Labour MP Wants Promised Levelling Up Funding Delivered For His Town
Hartlepool and 54 other towns were promised funding in the Long-Term Plan for Towns by the previous government (Alamy)
4 min read
Hartlepool’s Labour MP Jonathan Brash has said he wants levelling up funding that was promised to his town to be delivered by the new government, and hopes the Autumn Budget will offer “clarity” on the funds which have been cast into doubt.
Under the previous Conservative administration, three pots of funding were promised to some of the most deprived areas in the UK, including the Levelling Up Fund, the Levelling Up Partnerships and the Long-Term Plan for Towns.
The Long-Term Plan, announced last year, promised 55 towns a ten-year endowment-style fund of £20m each. This funding was to give them “long term certainty to deliver projects over multiple years and the flexibility to invest in interventions based on evolving local needs and priorities”.
However, there are concerns over whether all these towns will now receive this funding, with senior councillors and council officers telling the Local Government Chronicle last month that they have not yet received confirmation from new Labour ministers that the cash promised in all three levelling up funding pots will be delivered.
Brash told PoliticsHome that he hoped the Autumn Budget would bring “clarity” as to if and when this funding would be granted for towns like Hartlepool – which was ranked the ninth most deprived local authority by the English Indices of Deprivation (IoD) in 2019.
“I’m very clear that I want that funding – there's no question about that,” he said.
“Obviously I'm incredibly hopeful that the Treasury, the Labour Government, will find the money and will secure that money for towns like Hartlepool."
However, Brash said it was “right” for Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves not to promise anything they feel cannot be delivered.
“The Government is getting it in the neck across a lot of these things, but let's be clear, starting with the principle of not promising things you cannot deliver is one that every government should have – and sadly, the last government didn't,” he said.
“They [the Conservative government] were perfectly happy to promise things they knew they couldn't deliver on, but they knew they were probably going to lose [the General Election] so they just thought let's try and save as many seats as we can by making these unfunded promises.
“My predecessor [Conservative MP Jill Mortimer] was putting this on leaflets, and the money wasn't there. It's incredibly duplicitous and needs to be called out.”
He called the last government “morally repugnant”, explaining that a lot of communities had taken the funding promises “in good faith” and had started planning how they were going to use the money.
PoliticsHome understands that the Government will be setting out further details on the funding in "due course".
Hartlepool MP Jonathan Brash said he wanted fundamental reform of local government funding (Alamy)
Brash added that the whole funding system needed to be reformed, as “multiple pots with multiple different rules, with multiple requirements” had became “burdensome” for local authorities.
The Hartlepool MP hopes the Labour Government will also give local authorities more freedom over deciding how to spend such funding.
“The idea that someone in Whitehall can explain to somebody living in Hartlepool the best way for the money to be spent is nonsense, and this government gets that,” he said.
Brash, who was a local councillor before being elected as an MP this year, said he hoped to chair a new All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) advocating for council tax reform, calling the council tax system “completely broken” and “regressive”.
He has already raised with ministers that he believes fundamental reform is needed on what services are provided by local government. Adult and children's social care in particular currently accounts for a huge amount of spending by overstretched local authorities.
“Children's social care is slowly bankrupting councils like mine: Hartlepool Borough Council overspent £4.5m pounds last year, it's going to overspend by £5m this year, purely on children's social care,” Brash said.
“You've got private sector children's homes owned by, frankly, hedge funds, charging utterly unacceptable amounts of money every single week.
“I don't think that makes any sense… it's an issue for the state.”
However, the MP said he would not want the government to “try and solve it overnight”.
Hartlepool was one of the towns worst affected by violent riots in the summer, which Brash viewed as a “tiny minority of violent folks”. However, he previously told PoliticsHome he did have concerns about how the asylum system was affecting the town, calling for a further conversation about the “capacity” of local areas to be able to deal with issues surrounding immigration and asylum.
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