Wales: Replacement Funding

Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, the whole purpose of the UK levelling-up fund of some £4.8 billion is precisely to provide the funding to underpin the regeneration required to make areas in Wales as competitive as possible. Of course, we keep changes in the industrial landscape under close scrutiny.

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)]

My Lords, the partnership between local communities, the devolved Governments and other local authorities in England inside the UK and the European Commission was a real strength of the old structural funds. They had their problems but they also had those strengths. Why have the Government moved away from that model? There was a real opportunity here to set a structural fund-type analysis for the whole of the UK and priorities that could be shared within this shared prosperity fund, and then to implement it in practice with the devolved Governments and regional and local authorities throughout the UK. That partnership will be missing from this new model and simply sticking a UK flag on a fund then distributed straight to Scotland or Wales will not solve the problems the United Kingdom has in terms of respect in Scotland and Wales right now.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I underpin the commitment to collaborate very closely with the devolved Administrations. That is why they will be an important part of the governance structure of this new fund. The new fund gives us opportunities to improve on the funding approach used by the EU structural fund, not least because there are now only two layers of government that need to work closely together.