One of my favourite poets, Blackpool’s Nathan Parker, once wrote: “The working class spirit, the folk I admire the most: we founded the NHS, tea breaks, and beans on toast”. In his own self-deprecating way, he was making the point that the most important fixtures in our lives all come from ordinary people achieving extraordinary things.
Politicians are quick to take credit for social progress. But such progress relies on a partnership between government and working people. For as much as Nye Bevan is responsible for healthcare free at the point of service, so are the many millions who have worked in the NHS since. As much as Barbara Castle passed the Equal Pay Act, so did the women of Dagenham.
But in that partnership for change – between politicians and those we try to serve – it’s never a matter of equal contributions. It has to be local communities that decide the future and that’s what “levelling up” failed to grasp. Whitehall can’t micromanage our towns and cities. You can’t pit places against each other. You’ve got to throw power and long-term investment behind them and offer the full force of government on their side. Only then can they bring about long-lasting change.
That’s why the Plan for Neighbourhoods, which I’ve announced today, aims to draw a line under the last government’s levelling up agenda. I know that some of those responsible for the past pots of money really cared about the places which have been left behind – but they could never deliver what was promised. It was small handouts for hanging baskets, which councils were expected to go cap-in-hand to ask for. That is not how you deliver sustainable growth or the opportunities these places need.
This new programme learns the lessons from levelling up. The 75 places we’re investing in have been chosen because they were promised this funding by the last government. That money never actually existed and was due to come out of reserves that had already been spent three times over. But I’ve asked officials to look at the list of places, and it’s clear to me that they all need what they were promised. I know there are plenty of others that could do with more funding too, but in this difficult economic context we wanted to at least give places what they’re owed.
In each of those 75 places we’re setting up a Neighbourhood Board of local residents, businesses, campaigners and members of the community. They’ll receive £20m over the course of a decade to deliver their own plan for change, which we’ll work with them to develop. The funding can be spent on a list of approved interventions which we know can work. This includes community grocers providing essentials at discounted prices to help with the cost of living, new co-operative businesses which local people can have a stake in, and training courses to address skills gaps. Communities can still spend the investment on regenerating high streets and estates, but I want this to be about long-lasting change.
The priority is for communities to deliver change themselves. When I entered my department last July, I couldn’t believe that previous secretaries of state had spent their time choosing which park would get a chess board. We’ll still ask Neighbourhood Boards to submit their plans to the department so we can check the investment provides taxpayers with value for money, but you won’t find me or any other minister telling people what’s best for them.
It aligns with this government’s wider devolution agenda. Just as I believe that Tracy Brabin knows what’s best for West Yorkshire and Steve Rotherham knows what’s best for Merseyside, so the same is true of the communities of Wrexham, Scunthorpe and Irvine. As much as our plan for every part of England to have a mayor is important for moving power to where it belongs, I also see the potential for communities to drive change at a hyperlocal level.
In designing this programme, I’ve drawn inspiration from John Prescott’s New Deal for Communities, which also supported community groups to deliver their own change. In many of the estates that the New Deal focused on, you can still see the effects 20 years on. This time we’ll be cutting down on the use of consultants and investing in people as much as places, but remembering that communities themselves so often have the answers to local problems.
This is all part of the government’s Plan for Change and making sure that every corner of the country can kickstart growth. For me, it’s also important that nowhere is left behind in our opportunity mission – we recognise that so many feel that they and the place they call home have been underestimated.
In each of these 75 neighbourhoods there’ll be kids today with dreams made more distant by starting each school day on an empty stomach, or having parents who don’t know what hours they’ll be working next week. The levelling up agenda was never set up to invest in them or make fundamental changes to the way our country is wired. Put simply, its ambitions were always too cosmetic.
We are at the start of a decade-long plan to regenerate these places. By the end we’ll need to ask not just whether these places look better, but whether the lives of those who call them home are improved. That will be the real test of the Plan for Neighbourhoods, and that is what we’re setting out to achieve.
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