Contribution
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendments 93, 119 and 183. I thank all noble Lords who supported these amendments across Committee and now on Report, including the noble Lords, Lord Young of Cookham, Lord Shipley and Lord Blunkett, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty. I thank the Minister for her engagement between Committee and Report. I hope she will be able to offer a substantive proposal in response to these amendments in her summing up, particularly Amendments 119 and 183.
Starting with those amendments, I will add to what I said in Committee. Social mobility is a long-standing problem in this country. The noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, said yesterday in the Chamber, around the Government’s aspirations, that where you come from should not determine where you are going. We know that relative income mobility—the strength of the link between a parent’s income and that of their child—is poor, when we look at that internationally, ranking near the USA as one of the least mobile developed nations.
That echoes my personal experience growing up in inner-city Nottingham. I saw too many young people who did not meet their potential because of where they were from. The tragedy of lost potential that that represents led me to put forward a proposal for a special inquiry committee to look into this, which has now delivered, although we await the Government’s response on that. One of the things that that committee report highlighted, along with lots of recent work by the Social Mobility Commission, is the regional nature of the problem. We know that in places such as London and the south-east, social mobility is relatively good, but in the regions, such as the north and the Midlands, it is relatively poor, which highlights the importance of specific place-based approaches to address this issue of social mobility.
We now have a Bill in front of us to do with getting more power into strategic authorities in the regions. We have a good opportunity here to make some progress on this long-standing issue of social mobility and youth unemployment. I look forward to the Minister’s response on these amendments.
My Amendment 93 on pan-regional partnerships, which I have brought back from Committee with some minor changes, is informed by the work I have done in many areas on pan-regional issues across the Midlands over the past four or five years, and seeing the benefits of working at scale on a pan-regional basis and taking advantage of that larger scale.
In Committee, the Minister said that strategic authorities were enabled to do this already. Indeed, there are some successful examples of pan-regional partnerships—for example, the Great North partnership. The issue here is fragmentation. If the Government do not push this approach more widely, it simply will not happen more broadly across the country. The reason this is so important touches on a point that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, made in the last group on economic development—another long-standing problem of the concentration of wealth and economic activity in the south-east of the country, with the Midlands and the north being left behind. Getting the regions together at that larger scale is key to helping to increase the prosperity of the regions in areas such as inward investments, large-scale infrastructure and cultural events, and to linking up cross-cutting issues such as social mobility, energy, and many other areas.
The Government have already committed to this. In the devolution White Paper, they recognised the benefits of a pan-regional approach, and the Minister talked about enabling co-operation with neighbouring strategic authorities. This is about going beyond that, enabling wider collaboration between groups of strategic authorities at a pan-regional level across larger geographies. My question for the Government is this: how will they provide support for the formation of those pan-regional partnerships, which are so important for the regions to develop economically, to tackle cross-cutting issues and to enable broader economic growth across the country? I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response when she comes to sum up.