11:00 Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)

We strongly require support for the emergence of a range of different financial sources for infrastructure development, including the green bank, and a greater localised and decentralised source of capital explicitly held for manufacturing entrepreneurship. That will allow risk-takers to take those industrial strides around the existing capital and skills inherent in the cultural demographics of our region. I hope that, unlike the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, the Minister will consider a manufacturing green bank that works with the agencies to deliver the technology and product design that will give us green technologies—working and operating out of Edinburgh, the Secretary of State’s preferred location—rather than holding debates on “green” ISAs or other financial products that simply have the term “green” before them. That green finance must be aimed at manufacturing and not solely at financial high-street products if the Government’s own agglomeration policy is to be pursued for manufacturing.

Of anything that I say today, I beg the Minister to take that message about carbon floor pricing back to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Treasury and the Department of Energy and Climate Change, to block any moves that will hurt our north-east in general, and Teesside’s industrial core in particular. The announcement of a supposed regional growth strategy for the north-east as part of the comprehensive spending review is at best misleading and at worst a smokescreen to hide the deep cuts that will stunt economic growth in our region. The regional growth fund will also have to finance bids for housing and transport plans, so it is obvious that even a successful LEP bid to the fund will mean only a small slice of a very small cake. The fund was designed to redress the regional imbalance in the economy, so surely providing funds to companies in the affluent south-east will undermine its objectives.

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