Lord Livermore (Lab)

I am grateful to my noble friend for her kind words and her good wishes. I absolutely agree with her. One of the central themes of this spending review is making sure that growth is both created in all parts of the country and felt in all parts of the country. For too long, we have been reliant on just one or two regions of our country to generate that growth. Clearly, given our growth mission and the importance of raising sustainably the level of growth in this country, making sure that every part of the country contributes to that economic growth is absolutely vital. On the regional investment that my noble friend talks about—in particular the transport investment that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, referred to—the previous Government made lots of grand plans but never funded any of those grand plans. What we are doing here is setting out a very careful strategic plan to connect our cities, connect our towns to our cities, and funding that fully, so that those transport connections are made and people are able to get around cities and regions, which is absolutely vital to economic growth. It is no good having the jobs, the skills, the towns and the housing if they are not connected and people cannot travel around to them. I think that is an absolutely vital part of getting growth throughout the country.