Mark Langabeer (Hastings and Rye CLP) reviews a recent Panorama documentary – Fixing Unfair Britain: Can Levelling Up Deliver (which can be found here).
Chris Mason, the chief political editor of the BBC asks whether the Tories levelling up pledge at the 2019 General Election can work. He travelled to Barnsley, described by its Council Leader as a post industrial town that suffers from high levels of deprivation. Mason states that Barnsley and many other towns in the North are significantly poorer than London and the South-East of England.
Mason states that average annual earnings in Basingstoke is £36,000, in Sunderland, the average wage is just £26,000. In Blackpool, life expectancy is eight years less than in Guildford. London spends, annually, £1500 per head on public transport. Only around £500 is spent in Yorkshire. Tory claims of levelling up have been dented by cancellation of the Eastern leg of the HS2 rail project and scaling back on improved rail links between northern towns and cities.
Tory austerity
The programme points out that council spending has been reduced by 40% since 2010. Some of the problems faced by towns outside the South East (and within the London and SE regions) are as a consequence of Tory austerity during the period between 2010 and 2017. The Tories have set up three funds for the purpose of levelling up. The towns fund with £3-6billion, a £4-8b levelling up fund and a further fund of £2-5 that replaces monies received from the EU.
In order to get funding for regeneration, councils are obliged to enter bids. The selection for extra funding is, to say the least, somewhat vague. Panorama have discovered that of 100 councils eligible for funding, 34 never entered a bid and 28 got no money. Mason interviewed a guy that led a bid for funding in Stocksbridge (10 miles from Barnsley) and received £21 million, despite being a low priority area. However, it was traditionally a Labour area until 2019. Out of 101 successful bids, 80 were in areas with a Tory MP. Nine were in towns that had both and only 12 were in towns that had only Labour MP’s
Interviewing Michael Gove, the ‘levelling up Minister, Mason stated that critics of the scheme would describe this as pork-barrel politics and not addressing the need to level up. Gove claimed that decisions were based upon the quality of the bids! A spokesperson for the Association of Local Authorities stated that available funding should be prioritised on areas of most deprivation, not on a competitive bidding process.
Mason suggests that the shine is coming off the levelling up agenda. With inflation approaching 10%, it’s more likely that most of us are levelling down, regardless of what region we live in.
In my opinion, Labour should stand on a no cuts platform in local government and a Manifesto commitment that restores Council funding to its 2010 level.
