16:03 The Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Michael Gove)

To get back to some serious points for a moment, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told Glasgow’s COP26 today that the world’s

Will the Secretary of State use his planning powers to protect the beautiful parts of his own county of Surrey and prevent it from being turned into a British Texas? Why are Conservative Ministers prepared to allow new oil drilling in the Surrey hills and the north of Scotland when we are in a climate crisis?

I have huge respect and affection for the right hon. Member, but I remember when we sat in Cabinet together and he was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. I remember when he spoke to the Liberal Democrat conference, when such a thing occurred —when there were enough Liberal Democrats to get together to fill a conference hall. I remember him telling that Liberal Democrat conference hall that it was time—please forgive my language, ladies and gentlemen—to get fracking. Now that he is no longer in government and is in opposition, he seems, curiously enough, to have reversed his position, an unprecedented thing for a Liberal Democrat to do. [Laughter.] Saying one thing to one constituency and another thing to another? Remarkable!

On top of that, as the Chairman of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), pointed out, we have £4.8 billion going to local government over the spending review period. This is necessarily an injection of cash to help local government ensure it can play its part in levelling up, and to ensure that it is supported by thriving businesses. We have also reformed business rates and moved towards a three-year evaluation, relief on improvements, including improvements that will help to deal effectively with climate change, and a 50% reduction for small businesses in the most affected sectors.

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16:32 Steve Reed (Labour)

Our held-back regions desperately need a radical plan to reindustrialise around the green economy and digital technology, and to bring good new jobs to every part of the country. The shadow Chancellor, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), has announced bold plans for a green new deal to do precisely that, but the Chancellor did not mention the climate crisis even once in his speech, just days before COP26 was due to start in Glasgow.

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17:17 Dame Margaret Hodge (Barking) (Lab)

In all my years, I have never heard such an incoherent and botched statement. It was a Budget that ignored economics and focused on politics, proclaimed a moral mission for small government and delivered the biggest public spending programme since the 1980s, ignored the impact of Brexit, encouraged air travel rather than leading us to net zero, and prioritised cheap champagne over affordable childcare.

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17:22 Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)

It has been easy to make those constructive criticisms, because I do not have to implement them, but Ministers do; Back-Bench MPs of the governing party are on the hook for delivering them, too. This has been a Budget that gets things done: it will fund better roads in my constituency, whether that is through the levelling-up fund or through the towns fund, and it will tackle the climate emergency as we find the path back to 0.7% and invest in some of the countries most affected by climate change. I look forward to the promise of lower taxes stimulating growth and helping around the world

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17:27 Ed Davey (Liberal Democrat)

The Budget proved one thing about this Conservative Government: they are totally out of touch. They are out of touch with the cost-of-living crisis: despite people struggling with rising heating, food and mortgage bills, the Conservatives’ response is to raise their taxes. They are out of touch with the crisis facing our children: despite the dramatic loss of learning, thanks to covid, the Conservatives plan to spend less than a third of what their own catch-up expert recommended. They are totally out of touch when it comes to climate change: despite the Budget taking place on the eve of the most important set of climate talks ever, the Chancellor had literally nothing to offer on positive action for the climate. Instead, he offered tax cuts for people using fossil fuels, not least on short-haul flights.

It was such a missed opportunity and such an own goal. Does my right hon. Friend agree that there were other things that the Government could have done, such as the electrification of east-west rail, which would have affected my constituency? That would have shown that the Government were serious about decarbonisation, but what they did was encourage people to fly when they should not be flying.

My hon. Friend is a real campaigner when it comes to the environment and climate change, and she is absolutely right. I make a prediction to her: this continuing concerted love-in with fossil fuels will be seen by our children as criminally negligent.

Let me be crystal clear about the Glasgow COP. Having led the UK delegation to three past COPs—in Doha, Warsaw and Lima—when I was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and having prepared the UK’s negotiating position ahead of Paris, I desperately hope that Glasgow succeeds. But when I see the Government’s gross diplomatic mistakes ahead of COP26, and when I hear a Budget speech that does not even mention climate change, I fear for the outcome of Glasgow, and I am angry with this Government.

I regret to say that, as I watched the Prime Minister pose in Rome’s Colosseum, he reminded me less of Emperor Augustus than of Emperor Nero. He talks about ending coal use across the globe, while refusing to stop a new coal mine being opened in Cumbria. He asks world leaders for the political will to act on climate change, while allowing new drilling—new drilling!—for oil on land in Surrey and offshore in Scotland. With the Secretary of State for Levelling Up refusing to use the planning power that he has for climate action, I fear that the only levels that will go up under his leadership are the sea levels.

I have to say to the Secretary of State that I am proud to be the Minister who passed the regulation that did more to stop fracking under this Government and I am proud that I passed it under his own nose in the Cabinet. He was one of the people urging me to go on to fracking but, because I fooled him, I managed to make renewable energy the watchword of the Liberal Democrats in power. We nearly quadrupled renewable energy. We made Britain the world leader in offshore wind power, despite opposition from the Conservatives. I am so proud that it is the Liberal Democrats who were responsible for cutting coal use in this country more than any other party.

The Secretary of State is known very well for his debating skills, but he is also known for his political skills. My political skills were shown in my ensuring that his Ministers, and he, believed that we were taking real action on fracking when I was passing the regulation that did more to stop fracking—let him hear this. We did more to stop fracking than any other group of politicians. I am really proud that the Liberal Democrats did more on renewable energy—

As we debate the need to level up, anyone would have thought that the Government would want to save jobs in our energy-intensive industries, most of which are big employers outside London and the south-east. But no; there was no help at all in the Budget for the energy-intensive industries. The Government could have used money from a windfall tax on gas producers, as we would have done, to help those industries to decarbonise and to invest in the technologies of the future. This is yet another missed opportunity on climate change from the Conservatives. We can have a greener and fairer society, investing in climate action and helping the fuel poor, but we will not get it with this Conservative Chancellor and this Conservative Government.

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17:41 Clive Betts (Labour)

The Secretary of State is right to emphasise the importance of transport. Yes, the South Yorkshire region got £600 million, but its bid to the levelling up fund for transport expenditure got turned down completely. When councils look at their local plans, there is a levelling up fund, a bus service improvement plan, a city region sustainable transport settlement plan and a zero emission bus regional areas fund to bid for. That is four different pots of money that councils must bid for to fund local transport services and that they must try to tie together, in the hope they may get some of them. That is really no way to enable our city region Mayors to plan the transport for their areas—no way at all.

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17:46 Royston Smith (Southampton, Itchen) (Con)

To create more secure jobs, we need infrastructure. I agree with the direction of travel on net zero and clean air, but that does not mean that vehicles will not need to access the city—we just need cleaner, greener ones. Our port welcomes 2 million cruise passengers per year. It is the busiest car-export port in the country and the second-busiest container port. More containers and cars are going by rail, but it will never be all of them that do so, or anything like it.

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18:02 Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)

As COP26 starts today, one can only applaud the ambitious net zero strategy, the issuance of green bonds and the incentives for renewable growth. I have long campaigned for the changes that will allow pension funds to invest in long-term projects. All of that is welcome as is the new investment in public services. As my right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said, it is not only how much we spend, but how we spend it and how we pay for it. It is key, therefore, that the Government do not, in their quest to work out how to pay for investment, become boxed in with the false choice of higher taxes or higher debt. Higher debt leaves the economy open to the ravages of inflation and higher interest rate costs, which only hit the poorest in our society. With experts at the moment predicting inflation to be 4% at the end of the year and possibly rising to 7% next year, any headroom that the Chancellor has created to invest more in public services will be eaten up by debt service payments. Therefore, as my right hon. Friend said earlier, we must attack inflation.

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18:14 Dan Jarvis (Labour)

I am proud to say that in South Yorkshire, we are not waiting to follow, but are already leading the way. We have established an ownership hub to support worker buy-outs and co-ops. We are working to confront the climate emergency, with a plan to reach net zero carbon emissions, and we are developing a pioneering strategy to reduce flooding. Through our innovative working win programme, we have supported thousands of people with physical and mental health conditions. The same is happening across the north in West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, North of Tyne and the Liverpool city region: Labour Mayors drawing on the industrial heritage of the past, the dedicated workforce of the present, and the cutting-edge innovation for the future, to transform our communities for the better. With the right backing, we can unlock the huge potential in the north and level up our country, but to do so in full we need the Government to play their full part.

The same applies to our levelling-up fund bid—the Government’s flagship programme, which regrettably delivers less money than its predecessor, the local growth fund. Our mayoral combined authority proposal is a great example of how to rebalance the scales. The bid, which I personally submitted and has the backing of all our local leaders, targets investment in our bus services. It is not a massive amount of money, but it will help us to drive towards net zero—an objective to which levelling up must be inextricably linked. On Wednesday, we received word from the Government: a hugely disappointing, “No.” I urge them to take another look at our bid during the next round.

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19:30 Yvette Cooper (Labour)

It will get worse, too. The OBR forecasts growth—once we come through the bounce-back from the pandemic—of 1.3%, 1.6% and 1.7%. For all the warm words in the Budget, and for all that Conservative Members seize on particular phrases of the Chancellor’s, that is the underlying reality that they should be most worried about: weak economic growth for the future. That is what will hit our future public services and hit future living standards. We do not have the investment in regional economies, in jobs of the future or, particularly, in tackling climate change and the environmental challenges that have been highlighted so heavily this week at COP26.

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19:55 Kerry McCarthy (Labour)

There were two main challenges facing the Chancellor as he prepared for the Budget. One, on the eve of COP26, was to accelerate progress on tackling climate change, yet he had nothing to say on that. Instead, he cut air passenger duty on domestic flights, sending out entirely the wrong signal when he should have been investing in our rail services. It was clear that net zero could not have been further from his mind.

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20:25 Ruth Cadbury (Labour)

With the climate crisis hardly getting a mention in the Budget, nothing was said about green skills. FE colleges are critical in this regard. They provide the essential learning that will be needed, including designing, installing and maintaining heat pumps, solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars and better insulation; and rewilding our natural spaces. We cannot deliver net zero here in the UK if UK people do not have the green skills, and we cannot level up if people who want to work and who want to get better paid work do not have the skills that this country needs in future.

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20:41 Matt Western (Labour)

There was no mention of the climate crisis, which the Chancellor failed to address. This Government are not on track to achieve the fourth or fifth carbon budget, yet they still, despite the penalties that we will face, see it as right to cut air passenger duty on short-haul flights. The reality is that we are seeing one of the major impacts of climate change—heavy instant flooding—happening in Yorkshire, south Wales, London, the midlands and elsewhere.

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20:49 Tan Dhesi (Labour)

No opportunity was more missed in the Budget than investing in UK railways. I share the Rail Industry Association’s disappointment. There was no guarantee of the long-term day-to-day investment that the railway needs to survive after the pandemic; still nothing on the integrated rail plan for the midlands and the north; continuing uncertainty about the eastern leg of HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail and the midlands rail hub; no update on the rail network enhancements pipeline two years after it was published; and still no announcement on when the western rail link to Heathrow will finally be built. With COP26 now in session, Ministers could have announced plans for a net zero railway with a huge rolling electrification programme and significant investment in developing battery and hydrogen technology, but no.

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21:04 Janet Daby (Labour)

On a serious note, the Government have not made promises to bring people out of poverty, tackle the climate crisis, fix our healthcare system and deliver safe, affordable homes for all. That is what my constituents wanted out of this Budget, and that is what I wanted. We heard in detail about the various drinks that the Chancellor plans to lift taxes on but there was not a single mention of the climate. It is astonishing, considering we are hosting the historic COP26 summit. Are our Government more interested in supporting offshore tax havens than offshore wind farms?

Coming out of the pandemic, we need commitments on supporting green industries, which will provide sustainable energy and great new jobs. We need to lower our vehicle emissions and clean up our air. The Government started making excuses about not being able to achieve a 1.5°C global warming pledge before the summit had even started. What sort of message does that send to the world leaders approaching negotiations? It is a mindset of defeatism and not so Churchillian from our Prime Minister.

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21:11 Helen Hayes (Labour)

After almost two years of the gruelling covid-19 pandemic, with the economic consequences of Brexit starting to bite hard, and on the eve of the COP26 climate summit, our best last chance to save our planet from the consequences of catastrophic global warming, we needed a Budget fit for the task—a Budget to deliver a net zero economy, a just transition, skills and jobs fit for the 21st century, fair taxation and public services to provide support for everyone who needs it. The Chancellor’s Budget fell far short on every one of those measures.

First, in relation to the climate emergency, this needed to be a Budget to make tackling climate change a prism for all economic decision making and all public spending. The Government could have entered their COP presidency leading the way on a just transition to a net zero economy, harnessing the opportunities to create new high-quality green jobs and deliver better public health and wellbeing, and ensuring that no part of the United Kingdom was left behind. Instead, we have the embarrassment of a Government rushing out their net zero strategy at the 11th hour before COP26 got under way, refusing to rule out new fossil fuel extraction in the North sea and in Cumbria, lowering air passenger duty for domestic flights, and failing to invest in retrofitting at anything like the scale required to decarbonise our homes.

The theme for today’s debate is levelling up—an incoherent, ill-defined concept that has now been honoured with its own Department. Our experience in London is that levelling up almost invariably involves cutting funding from our hard-pressed public services and from some of the most deprived communities anywhere in the country, and handing it to areas where the Tories find it politically expedient to do so. A coherent approach to levelling up would not pit north against south, or city against village. It would be underpinned by an industrial strategy and a net zero strategy for the country as a whole, and would fund and empower local councils and communities to tackle disadvantage wherever it is found.

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21:16 Beth Winter (Cynon Valley) (Lab)

In the build-up to the COP26 summit, which began today, I held three climate assemblies in my constituency, and I have sent our manifesto to the COP26 President. Cynon Valley is an old mining community suffering higher than average levels of poverty and ill health. While the people of our community are ready for and want change, they are also anxious to ensure that in the future-proofing of our planet, communities such as ours are not left behind, but this Budget and spending review give me no confidence that that will be the case. Indeed, yet again, the people of Cynon Valley and of Wales are being short-changed by this Tory Government. The Welsh Government’s budget in 2024-25 will be nearly £3 billion lower than it would be if it had increased in line with the economy since 2010-11. The Chancellor’s Budget offers Wales no help to deal with dangerous coal tips, although the whole UK benefited from the coal dug out from the south Wales valleys. Must we wait for another disaster before action is taken, given that a disaster becomes more likely as the climate crisis accelerates?

I am proud to be a co-sponsor of the green new deal Bill—the Decarbonisation and Economic Strategy Bill—which is relevant today. Addressing the climate crisis must be embedded in everything we do from now on. It means prioritising the future of the planet in every decision we take, including budgetary and spending reviews. We need urgent action now, and it is my sincere hope that the world will come together at COP26 to save our planet. No, this Tory Government have not stolen my green clothes at all; they have given to the rich and made life harder for the poor. That is the opposite of what I stand for, and levelling up it most certainly is not.

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21:28 Lucy Powell (Labour)

Given that the Resolution Foundation says that this must be a decade of high investment as we transition to net zero, it is astonishing that in the Chancellor’s flurry of giveaways there was almost no mention of green investment. The huge upheaval and change that meeting our net zero targets requires is the once-in-a-generation opportunity to truly level up and to create a fairer, better distributed economy—it is an opportunity this Government are frittering away. This is about winning the green global race in the sectors that power our regions, such as steel, aerospace, wind and wave, but there was not a single mention of that in this Budget. It is also about reducing demand and, in so doing, reducing the cost of living crunch through a major drive to retrofit homes and switch to green energies, but there was not a flicker about that in this Budget. It is also about investing in people, especially those who need it the most. The Government’s own report on lost learning during the pandemic, published just last week, shows the stark regional inequalities, with children in the north-east and Yorkshire and the Humber losing 15 times more learning than those in London, but that was not referred to in the Budget. Its stark findings should be at the heart of any Budget that claims to be levelling up. The Government cannot level up without a serious programme of catch-up.

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