Jon Trickett
MP for Normanton and Hemsworth · Labour · United Kingdom
“The shadow Minister has said, “Well, we’ve got to be a bit careful. We don’t want to over-regulate these things.” The idea that these activities should be dealt with using a light touch will raise a bitter laugh in the communities I represent, and in communities all across the country who are suffering from the same kinds of problems.”
“They told me that it is probably the worst site in the north of England—other sites are competing for that award, but let us put that to one side for a minute. However, it became clear fairly quickly that the Environment Agency was understaffed and under-resourced and lacked the powers it needed to begin the process of enforcement.”
“At first, the Conservative Government envisaged light-touch regulation. It seemed to me—this has now been confirmed by the Minister, and I welcome her comments—that light-touch regulation simply does not allow the EA to take the necessary enforcement action when activities such as those I have described take place.”
“I welcome the robustness and energy that the Minister has brought to her task—it is very welcome. Inevitably, the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth), wants to revert to some kind of light-touch approach, but we need to make sure the communities we represent are adequately protected—if necess…”
“Many, many years ago, permission was given under licence to do some recycling there, in order to eventually turn it back into arable land. When the people who live there bought their houses or moved in, they had a more than reasonable expectation that that work would be finished within a 10-year period.”
“Secondly, last Monday, we were having a planning appeal on this site, and the planning inspector went way beyond his brief and said to me—I am a Member of the governing party, but he thought I was the Government—“Will you ask the Government what they are going to do about those operators who deliberately take millions of pounds of profit…”
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“It is a pleasure to be here under your guidance, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn), who introduced this debate, and the Petitions Committee on organising the debate, even though the petitions had not reached 100,000 signatures. This is a very important debate. We have heard heartbreaking stories from Members across the House. I am sure that the Minister will have noted the unity across the House on this matter and will respond appropriately. I argue that there is a crisis in our country. It is a crisis for millions of individuals. I think it was said that there are 3 million people—children and adults—with ADHD and nearly three quarters of a million, at least, with autism. For each one of those people and for each of those families and households, this is a personal crisis.”
“It is difficult to find the information, but there was a major incident at Sellafield in, I think, November of 2019, when a lot of radioactive liquor went into the ground from the Magnox swarf storage silo—to get the correct wording. The terrain remains polluted, but we are told that the remediation works will not take place until after the facility is totally decommissioned. Four out of five current reactors are due to be decommissioned by 2028. Will the HSE, now that this has been brought under UK legislation, be supervising carefully that decommissioning process—”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. The Minister would like us to focus purely on the mistake that was made, although I guess she does not want to have made a mistake in the first place, but I think we are entitled to ask whether, in bringing the legislation home to the UK, the HSE is tooled up properly to deal with nuclear industry issues. I will therefore make a couple of points to test whether the HSE is capable of handling the work that has now been brought solely within the UK. I tried to find the number of accidents that have taken place in the nuclear industry in the past few years.”
“While we are constructing the new nuclear facilities, will the HSE be able to charge fees, and levy other charges, to the industry for the construction period? How will that be managed? Finally, the HSE looks, to me, as though it is drastically understaffed. Nuclear is one of the most dangerous industries in the country, and we are proposing to build more facilities, as well as to decommission some. Can the Minister convince us that, by bringing all this legislation home into the UK, the fees that will be charged to the industry will cover all the aspects of work which I have just described?”
“Instead of 1,500 inspectors across the whole HSE, there are now fewer than 500 main grade inspectors. With the fees and charges that the HSE collects from industry, will it be able to staff the nuclear industry properly? What does the Minister imagine the fees and charges will amount to? Will that aggregate on top of the £136 million budgeted now? Finally, as well as the costs of decommissioning—presumably charged to the industry through fees and charges by the HSE—what will be the situation in relation to the construction of all the nuclear facilities being envisaged by the Government? I worked as a manual worker for many years in the construction industry, which is very dangerous. Thousands of days a year are lost because of accidents in the construction industry.”
“Thank you for that advice, Mr Hollobone. That is precisely the point that I was about to arrive at. The industry is meant to be charged to recover costs incurred by the HSE, but—my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth made this point—there have been huge cuts in the budgetary provision to the HSE by the taxpayer in recent years: £100 million less. Not all that goes to nuclear, and the Chair wants me to keep to the subject of the legislation, but will the Minister tell the Committee whether the fees charged to the industry will cover all the costs of decommissioning—the point I have just made—and of other accidents? Outside the nuclear accidents I have just described, will the Minister also tell us how many other accidents at workplaces happened? Is all that expenditure recovered in fees and charges, as discussed?”
“In her written response, could the Minister indicate what the costs were in relation to the incident at Sellafield? How much of those costs were recovered, possibly including anticipated costs because it is not yet finished?”
“In earlier comments, I found that the Leader of the House was trying to suggest that ambulance workers are not co-operating with management as nurses are. I recently visited my local picket of ambulance workers, and there was a protocol in place: when there was an emergency, the picket immediately and voluntarily went to see the patient. Will she withdraw her comments? Has she noted that this morning T he T elegraph says that recent weekly statistics show that 2,837 more people than usual died, which is 20% higher than the average. Does she accept what is happening? There is not a shred of evidence that the strikes are causing these problems; it is a failure of management of the NHS by the Government.”
“It is around £300 billion, which is an astonishing amount of money. The OECD, the European Commission and the United Nations have all said that procurement carries the biggest risk of corruption or fraud in modern states. Of the £12 billion that was spent on PPE, £4 billion was spent on contracts that failed to meet the NHS standards—a third was spent on supplies that were not fit for purpose. Some £10.5 billion-worth of contracts was awarded without any fair or open competition in a seven-month period at the height of the pandemic. We understand that there was a national crisis and huge pressure on the NHS, but notwithstanding that, something went badly wrong; everybody must agree with that.”
“I am pleased to speak under your chairpersonship, Ms McVey. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley), who has made a great contribution to the debate. I agree with him that the procurement of services and goods during the pandemic was a disgrace. It is hard to avoid the word “racketeering” when we consider what happened. There was a time when suppliers would meet on the golf course—perhaps at the 19th hole, as they used to say—to rig the prices for providing services to local councils, and there was debate about whether that took place in freemasons’ lodges and elsewhere; now, it seems that they just pick up the phone to a Tory Minister or MP and it gives them access to the VIP lane. One pound in every £3 of public spending goes on procurement, and possibly more.”
“One is serving and enhancing shareholder value as a private sector provider; the other is public service. Well, I know what I want for the staff who treat me, my family or my constituents. I want people who are motivated by one thing only: providing the highest possible quality service. That is what motivated people. The three women I just talked about, who were cleaners and went on strike, were treated in a really shabby way. Their greatest concern was the kids left in the school. The toilets were not being cleaned. They would talk to me regularly about their guilty consciences at being unable to provide the service. They were interested in only one thing: providing a service to those children.”
“I have experience of that in my constituency. We had a service for cleaning a school a few years ago. The first thing the company did was to cut wages and try to get rid of some of the staff. The staff went on strike, which went on a long time, and the school was filthy. That contract was frankly a disgrace. We all know that that happens everywhere. We see wages falling as a share of GDP. What is the process behind that happening? There are a number of processes, but one is outsourcing, driving down wages in order to increase profits. My fifth point is this. A service provided in the public sector is motivated by the single ethos of public service. It tries to provide a service to the public without a mind to delivering profits and dividends to shareholders. There are two contesting ethoses—if that is the correct plural—in play.”
“No evidence has been produced anywhere in the world that outsourcing is cheaper than insourcing. It has been looked at by the Public Accounts Committee and various bodies throughout the world. What is striking is that larger global companies are now insourcing. They were outsourcing, buying in accountancy and legal services and so on. That is stopping. Why are they insourcing? Because it is cheaper and more effective, and delivers better value for money. Yet here we are with a Government that seem hellbent on outsourcing, for ideological reasons rather than to protect the public purse. My fourth point is that the private sector puts in prices, but the first thing it does when it wins the contract is to drive down the pay and conditions of the staff employed. Wherever one looks, that is the case.”
“When I was the leader of Leeds City Council, I would ensure that if something was going out to the private sector, there would be a public sector bid made by the council, which would not have a slice on top for profitability. I would then see whether the private sector could compete with the public sector bid. That is one thing that might be done, but there are no public sector comparators under the present neoliberal economic settlement, which we regard with despair, to be honest. Therefore, there is no guarantee that a cartel or group of racketeers is not fixing prices between them to rip off the taxpayer. We cannot be clear about whether that is happening, although without a proper procurement service, I am sure that it is. My third point is this.”
“I worked in the private sector, as a plumber in the building industry. We were monitored by the main developers to make sure that we provided value for money. Quite often, I confess, we would see whether we could get extras built in on top of the money in the original contract. It was for the quantity surveyors who worked for the developers and builders to make sure that we did not get away with anything. Can we honestly say that every single line in every contract is monitored in the same way as in the private sector? I do not think we can. The reason is because staff are under-resourced, and we are under-resourced because we are outsourcing as an ideological decision rather than anything else. Here is my second point. More often than not, there is no public comparator.”
“I hasten to say, though, that there will always be a case for some procurement from the private sector—for instance, police motorbikes will not be nationalised in the immediate future, so one can see that there is a case there—but the presumption should end. Let me briefly refer to the seven issues that it is important to consider. First, the Government Procurement Service is not as professional as it needs to be. It is possible to get a university degree these days in good procurement practice. That is a necessity to ensure value for money for every penny spent, but the service is under-resourced and not as professional as it needs to be. That is not to criticise the civil servants who do a difficult job in difficult circumstances, but they are in danger of being flooded by the provision of contracts.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right to ask that question. No convincing answer has been provided as to whether value for money was achieved. In fact, it is as plain as the nose on your face that there was no value for money, and I will come to that in a second. In recent decades, there has been a presumption in favour of outsourcing. That was never the case before. Britain used to be proud of its public service and of the high standards of ethics in the civil service and in politics. It is hard to share that pride these days. The presumption in favour of outsourcing contracts and obtaining services from the private sector has gone through the leadership of all the political parties, and it is time it stopped. There are seven separate reasons why one should be cautious about that presumption.”
“If we do not control procurement in a proper way, we are unable to direct it to local providers of services in a way that we would expect to be able to do with taxpayers’ money. That has an impact, too, on the local economy. For all those reasons, this is an important debate, and I am glad that it was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead. It is beyond the legislation that is before us. We need an ideological shift; we need a presumption in favour of the public sector, not the private sector, and I hope that I have contributed in a small way to making an argument for that.”
“That is not congenial to providing a public-oriented service, which is what we would want to see. Pay ratios in the public sector are accountable through Parliament to the public in a way that they are not once they have been privatised. Indeed, once a service has been privatised—outsourced—it is no longer subject to all the constraints that the public sector has to operate under. Indeed, one further point to make is that if I want to understand why a public sector service in my constituency or the country is deteriorating, I can submit a freedom of information request or ask questions in Parliament. The minute that service has been privatised, we cannot do that, so it is not accountable. My final point is about the impact on the local and national economy.”
“I totally agree with the hon. Member. We are seeing a fragmentation of the labour market and the driving down of people’s incomes—particularly of manual workers and others—and I resent it, on behalf of those people. It is not right for the country; after all, if wages are in long-term decline, the economy itself will be in long-term decline as well. My sixth and penultimate point is about pay and pay ratios. What happens in the public sector—although we would have to say, if we were living in a purely ethical economic environment, that certain public servants are probably paid more than they ought to be—is that pay ratios accelerate the minute a service is outsourced, to the point where we see people earning massive multiples of what the lowest paid in the same service receive.”
“I wonder whether the hon. Lady agrees with those learned commentators who said that EU rules actually preclude the use of procurement to achieve social objectives, and that that was an argument for Brexit rather than for remaining in the European Union.”
“My hon. Friend is making a strong speech, although I wish her good luck if she is trying to persuade this ideologically driven Government to change their course. She may recall that three Prime Ministers ago—not so long ago in weeks or months, but some time ago in politics—the then Prime Minister advocated Brexit on two grounds: state aid to industry and procurement. Does my hon. Friend think the Government’s procurement policies are doing anything to level up the country socially, economically or otherwise?”
“The Minister prays in aid the money that is being given to households across the country, and I acknowledge that that is a significant amount of money, but it is not working, is it? One prepayment meter is issued every 10 seconds. Millions of people live in fuel poverty. My constituent, for example, is disabled and trapped in his house. He had a prepayment meter imposed on him, but no voucher. He was left in freezing cold conditions in the run-up to Christmas. That just is not acceptable. I am afraid to say that polite letters from the Secretary of State or cups of tea this afternoon with the Minister will not hack it. Does he agree that it is time that the Government took legal powers to intervene directly in the energy market in order to protect the people of this country?”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is a great champion for his constituency, working people and the north of England. Has he seen the reports today saying that if the north of England were a country, it would be more or less the worst in the whole OECD for investment by the public or private sector? Have we in the north not been let down enough, and particularly those in my hon. Friend’s constituency, who were led up the garden path, by the looks of it, on a promise that will now not be delivered?”
“The Leader of the House no doubt believes she is an extremely persuasive person, and no doubt she is, so can she not, over the weekend, persuade the Prime Minister to make a statement on Monday or Tuesday—since there is another action on Tuesday—that he will resolve the nurses’ case to their satisfaction so that we can have a Christmas where the NHS begins to rebuild?”
“Season’s greetings to you, Mr Speaker, and all members of staff of the House. On today’s nurses’ action, which has been taken most reluctantly, I want to say that two of the closest members of my family were gravely ill for weeks in Yorkshire hospitals, and I had an accident and almost lost the use of my leg, which was recovered thanks to the skill of the staff. The nurses looked after all three of us, as they do tens of thousands of other patients every day. They do not ask for anything, except that we leave that hospital better than we came in. They stand by us; it is time we stood by them.”
“The Minister referred to environmental concerns relating to the planning process. It is remarkable, then, that there is no requirement to do an ecological survey of local wildlife—flora and fauna—before planning consent is considered, so I have proposed some amendments to new clause 5 to achieve that.”
“The Leader of the House may know that yesterday, during discussions about biodiversity in Canada, the Secretary-General of the United Nations said that humanity was is in danger of becoming a “weapon of mass extinction”. In my constituency there is proposal for a major incursion into the green belt that would threaten 27 separate native species, including some ancient woodland. Will she find time to reaffirm the Government’s commitment to green belt land and biodiversity, and may we have a debate on this essential subject, which should provide the background for any planning decisions for the future?”
“The Secretary of State is probably aware of the statement made yesterday by the Secretary-General of the United Nations that multinational corporations are making ecosystems into “playthings of profit”. The Secretary of State has prayed in aid the inspector’s report, and I accept what the inspector has said. However, the Secretary of State provides the framework for the Planning Inspectorate, so will he not now at least say that he will review the whole of our planning framework to try to protect wildlife, ecosystems and biodiversity, as well as the green belt?”
“Has the Minister considered that, given that the regulations effectively empower ARB to control admission to the profession? Regulatory capture is a major problem, as almost all our regulators have been captured by the professions that they are meant to regulate. As I say, the consultation of 8 June led to the order. In that consultation, the Government proposed two options, neither of which has been adopted in the statutory instrument before us. Was there a further round of consultation? If so, it does not seem to have been conducted publicly. If there was, will the Minister draw our attention to it and say why nobody else was consulted, other than ARB, which seems to be a flawed institution?”
“That is the body that the regulations will empower to make decisions with respect to other jurisdictions. A lot of theoretical work is being done on regulatory captures. Regulators tend to be captured by the institutions that they are meant to regulate. In this case, it is clear that ARB is dominated by architects. I have looked at the work it has done over the last couple of days, and ARB is focused on developing the profession, rather than regulating it. That will inevitably be the case if members of the board are architects or people who work closely with architects. Is ARB, in its present form, an appropriate body to regulate the profession, given the mistakes that the architectural profession has made over the years?”
“A consultation was held by the ARB, and I note that RIBA said that it was concerned that what was being discussed by the ARB would result in “a highly prescriptive, inflexible and expensive system, parallel to the RIBA’s internationally recognised validation programme.” How do the Government intend to tackle the problem of there being two separate institutional frameworks that decide how people become architects and gain admission to the profession of architect? That seems to me quite an important matter. Let me reflect on RIBA and the ARB. They are overwhelmingly white. I think I found only one person on the board who is a person of colour. There are nine members of the board of the ARB, and six of them are either architects or connected directly to the construction industry.”
“What is not referred to is the Royal Institute of British Architects, which my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North mentioned in passing. RIBA is established by royal charter, and it plays a role, alongside the ARB, in accrediting architectural schools in the UK. It therefore helps people to gain admission to the architects register. Why has RIBA not been consulted, as apparently it has not, according to the note? RIBA is a distinguished body that was set up by the Crown.”
“There is a significant implication, so it is right that the Government introduce legislation, and the regulations are based on the Professional Qualifications Act 2022. The preamble to the note we have says that the Government consulted only the ARB, which is the regulator, but I have done some research and sought advice from the Library. There was a consultation by the Government, dated 8 June 2021, and the consultation says that the Government consulted a wide range of bodies, including UK-based architects, internationally qualified architects, schools and students. I will not read out the whole list. Why do the regulations say that the Government have spoken only to the regulator, when the consultation was much wider? I do not understand why the regulations would make such a statement.”
“After all, we meet in the shadow of not only Brexit, but Grenfell, and many Members will probably have in their constituencies architect-designed estates that are not fit for purpose, although people have to live on them. That has been a disaster. System build construction from the ’70s, ’60s and before was all designed by architects, so any decisions on how the architectural profession is regulated and monitored and how people are admitted to the profession of architect have a public impact. The regulations provide a new framework to allow people to access the profession. Some architects are local, but many are international and operate internationally, so let me reflect on the consequences of Brexit for architects who either trained abroad but work in our country, or trained in the UK but provide services in America or elsewhere.”
“Member for North Ayrshire and Arran, who said that the good old days were before the Brexit vote, but the way in which the Government embarked on Brexit has proven a disaster. I do not want to say that the regulations are shoddy, because that would be disrespectful to a Minister who probably was not in post when they were drafted, but they are not a brilliant piece of work. The preliminary note on the regulations says that the Secretary of State consulted the Architects Registration Board, which is the regulator for the architectural profession, and the explanatory memorandum says that the Government have not carried out an impact assessment because there is no impact from the regulations. Those two things are mistaken.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Mr Robertson. I want to make a couple of points. First, I am perhaps the only Member of Parliament who worked as a manual worker for quite a number of years in the building industry. I therefore came to know architects and the architectural profession well. I will try to keep private my prejudices given those experiences, rather than sharing them with the Committee, but I have strong views about the nature of the building industry, construction, the role of architects and so on. We have discussed the impact of the Brexit vote on a number of matters, and today it is on the architectural profession. I do not entirely share the views of the hon.”
“Does the Minister not accept that there is a wider public interest beyond the profession in how it is regulated, given his references to Grenfell and my points about architect-led system building, which was a disaster? Why has he failed to consult the wider public, and why did he consult only the architect profession?”
“My second point—I know that you will listen to me carefully, Mrs Murray, and tell me if I am out of order—is that moving from the system we have is that probably no Mayor in the country will ever be elected with more than 50% of the vote. If we look at the 2019 North of Tyne mayoral election—I will develop the point in a second to show why it is relevant to today’s proceedings—Jamie Driscoll, who is an excellent Labour Mayor, was elected on a 32% turnout. However, in the first round he received only 33% of the vote, which means that only 10% of the electorate voted for him. One would imagine that that is what will happen under first past the post: a person with executive duties, making decisions about the nature of a region, will have been elected by only one in 10 voters.”
“Why are we applying the lessons of a referendum about one system of voting to a completely different system of voting and saying that people have expressed a view? They have not expressed a view on SV, because they were never asked. The truth is that, as the explanatory memorandum says, no consultation took place with the public at all. The Government decided not to bother. The Conservative party used to be the party that would protect and conserve the constitution. What the Conservatives are doing here is playing around with the constitution in a number of ways. I will come to my second point in a moment, but first I ask the Minister why that paragraph is praying in aid a referendum about one voting system to argue that we do not need to consult on a completely different voting system.”
“They consulted the Electoral Commission—full stop. They did no further consultation at all, and we can identify fairly easily from the explanatory memorandum why they did not. Another reason, of course, is the politics of all this, which are always interesting. My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North exposed some of that. Some of the arguments developed in the explanatory memorandum are difficult for the Government to sustain. I want to probe why, in paragraph 10.3, whoever it was who wrote the explanatory memorandum on behalf of the Government says, “Well, we had a referendum, and people decided they did not want a change from first past the post.” However, the referendum was about the alternative vote—a different kind of proportional representation from SV, which is in place for the mayoralties.”
“I am pleased to serve under your leadership of the Committee, Mrs Murray. I rise briefly to raise a couple of points about the provisions. These are quite ingenious ways of moving from one system of voting to another, and the details are extremely complicated to follow. However, there are helpful explanatory memorandums for each of the provisions, and I went to those to try to understand the details of the various measures that are being changed. I was particularly interested in the consultation process, which does not seem to have taken place. The explanatory memorandum to the Combined Authorities (Mayoral Elections) (Amendment) Order 2022 says that there is a statutory duty to consult under paragraph 12(4) of schedule 5B to the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009. What did the Government do?”
“Let me just make the second point, and then the hon. Gentleman can come in. I am not looking only at Labour Mayors; Andy Street in the West Midlands received 48% of the vote on a 31% turnout, but the truth is that, of the total number of people who might have voted, only 15% voted for him— [ Interruption. ] Has the hon. Member for Bolsover been told by his Whip not to intervene on me?”
“If the Government stopped this system of Mayors who simply operate with delegated powers and administrate decisions made by central Government, and if those Mayors were given real powers, we might get more engagement with the public and might not have to tinker with the electoral system.”
“That cannot be a justifiable reason for changing the way we do things without consulting anybody in the country. I have major reservations about this. I remain to be convinced of the case for moving away from first past the post in parliamentary elections. Once we establish a system for setting up and electing what are effectively neo-presidential authorities, having tinkered with the British constitution, we should not change that system without at least speaking to the public. If we spoke to them, perhaps we would end up with more engagement. My final point is not at all in the documents before us—you will probably rule me out of order, Mrs Murray.”
“That is quite an issue, and it needed to be properly debated with the public. We are back to the failure to consult the public. Why on earth did we not consult the public? Why on earth have we allowed a situation in which only one in 10 voters might vote for an elected Mayor, who will have executive decision-making powers of a kind that the Prime Minister does not have? Certainly, under the normal system of council governance, a council leader would not have those powers. That is quite a mistake. In paragraph 12.3 of the explanatory memorandum, under the heading “Impact”, we find out that we can save money by moving from one system to another, but are we really going to put a price on democracy? The memorandum says that we will save £7.3 million by moving from one system to another.”
“I will come to precisely that point. I was the leader of a great council—Leeds City Council—for almost 10 years under Mrs Thatcher and then under John Major’s premiership. I was elected under first past the post, but we had a parliamentary system, as we do here. The Prime Minister is not elected by the people; he or she is elected by parliamentarians, and it was the same with the council. I was elected as leader of the council by the councillors, who had been elected by the public. What we have here is a presidential mode of running local regions and councils, in the sense that we have directly elected Mayors—who are not really accountable to a council or a group of councillors and who are able to make executive decisions of some significance, often spending large amounts of money—elected by only 10% of the population.”
“Is it not clear that slack management in the Department led to get-rich elements of the British ruling establishment taking money from the NHS at a time of national crisis? Their watchword was “greed” rather than “public service”. Where is the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock)—I have notified him of my intention to mention him—who was in charge of the NHS when all this was going on? Is he still in Australia getting his £400,000 for eating unspeakable parts of the anatomy of various beasties?”
“Everybody in the House knows that the reason the Bill on Monday has been changed is that the Government cannot deliver a majority for their top-down, random house building targets to be imposed on various local councils. May I make a helpful suggestion to the Leader of the House? Why not have a debate about house building and how we deliver our targets without damaging local democracy? That would test the views of the House and give me a chance to oppose a 3,000-house development in south Featherstone, which will do massive damage to the community and the local environment.”
“I was council leader in Leeds, one of the great cities of the country. We had resources to begin to make a difference, although not enough—we always needed more; council leaders will always say that—but local authorities no longer have the resources to deliver the kind of levelling-up agenda the Government say they want. We see that in every single service—buses, trains, education, feeding people who are hungry. Funding for all those areas has been cut. There was a discussion earlier in the debate about literacy. My constituency has some of the worst educational attainment figures in the country, and school funding has been cut by 40% during this Government’s time in office. We cannot level up on peanuts or simply by changing structures; we have to will the means as well.”