| Levelling up bill 08:49 - Aug 25 with 721 views | SaleAway |
feedback on the Levelling up bill .... basically, its a slogan with no money and no actual detailed plans.... quel surprise....
Levelling up bill does not include funding needed to make levelling up happen, say MPs
Although the House of Commons is not sitting over the summer, MPs still have work to do and some who chair select committees have been sending out letters. Clive Betts, the Labour MP who chairs the levelling up committee, says that when Greg Clark replaced Michael Gove as levelling up secretary in July, he asked Betts to tell him over the summer what the committee thought of the levelling up and regeneration bill.
Not much seems to be the answer. Today Betts has released the letter he has sent to Clark on behalf of his committee giving an assessment of the bill and here is the key paragraph.
It is the committee’s view that the main tool to achieve levelling up will be through appropriate funding to those areas that need it most. This funding will help in making progress on the levelling up missions related to public transport and local connectivity; transforming digital connectivity; improving education outcomes; increasing the number of adults who complete high quality skills training; and increasing healthy life expectancy. None of the provisions in the bill will directly contribute to making progress towards achieving these missions — other than setting them. There is also no funding for levelling up associated with the bill.
Like all select committees, this one has a narrow Conservative majority.
And in a statement to journalists Betts said:
In its current form, the bill does little to reassure that levelling up will prove to be more than just a slogan and that we will have meaningful change in local communities across the country. In key areas, it is unclear how the government intends to drive change and they are yet to commit to the spending that is necessary to level up the country.
Our inquiry has focused on the planning provisions in the bill, which can be described as loosely-connected proposals to tinker with the current system, hopefully achieving some improvement. It has been difficult to conduct scrutiny due to a lot of the detail of the provisions having not yet been published.
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| bear s***s in woods on 10:49 - Aug 25 with 580 views | Swansea_Blue |
This whole concept will be new to people in many parts of the country, but to those of us living in areas that received EU structural funds (like West Wales & the Valleys, Cornwall), it’s obvious the govt position in actually ’levelling down’.
Our argument all along during the Brexit squabbles was, yes of course the EU money we received was offset by our contributions, but at least it was coming back to the poor areas to be used for society’s benefit. Only the most naive or partisan would have believed Brexiteer claims that all the EU funding would be replaced. The poorer regions of the UK have been deprived of hundreds of millions of pounds of funding that would have gone on infrastructure, education, innovation and enterprise, etc.
“Bear s***s in woods” indeed. |  |
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| Levelling up bill on 12:56 - Aug 25 with 477 views | Darth_Koont |
So basically the Northern Powerhouse again but on a national level. Triffic.
But not surprising. The last thing anyone in our political class seems to want is government spending to be accountable, an investment and/or to redress structural imbalances. That would mean moving money from private to public interests. |  |
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