Government 'has six weeks to finally deliver on levelling up promises', Dan Jarvis warns

At a Westminster Hall debate on levelling up last night, the Barnsley MP and South Yorkshire Mayor, Mr Jarvis said the project to tackle deep-rooted inequality “demands scope, endurance, resources, a national strategy and local leadership”.

He said while there has been some welcome policy shifts such as the creation of the UK Infrastructure Bank, “so far the Government have fallen well short” on delivering wider objectives.

“Transformative ambition needs transformative resources,” he said. “Instead, we have old money relabelled as new and distributed with more concern for politics than progress.

“The flagship levelling-up fund, worth £1.3 billion a year on average, replaces a local growth fund that was worth 14 per cent more, and half its budget this year is taken from the towns fund. Even worse, the levelling-up fund puts the Chancellor’s Richmondshire constituency, ranked 251 out of 317 in England’s deprivation index, in a higher category of need than my constituency of Barnsley, which is ranked 38. That is no one-off. A third of English areas due to get funds are not in the top third of the most deprived regions.”

He said “politicised, fragmented and inadequate funds also come against a major backdrop of cuts elsewhere”.

“The reality is that, almost everywhere, the Government’s model is to force local authorities to scrap for inadequate, restricted, one-off pots of cash, designed according to the Government’s priorities and not to ours,” he said.

Mr Jarvis said the forthcoming Comprehensive Spending Review will be a litmus test of whether the Government is genuinely committed to levelling up.

“For all the grand talk, the Government’s actions so far suggest a limited agenda, yet they still have the chance to change that,” he said.

“The forthcoming comprehensive spending review is where we will know once and for all whether the Government’s commitment to reducing regional inequality is serious or merely cynical. There are six weeks to decide which it is. I very much hope that they do the right thing. One way or another, it is by their actions that they will be judged.”

Kemi Badenoch, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, said in response: “Last year’s spending review announced record investment in infrastructure, with all the benefits that will bring. This year’s review will build on that progress and will focus on strong, innovative public services, the transition to net zero and delivering our plan for growth.”

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