Levelling Up News: 30 October
This is the fourth newsletter from the Levelling Up Taskforce. If it’s been forwarded on to you, you can subscribe using the link below. If you don’t want to get this, just click the link at the bottom to unsubscribe.
NEWS OF THE WEEK
The Treasury has announced plans to create an economic campus in the north and other major departments could also relocate. The Government’s plans would move around 22,000 civil servants out of the capital in the next decade. Currently, two-thirds of senior civil servants work in London. (The Times).
New proposal for an ‘East Midlands Development Corporation’ that will invest an initial £235 million into skills and retraining, green technology, and transport. Forecasts indicate creation of 84,000 new jobs and adding £4.8 billion to the region’s GDP every year. (Derby Telegraph).
The first tranche of the ‘Towns Fund’ has been announced. £180 million is awarded to Barrow-in-Furness, Blackpool, Darlington, Peterborough, Norwich, Torquay and Warrington. The funding will build an electric bus fleet depot in Warrington, bring more retail and leisure to modernise Torquay’s town centre, and develop the Blackpool Airport Enterprise Zone. (MHCLG).
New polling suggests that ‘left behind’ places are missing out on community facilities and places to meet. Over 4 in 10 people said that their area gets less than its fair share of resources, compared to other nearby communities. Places to meet and sports and leisure facilities were cited as the biggest areas where ‘left behind’ communities were not getting their fair share. (Local Trust).
On Thursday 12 November, we are hosting a panel on Building connectivity: How best to harness digital infrastructure to level up the country? with Matt Warman MP, Jo Gideon MP, Alan Mak MP and Vodafone UK’s Nick Jeffery. Sign up here.
VIEW OF THE WEEK
Scott Mann, MP for North Cornwall
It often seems the case that those parts of the world that are the most scenic are also the most socio-economically challenged. My home county of Cornwall is no exception to this theory.
Beneath the beauty it suffers from many of the issues faced by other coastal areas in the UK: lack of infrastructure, lack of employment opportunities, leading to poorer life chances.
There have been some notable efforts in recent years by the Government to address these longstanding issues and I appreciate the consideration this issue is starting to be given. That being said, we still have a long way to go.
In my constituency of North Cornwall, we have a low wage economy in an area with a surprisingly high cost of living.
The median gross weekly pay for full time employees in North Cornwall in 2019 was £520, compared to £580 across the country.
However, part-time work is a substantial part of the local labour market. When this is taken into account the average income including pensions in North Cornwall in Cornwall drops considerably to £20,700 – or £398 a week – compared to £24,652 across the UK (2018 figures). Wages have increased since 2015 and things are starting to change, but we are clearly a long way from parity with the rest of the country.
The combination of these low wages, an undersupply of housing, and the popularity of second homes/holiday lets creates a perfect storm for local working people.
This situation is worsening. The average cost of a home in North Cornwall was £247,500 in September 2019 – a jump of 7.6% on the previous year. That is close to England’s then-average at £250,000, despite wages being substantially lower than elsewhere.
I will be championing giving individuals more freedom to meet the housing demands and tenure requirements of a modern Cornwall. I have a particular interest in community self-build housing and with rising land costs I believe this could be the answer for aspiring Cornish people.
We must also improve our digital and physical infrastructure to give businesses the tools they need locate in our beautiful part of the world – injecting money into the local economy in the process and driving up wages.
Our communities have experienced a brain drain as many people leave for further education and never return. Those who remain have often missed out on the technical or vocational skills training available elsewhere.
This is something I have tried to resolve by throwing my support behind a new further education college that has a strong emphasis on vocational courses. We opened Callywith College in 2017 – the first new further education college in the UK for 20 years.
The Conservatives must reach out to young people and give them the ladder of new opportunities right on their doorstep – truly give them the power to help themselves.
Many constituencies have returned Conservative MPs for the first time, and hundreds of thousands of people voted Conservative for the first time. When it comes to convincing them to vote for us again, we would be wise to remember that it may be difficult to continue selling the Conservative vision of a capitalist property-owning democracy to people without capital or property.
It is incumbent on us to help these communities, and I look forward to working with the Levelling Up Taskforce to do so.
MAP OF THE WEEK
R&D funding (from Innovate UK) for projects that are specifically designed to boost our economic recovery from the impact of COVID-19, by grant size and region.
STATS OF THE WEEK
BBC spending is skewed towards London, data shows.
Half (49%) of the corporation’s TV programming expenditure was spent in London in 2019.
By contrast, just 2.8% was spend in the Midlands.
But the North of England (14%) saw a greater portion of BBC TV programming spending than the South of England (9.8%).
ABOUT US
The Taskforce is made up of more than 60 (and growing!) Conservative MPs from constituencies right across the country.
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