolutely critical in generating jobs, investment and regeneration, and it would be great to hear a commitment to extend it from the Minister today. However, LGF renewal is only enough for us to stand still. For transformation, we need something much more like a new deal for the north.

In my patch, we think that that would look like our renewal action plan, which calls for funding and powers to expand kickstart and apprenticeship schemes, begin a massive investment in infrastructure and decarbonisation, increase active travel and plant millions of trees. Will the Minister confirm today what plans the Government have for investment at this transformational scale across the north?

Transport will be especially key. Northern Powerhouse Rail is often presented as the infrastructure that will be at the heart of levelling up, but there are growing fears that critical parts of it could be delayed, along with the north-east leg of High Speed 2. It is hard to overstate how damaging that would be for the levelling-up agenda.

Lastly, the Government should make some critical structural changes, especially reforming the Green Book to reduce the in-built bias towards more affluent areas in Government investment decisions and following through on proposals to move significant parts of the civil service. Perhaps the Minister could update us on that today. Of course, beyond the spending review, the new shared prosperity fund must also embed the same ambitions. Like the European Union funds that it replaces, it must be based heavily on need. It should be as devolved as practically possible. All this is not just about making the northern economy bigger; it is about making it better—more high-tech and more high value, more sustainable and more equitable.

My ambition for the north is for it to be stronger, greener and fairer. That should be our aim for the whole United Kingdom. Covid is not an obstacle to that, but an opportunity: there is a near-consensus on the need for spending to protect our economy. The question is whether that spending will serve a greater purpose. Crucially, the issue is about not just money but power—to be legitimate and effective, levelling up must be done with and by us, not to us. We need much more flexibility over how we spend the funds allocated to us, but we also need a more fundamental doubling down on devolution.

We have done a lot in South Yorkshire, but we have done it with modest powers and resources. We are still the most centralised large developed country in the world. That must change, not just to unleash our potential but to help address the disillusionment and division that is growing across our country and that threatens to break it up. The polls showing a majority of Scots expressing support for leaving the Union are only the most alarming symptom of a wider crisis of faith also visible in the north. For all our sakes, we must make levelling up part of a more ambitious vision for reform—one that lets people feel that they are taking back control and that they have a country, a United Kingdom, that they can believe in.

We are now at a moment of crisis, but also a moment of opportunity. There is an overwhelming case for us to rise to this moment with ambition—not just to give the north the means and the powers to rejuvenate our economy and our society, but to do so as part of a wider vision for a more prosperous, more equitable, more democratic United Kingdom. In the process, perhaps we can make this a transformative moment not just for the north but for the whole country.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Dan Jarvis]

I am acutely conscious that Members will want to observe the two-minute silence on Armistice Day, so I will be brief.

We have had a really constructive debate this morning. We have heard a range of articulate views from Members across the House. I think there is a clear consensus around the need to level up the north and to invest not just in our infrastructure, but in our people. I also think that there is a clear consensus that the time to do this is now.

The spending review in a couple of weeks’ time will be a major test of the Government’s commitment to level up the north. I hope that the Government take the opportunity to stop tinkering and start transforming. We in the north stand ready to be levelled up. Please do not let us down.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered support for the economy in the north of England.

Public Health Restrictions: Government Economic Support

Dan Jarvis Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Especially when the Member does not want an answer, Minister! [Laughter.]

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab) [V]]

Without additional financial support, the restrictions to which South Yorkshire will be subject will deal a hammer blow to businesses and high streets across our region. Can I ask the Chief Secretary what assessment the Treasury has done on the economic effect of the tier 2 measures, and whether he is personally satisfied that the current support available will be enough to save jobs and businesses here in South Yorkshire?

[Steve Barclay]

I know through his local responsibilities that the hon. Member is in conversation with my ministerial colleagues in the wider discussions on our response. The reality is, as I said earlier, that one cannot be satisfied that every job in the area will be protected. It is about having a balance of measures that enables those businesses to be open that can be and takes action on the virus to suppress the increase. The previous question from one of his own parliamentary colleagues was to say that we should not be going as far as we are. He is saying, as I understand it, that we should be going further, but with wider support. That points to the fact that even within our own parties we have these debates.

It is about getting the balance. We have brought forward what is by international standards a very supportive package that combines the additional billion pounds to local authorities and the extra £500 million to localise track and trace, which the hon. Member and other local leaders have called for. We have listened to those representations, and that is reflected. I hope he welcomes that, and I look forward to working with him constructively in the days and weeks ahead.

Covid-19

Dan Jarvis Excerpts

Monday 11th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab) [V]]

In South Yorkshire, where I am also the Mayor, the coronavirus has infected more than 4,500 people and, tragically, killed 576 people. My thoughts are with all of those who have suffered and lost, and those who are doing so much to keep our people safe and our society functioning. I will always seek to work constructively with the Government, but we do have a duty to test their policies and to hold them to account. One of their most crucial tasks is to keep the confidence of the British people, and without clarity, we will fail. So I have four immediate concerns.

The first is that “Stay alert” is vague compared with “Stay at home”. I am glad that the Prime Minister provided more detail today, but many people will still be confused, and confusion risks contagion. Secondly, we cannot ask people to go back to work if they cannot get there safely. Social distancing means much lower capacity on our public transport systems, and a switch to cars would mean instant gridlock. That means that getting people to walk and cycle is central to easing the lockdown. To be fair, the Government seem to understand that, but we urgently need to translate that into action together.

Thirdly, we cannot force people back to an unsafe workplace. The Government must monitor and support businesses to implement rigorous protective measures, in close collaboration with employees and unions. Until that is done, those workers should remain furloughed. Fourthly, the Government must be careful not to create suspicion, justified or not, that they are motivated by any concern other than fighting the disease. Things such as testing targets that are met just on the one day needed to avoid negative headlines inevitably undermine that vital public trust; this is no time for politics as usual. So the Government must be utterly transparent about the data, the advice they are getting and the compromises they are choosing. There must be a clear line between the science and the political decisions based on it. That applies right across the UK, and the Sheffield City Region Combined Authority has led in supporting and informing local communities and businesses, in getting them the help they need and in championing their concerns at Westminster. We have kept our businesses and our light rail system running. We have lined up our local industries to supply PPE to the NHS, and we are developing a recovery plan that truly reflects local needs, but the Government must bring us in to the heart of their response, and fund and empower us accordingly.

Finally, that response must also serve a wider purpose, We clearly need massive—[Inaudible.] This is the moment for a green new deal, for fixing our crumbling infrastructure and for addressing the unacceptable inequality between our regions and nations. History will not forgive us if, as after 2008, we make such sacrifices only to see inequality grow and the planet burn ever warmer. For all our sakes, the legacy we aim for now must not be a return to the status quo; it must be a national renewal.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Apologies to those who were not called today; they will be on tomorrow’s list, and they will be called.

National Productivity

Dan Jarvis Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2020 Westminster Hall

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered national productivity.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley, and I declare an interest as a metropolitan mayor. I am pleased to see the Minister and the shadow Ministers here this morning. I know they all take this issue very seriously, and rightly so, because it affects all corners of our United Kingdom and all our communities.

I wanted to secure this debate because, for too long, the general debate about productivity has been too narrow—it has been too focused on the purely economic, on gross value added and on national statistics. That is the wrong approach. Growing productivity matters to people, matters to our businesses’ ability to raise wage levels and matters in terms of the types of job our economy makes available and the prospects we seek to create for our young people.

Being part of a productive economy also builds those intangible bonds between our people and our places, and between our role and our contribution. I hope that I speak for all Members when I say that we all want to live productive lives; we all want to leave the world in a better place than we found it; we all want our children to grow up full of ambition and aspiration and to be confident that we are building a world in which their hopes and dreams can be realised; and we all want an economy that creates wealth, enabling us to invest in our public services, in our people and in our communities.

Raising productivity, which is, in essence, about creating more value with the same or less input, is at the heart of all of those aims. Yet, despite the importance of raising productivity, the size of our economy has for too long been the overriding measure of success. That has led to an approach towards economic growth that has neglected the real long-term drivers of success: skills; investment in research and development; a balanced economy, with opportunities available right across the country; and the enabling infrastructure, the lack of which in many parts of the country means that we lag behind.

Perhaps conveniently, we have been able to ignore the growing weight of evidence that we are in the midst of a productivity crisis. The figures are stark. Since the financial crash, the UK’s average productivity growth has been a woeful 0.3% a year. For that reason, the Royal Statistical Society awarded it what in this instance is the unwelcome accolade of the “statistic of the decade”.

That is costing us billions in lost economic output, and the situation is even starker outside London and the south-east. Public policy has entrenched a productivity gap between the north and the rest of the UK of around 12%, which costs the economy about £40 billion. The OECD calculates that regional productivity gaps alone account for lost economic growth of around 10%. Looking across the whole UK, according to the Core Cities Group, which represents cities across the UK, if we brought all our regions up to the UK economic average, we would put around £80 billion into the economy every year. So the current situation is a huge missed opportunity for our people, our businesses and the Exchequer.

There is no silver-bullet solution to tackle the productivity challenge, but the levers to pull are all within our collective grasp, and there are things we can do urgently that will start the process of addressing the national and regional productivity challenges we face. First and foremost, we must win the argument for investing in an active place-based programme of investment that includes every region, city and town across the country. That programme must be focused on investment that is linked to the strengths and capabilities of each individual local area: its people, its businesses and its research institutions.

We must ensure that such investment is better balanced across the UK. Public R&D investment in Oxford, Cambridge and inner west London accounts for 41% of total public R&D spending in the UK. I do not begrudge any of those fine places any of that investment, but we must close the gap between academic research and the implementation of the ideas that we create. That means increasing investment in institutions such as the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre and the Olympic Legacy Park in the Sheffield city region. Such institutions connect ideas, innovation and research with real-life business challenges. They are ready-made vehicles through which we can supercharge regional economies, and they must be the focus of greater Government investment.

Around such institutions, we must build deep and pervasive programmes of support, to connect them more effectively with the productive potential of our existing businesses. We are already starting to do that in my own region of South Yorkshire; indeed, I believe we offer a national blueprint that shows how we can turn the productivity challenge around through the creation of innovation districts.

Many hon. Members will have heard of the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre. At the AMRC, the Government, the university and the public sector have invested alongside industry to build an institution that is focused on tackling real-life industrial problems, operating in that sweet spot between academic research and industry, and applying knowledge to problems.

Through the AMRC, we have been able to attract companies such as Boeing, McLaren, Rolls-Royce and many others to our region. We have built our inward investment offer around that approach. We have built the AMRC training centre, which helps to connect our young people to the opportunities that are being created. We have started to develop supply chain programmes that connect small businesses in the region to the opportunities being created by larger manufacturers. We are also looking to invest in the enabling infrastructure, to enable our workers to get to work by rail, tram and bike. That approach is building a true industrial commons, where academia, the public sector and businesses come together in a way that puts us in the vanguard of the reindustrialisation of the north.

However, there is so much more we can do. To create transformational productivity growth, we must embed this culture of innovation and ideas more broadly, across all our businesses, from sandwich-makers to steel manufacturers, and from education technology to energy production. If the Government are looking to establish a Massachusetts-style institute of technology for the north, they should look no further than South Yorkshire and the assets that we already have in place.

What we need right across the country is the ambition, matched with the investment, to scale up that approach and scale it out. Underpinning it all, the Government must take care of the fundamentals of any modern, regionally balanced and progressive economy. According to the Core Cities Group, deprivation is the cause of up to 40% of low regional productivity. Therefore, economic policy must sit right alongside our social regeneration and skills policies. We must tackle the issue of vocational and technical education head-on, and the Government must reverse a decade of under-investment in vocational education.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate and on all the work he has done on this issue. He is absolutely right to highlight the lack of funding, because it has had a huge impact on areas such as ours, in Barnsley. Does he agree that skills are the missing link in South Yorkshire? We need more investment in vocational education, so that all kids can access courses.

[Dan Jarvis]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and parliamentary neighbour for that intervention. She is precisely right about all of that. We are seeking to do a huge amount of work across South Yorkshire, working with our further education colleges, our universities, our training providers and our businesses. I am incredibly concerned to ensure that, within our local enterprise partnership, we have the requisite knowledge, skills and experience to develop our skills sector. It is a fundamental and crucial pillar of our strategic economic plan, but it requires more thought and certainly more investment, as my hon. Friend rightly suggests. I give her an assurance that it is right at the top of my list of priorities, and I look forward to working with her and with colleagues right across South Yorkshire to ensure we have the investment in our skills system that we so need and deserve.

I was just making the point about the importance of investment in vocational and technical education. We need to ensure that we create parity of esteem across academic and vocational education routes so that we give businesses, our young people and their parents confidence in the skills system. We must better connect our businesses to the skills system. Notwithstanding the excellence of our civil servants and the capabilities and competences of Ministers of this Government, there is no way that skills, innovation, enterprise and transport systems can best be brought together at the national level. I know the Minister understands that.

To make all that happen, our places have to be given the right tools, so we must empower our places up and down the country to build their own industrial commons. Following years of austerity and systemic neglect, the manifesto on which the Government were elected contained a raft of ambitious infrastructure projects and a promise to level up investment across Britain, much of which was aimed at voters in the north of England.

If the Government are serious about building a collaborative, sustainable and inclusive economy where everyone shares the benefits, reversing the prolonged stagnation in productivity should feature at the very top of their agenda. The way to do that is by redistributing power to our nation’s regions through a programme of meaningful devolution. Westminster needs to give us the tools to do the job. I say this with the greatest respect to colleagues in the Government, but it is time to let go, because it is no coincidence that a country that has this level of political and economic centralisation also has some of the lowest levels of productivity growth and some of the highest regional inequalities. That is not good for the state of our nation. Nor is it good for the state of our public finances or the health, happiness and wellbeing of our communities. Let us make a change.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dan Jarvis]

I want very briefly to reflect on two points that the Minister referred to. First, the transforming cities fund is absolutely vital for us, in terms of productivity and economic growth. We have worked incredibly hard with the Department for Transport to put forward an outstanding bid into the transforming cities fund. I am the only metro mayor who has been required to bid for that money. My parliamentary colleagues in South Yorkshire, who now include three Conservative Members for the first time, and I will be looking very closely at what the Chancellor announces in his Budget in March.

I want to reiterate the points that the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) rightly made about the shared prosperity fund. It is a critical amount of money for our regional economies. I am pleased that the Minister said that the consultation will be launched later this year. It is vital that both regional and national leaders can contribute to the important process of determining how the shared prosperity fund will be allocated in our regional economies—that is incredibly important. We urgently require clarity so that we can make long-term investment decisions.

The debate has been really useful; we have had a series of very constructive contributions from Members representing every corner of the country—Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, the north-west and north-east of England, and Yorkshire. We have established a consensus that productivity is a key driver of economic growth in the UK, and that regional imbalances are huge challenges that will require investment in skills, R&D and infrastructure, of which public transport is key. Devolution is a significant way to address some of those challenges, but democratically elected leaders need investment and resources to make regional and local decisions.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) rightly placed the focus on women and challenged the Minister and the Government on what they will do about gender disparities. To be fair, that important challenge also needs to be levelled at our metro mayors, all of whom are men, as she will know.

[Alison McGovern]

Oh yes, I know!

[Dan Jarvis]

I had no doubt about it. My hon. Friend has put that important challenge to the Government and we will look and listen very carefully at how they respond to it. That challenge should also be put to our metro mayors, and I assure her that in South Yorkshire we take that very seriously and have a programme of work, through our skills and employment board, that looks specifically at the points she raised. I would be grateful for the opportunity to discuss that further with her at some point.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered national productivity.

Economy and Jobs

Dan Jarvis Excerpts

Monday 20th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)]

It is a huge pleasure to follow the outstanding maiden speech by the hon. Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan). To have delivered it without notes is incredibly impressive, and she has laid a powerful marker for what an articulate champion she will be for her constituents.

I should declare an interest as a metro Mayor. I want to say at the outset that, as we prepare for the future and for life beyond Brexit, our priority must be to build a collaborative, sustainable and inclusive economy where everyone shares in the benefits of growth. We have one of the world’s largest economies, worth $2.38 trillion, accounting for 3.3% of the global economy. That is an important achievement, but for too long the size of our economy has been the overriding measure of success, the overriding driver of investment decisions and the overriding focus in public policy, and that has masked a failure to focus on what matters most.

It is our people and their communities who matter most. We fail in our mission to improve the lives of all if that connection between people, place and prosperity remains broken. Given that we have five of the economically worst performing regions in northern Europe, that has been the case for too long. It also costs us billions. It must therefore be our collective endeavour to fundamentally rewrite the rules of engagement in how the Treasury decides where and in what we invest, how policy is made in Whitehall rather than in the regions and how people and their communities must be at the heart of our economic model.

In September, the Prime Minister was in South Yorkshire, where he said that

“there is no limit to the imagination, innovation, ingenuity and leadership in the North.”

I do not always agree with the Prime Minister, obviously, but on this we are as one. However, those words mean nothing until we see meaningful action. No amount of imagination, innovation, ingenuity or leadership can offset under-investment or a system that is skewed in favour of already prosperous areas. We need a fiscal programme that delivers transformational levels of resourcing, tackles poverty and inequality, helps us build the homes people need in the places where they want to live, grows an economy that exploits the opportunities of the green revolution, and helps us to build new infrastructure.

That will not be cheap, and in South Yorkshire hundreds of millions of pounds of investment are needed. That is why I welcome the Government’s commitment to changing the way they make investment decisions through the Green Book methodology. That is something I have long called for, and the Financial Secretary to the Treasury may recall that I have raised the issue with him—I badgered him on a number of occasions when he was a Transport Minister. That change must happen to ensure that we get the additional investment in the north that we need and deserve.

However, fundamental to all of this is that the Government must make sure that it is local people, empowered through devolution, who join all this up locally, and that means devolution right across our country. I am pleased at the progress we made in Yorkshire just last week, but we must remember that devolution is a process, not an event, so I would like to see the Government commit to working with metro Mayors—obviously—council leaders and communities right across the country to explore the full extent of the powers and resources that currently reside in Whitehall and Westminster that could and should be devolved further. The Government’s first principle in designing their approach must be that it is not in the halls of Westminster or the corridors of Whitehall that decisions over many of the issues that affect our communities are best made.

I think there is agreement that we are at a critical political and economic juncture. We must work to build an economy that works for all— an economy in which all our communities feel they have a stake. The anger that many of our communities feel at being left behind should serve as a warning to the Government that they will be judged on what they do, not on what they say.