Inequalities of Region and Place

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Liddle]

To move that this House takes note of the case for producing a (1) coherent, (2) cost effective, and (3) longer-term, regional strategy to tackle inequalities of region and place.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of Cumbria County Council and a former chair of Lancaster University. I am greatly looking forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Stansgate. It is something of a privilege that he is taking part in this debate. I am also greatly honoured that a mentor from my past is in the Chamber in the shape of the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank.

The Prime Minister made levelling up the centrepiece of his post-Brexit agenda. But, after listening to his conference speech, the Financial Times’ Robert Shrimsley memorably described this ambition as

“all destination and no map.”

This debate is your Lordships’ opportunity to advise the Government on what the plan should be. I agree with the Prime Minister that

“We have one of the most imbalanced societies and lop-sided economies of all the richer countries”.


We have no world-beating status here. We have one of the worst records for regional inequalities—worse than Germany once it incorporated the eastern Länder; worse even than Italy with the Mezzogiorno.

The Prime Minister is, of course, right that this is not simply a regional problem, and we remember the report by my noble friend Lord Bassam on the seaside towns. He was right to ask how, within the relatively deprived north-west, life expectancy is seven years longer in Ribble Valley than down the road in Blackpool. I can cite some numbers from Cumbria: the difference in life expectancy between the post-industrial Moss Bay ward of Workington and the rural Greystoke ward just outside Penrith is an amazing—a shocking— 19 years. On levels of educational attainment, the Prime Minister cited the difference between York and Doncaster, where 50% of adults in one city are graduates but only 25% are in the other—no prizes for guessing which, and on this occasion Ed Miliband cannot be to blame for that. But where is the plan to reverse these inequalities in outcomes?

One lacuna in the Prime Minister’s discourse which needs correcting is the absence of universities and the role they have played in leaning against the mighty winds of regional inequality in the last 30 years. They can do much more. I learned a thing or two when I was chair at Lancaster for seven years. Under the leadership of our pro-vice chancellor for engagement—our new Cross-Bench Member, the noble Baroness, Lady Black of Strome—we partnered with Cornwall’s remarkably successful Eden Project to devise a plan to bring Eden to the north, to Morecambe. That would be not just a visitor attraction, themed in this case on the wonders of the sky and seabed, but an inspiring educational experience as well as a centre of world-leading environmental research. It would create new jobs, from gatekeepers and cooks to technicians and scientists, which would all command respect. There is a plan there. All that is needed is for the Government to back it.

With support from the regional development fund of blessed memory, Lancaster also invested in a health innovation campus, where we can, for instance, work with health authorities in Blackpool—which has some of the worst health outcomes in Britain—using the university’s expertise in digital analysis of NHS patient records to improve patient and public health outcomes. That is not an investment in a new hospital; it is an investment in ways to keep people out of hospital.

University research generates innovations at the frontier of knowledge that stimulate new enterprise in the ecosystems that form around them. But the stranglehold of R&D funding of the south-east golden triangle must be broken. I congratulate the Government on locating the headquarters of their new National Cyber Force in Lancashire, which will enable it to draw on Lancaster’s excellence in cybersecurity. But the money has to come north from Oxbridge, and that will happen only if the Government deliver on their commitment to expand R&D spending from 1.8% to 2.4% of GDP—I hope they will.

When it comes to education in schools, the north and SNP Scotland have badly slipped behind London’s soaring standards. London now gets something like 60% of kids at 18 into university; in many northern towns, the figure struggles to get over 30%. We badly need a regionally tailored version of the Blair Government’s London Challenge, in which my noble friend Lord Adonis played such a transformative part.

In transforming young people’s expectations and opportunities, good-quality apprenticeships are as crucial as A-level grades. There is a national crisis in the declining availability of good apprenticeships, so why not create a 30% target for level 3 apprenticeships to stand alongside the 50% target for university entry? The levelling-up plan should ensure that every significant town in deprived regions has a further education college that is not a poor relation but an anchor institution that commands respect, has organic links to local business and offers clearly marked steps up a visible ladder of opportunity to foundation degrees and beyond.

The decline of the north has been with us for a century or more, following the horrors of the great depression of the 1930s. There was some success after the war, with the policies that Hugh Dalton introduced in wartime. But, since the 1980s, the regions—which now include large parts of the Midlands as well as the north—have had their economic heart torn out. In part, they were victims of inevitable technological change and the shift to a knowledge and service economy that goes right across Europe. The Germans managed to upskill their manufacturing, rather than destroy it as we did.

The social consequences of this have been profound. Take Barrow in Cumbria, for instance: it lost thousands of jobs in the shipyard in the 1980s, but the shipyard now enjoys a brilliant high-tech recovery, with many fewer jobs but much higher levels of skill. Yet too many families who suffered job losses in the 1980s have got stuck in the cycle of generational deprivation and worklessness, where a culture of low expectations makes a mockery of educational opportunity and where health and life expectancy are shockingly poor.

After 10 years of austerity, our public services are badly stretched in addressing these problems. They are too thin on the ground, too siloed, too focused on crisis, sticking too much to the rule book, too defensive and too resistant to change. To speak the language of new Labour: we need investment and reform at one and the same time.

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher argued that there was no alternative. Deindustrialisation was accompanied by radical change in UK labour markets, a shift to flexibility and a loss of trade union power, and this went along with a reassertion of short-termist shareholder capitalism, which discouraged long-term investment in technology and skills. Now the Prime Minister asserted, again, in his speech that

“no government has had the guts to tackle … the long-term structural weaknesses in the … economy”.

He has to recognise, however, that these weaknesses have been apparent since the 1980s, well before—in the Prime Minister’s rewriting of history—uncontrolled immigration became the sole structural problem. The truth is that immigration is not the cause of our structural weaknesses, and controlling immigration—whatever its merits—will not provide any kind of permanent solution to them

Mrs Thatcher did have a plan for the regions; it was called Europe’s single market, and it was very good at attracting inward investment—for instance, in the north-east, to get Nissan to come to Sunderland, which was crucial in the future. It also strengthened our position in financial services, and lots of jobs across Britain in places such as Leeds benefited from that. For the future, however, we shall have to address these structural problems with Brexit, as it were, tying one hand behind our back. That makes the need for a plan more urgent, not less.

The Labour Governments of 1997 to 2010 had many proud achievements to their credit and I am overjoyed that, at long last, my party is prepared to acknowledge them. Huge fiscal transfers were made to the regions, improving public services and raising children and pensioners out of poverty, but this did not prove a lasting change. After 2010, it was put into reverse by an austerity that bore more harshly on the poorest parts of the country. The fact is that the £20 cut in universal credit takes more spending power out of the regions than the levelling-up agenda is putting in.

Labour could have done better, however. We revived the northern cities through the regional development agencies—excellent—but there was weakness in the towns. It is not easy to put this right. The revival of a dynamic private sector when the heart of its local economy has been ripped out is a huge challenge. It requires powerful incentives for business relocation from the overcrowded south-east and possibly even stricter planning controls, as well as sustained support for indigenous new enterprise. It also requires an active national industrial policy, which I was privileged to help my noble friend Lord Mandelson with in 2008. At its heart today should be a green new deal that prioritises the transformation of our old industrial towns into exemplars of zero-carbon living, with the state offering the incentives and regulating the market, but the private sector doing the work and creating the skilled jobs.

But where now is the Government’s plan? We have lots of funds: the high streets fund, the towns fund, the levelling-up fund, the shared prosperity fund, the environment fund and even a bus improvement fund—the list goes on—for all of which local authorities have to make bids to Whitehall departments. It is London-based civil servants who recommend what should happen. Ministers consult their MPs—especially red wall Conservative MPs—about which splashes of new paint are likely to buy them the most votes. This puts the regions in the position of Oliver Twist, standing in the workhouse queue begging for whatever doles our London masters are prepared to spare us.

This top-down but fragmented approach is not a coherent regional policy. We need a coherent plan that, place by place, builds on existing economic strengths. We need a fresh start and I hope that Michael Gove, a man who prides himself on his radical thinking and intellectual strengths, will give us this. Key to that is, first, stronger local government structures, based on credible unitary authorities with elected mayors to offer accountable metropolitan and sub-regional leadership.

The second thing is a fair funding settlement for local authorities, based on transparent, independent assessment of needs, not the good fortune of a strong revenue base. The third is that local government and mayors must be trusted to draw up their own rolling plans for economic development and put in a single capital bid to central government to determine priorities.

Finally, we now have a unique opportunity to build a national consensus on levelling up—Boris Johnson has given us that. But high aspiration and lofty rhetoric are not good enough: we need a plan, and we need it now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I first congratulate my noble friend Lord Stansgate on his maiden speech, which has been described as “outstanding” and “assured”. I also thought that what he had to say about the importance of science was very real. Some critical decisions for the Government are coming up in the spending round in October, and I very much hope that the enthusiasm that Dominic Cummings, to be fair to him, had for the science budget will continue to be reflected in the Government’s policy.

Secondly, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, for his reply. We in the Lords often say, “Oh, it’s been an excellent debate”, but, actually, this has been an excellent debate. I thought that he tried to respond to it, in his own rumbustious style, and I am very grateful to him for that—

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

That is a compliment.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

It is; “rumbustious” is a real compliment. I thought that he tried to answer the points and displayed a certain sympathy with many of them.

For me, the key things that came out of this debate were, first, what my noble friend Lord Adonis said about HS2, which is one of the key decisions that will affect this country for decades to come. Who wants to add to the north/south divide in this country an east/west divide? That is a fundamental point.

Secondly, the noble Lord, Lord Young, and others talked about the need to reset central-local relations and think about local sources of revenue. We need to see that kind of thinking opened up again. For the department and Michael Gove, who leads it, these issues will come to the fore in the next few weeks. I hope that he reads what we have had to say in this debate in Hansard. I beg to move.

Motion agreed.