Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 17th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it is interesting to follow the noble Lord, Lord Haselhurst, and his comments on levelling up. I have some doubts about what we mean by levelling up. You can look at it from a geographical point of view, as my noble friend Lady Lister said, but the Built Environment Select Committee, on which I sit on with the noble Lord, Lord Haselhurst, has been trying to get from Ministers a definition of what government investment goes into different regions of the country, and it does not seem to exist. Therefore it is very difficult to come up with what we should do and where if we do not know what the data is to start with.

I suppose my definition of levelling up is basically that we have somehow to deliver the basic needs of jobs, housing, local facilities and the quality of life. The noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, and the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, talked about the south-west, which is where I too live. We have serious problems getting workers, housing them and providing the right education, as the noble Baroness, said, for the high-tech jobs which are currently on offer, as well as for more mundane but equally important things, such as welding and things like that. I was struck by the lack of affordable housing found by the University of the West of England. It says that each year the greater south-west needs 17,000 new affordable housing units and only 4,159 were completed last year. Homes for the South West of England has concerns about the absence of affordable housing. We discussed this in the committee. Where do lower-paid people work? Are they supposed to sleep on a park bench so that more people can have Airbnb? I do not know what the answer is, but it needs sorting out.

Another issue on quality of life is quite important for people who are working hard and have problems with whistleblowers. Can the Minister say whether the Government will support the Private Member’s Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, on the protection of whistleblowers—I am a member of the all-party group on that—because it covers environmental issues, immigration, food processing and shipping as well as transport and health. It would make people much happier if there were an office of whistleblowers as the Bill suggests.

There is a lot about planning in the Bill. The Walking and Cycling Alliance, of which I am a member, has proposed in the Commons that there needs to be

“a planning system fit for people, nature and the climate”

so these need to be built into planning policies and decision-making to embed walking and cycling and the rights of way networks in local planning authorities’ development plans. It appears that the Government do not think this is necessary because it is all going to be in the National Planning Policy Framework, except that it is not. I shall probably propose an amendment in Committee to consider how this could be inserted, because it is vital to quality of life, net-zero transport and everything else that comes with it.

My final comment is that I think the biggest failure of the levelling-up agenda is HS2, which noble Lords have heard me speak about before. It is going to attract more people and the economy to the south-east at a cost of £161 billion. That is a lot of money, and that excludes a new station on the great western line for £7 billion, although I suppose that is a detail, and a three-year delay at Euston. Why is the funding not going to infrastructure in the north to help improve the railways and other infrastructure there and in the Midlands? Very few people used the railways in those areas even before the strikes. If the Government want to splash £161 billion on this white elephant, it is time they explained to those using food banks and in queues for hospital treatment where the money could be better spent, because in a levelling-up agenda it could be very much better spent in the regions, and that would be much easier again if the regions were given autonomy to receive money and funding and to spend it as they saw fit.