Ms Polly Billington

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir Roger. State failure can come in many different forms. When he was Leader of the Opposition, the Prime Minister said, “we must restore the sense that this is a country that can rectify injustice, particularly when carried out by institutes of the state.”—[Official Report, 20 May 2024; Vol. 750, c. 668.] He was referring to the infected blood scandal, but lack of investment is a different form of state failure, and the sentiment therefore still stands. The state has failed so many of our communities. We must restore the sense that this is a country that can rectify injustice. This is not a new idea. In 2009, the Labour Government launched the Total Place initiative to improve the delivery of local public services and to increase the focus on communities. Frontier Economics analysis shows that a £2 billion investment in mission-critical neighbourhoods would deliver £2.4 billion in fiscal benefits to the Treasury. We reduce the cost of failure by investing in these communities. I am the chair of the coastal parliamentary Labour party, and co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on coastal communities, alongside my good friend and ally, my hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Alison Hume). The ICON report highlighted yet again the need to invest in our coastal communities. Of the 613 mission-critical neighbourhoods in the report, almost half are on the coast. The 25 neighbourhoods identified with the highest need in all of England are all coastal—every single one. Part of the reason why we have missed out on funding in Thanet and in other coastal areas is that the deprivation in coastal communities is often hidden by the upper-tier local authority statistics—forgive me for being a bit of a data nerd on this. East Thanet is one of the most deprived areas in the south-east, but because it is in Kent it is lumped in with Tunbridge Wells and Sevenoaks. The existing Treasury orthodoxy has meant that coastal communities have often missed out on vital funding. I was encouraged by reports that the Green Book is being reformed in ways that will allow communities that have been overlooked for investment for decades to finally share in funding. If done right, that could be transformational for unlocking potential and economic growth in coastal communities.