Lisa Nandy speech at Convention of the North 2023, Manchester

Lisa Nandy MP, Labour’s Shadow Levelling Up Secretary, said:

No more excuses. We can’t go on like this.

After 13 years of virtually no growth, we can’t fund our public services – chief amongst them social care and the NHS, our crown jewel, run down to the point where millions can’t get treatment and patients lie on floors in A&E.

High streets are to communities what the A&E is to health and social care - the warning light that flashes when the system is broken.

Behind every boarded up high street is a local economy that is failing – failing to grow, failing to put money in people’s pockets, failing to give young people choices and chances so they have to get out if they want to get on.

This is our failure, not theirs. After a decade of decay and decline so much is broken in Britain but chief amongst them our political system.

Our inability to grapple with every major challenge we now face – struggling public services, failing town centres, a rapidly aging population, an energy revolution that has left none of us untouched - comes back to one thing:

That we have written off the talent, potential and assets of most people in most parts of Britain.

This isn’t just a tragedy; it is a social crime.

Britain is almost unique in still trying to power a modern economy using only a handful of people in a handful of sectors in a few small parts of the country.

It has left us with a crisis in London and our major cities – of housing, cost of living, air pollution, congestion and extraordinary levels of poverty.

And only a one-word plan for the rest of Britain – redistribution.

To find our way out of this national malaise we needed to be bold.

Instead, we got a lecture on the merits of the Roman Empire.

A Hunger Games-style system where ministers choose who gets a leisure centre, some picnic areas and traffic light improvements from behind a desk in Whitehall.

A partial refund on our own money.

With businesses and political leaders forced to go cap in hand to Whitehall to ask permission for what they know will work.

And communities completely cut out of the conversation.

Together, we are calling time on this short term, arrogant, sticking plaster approach that leaves us lurching from crisis to crisis.

We can’t go on like this.

In Ellesmere Port, Bradford, Sunderland and Aberdeenshire – through arts and culture, wind and hydrogen, the ambitious, proud people and the political leaders that back them - you can glimpse the future.

The Councils pioneering community wealth building.

The mayors taking back control of our buses.

The Communities reclaiming our housing stock street by street.

The business leaders investing in our natural assets.

Ambition is everywhere in the towns, villages, and cities that were once the engines of Britain, for too long written off and written out of our national story.

For 15 years, since the global crash, the failure of running an economy like this has been plain to see.

But every time the public has sounded the alarm, hitting our politicians with tsunami after tsunami of discontent, our creaking political system has done nothing.

We can debate the merits of differing devolution models and funding formulas.

But this is the collective task facing our generation of political leaders.

To respond to that siren call or face obsolescence. To change or die.

We must succeed where successive generations have failed, in various ways, to varying degrees, for a century, and we must do so for one simple reason - because ending a century of centralisation and unleashing the power of all people in all parts of Britain is no longer a nice to have, a local or a regional issue, it is at the heart of whether this country has a future or not.

It is the only way to heal a fractured and divided nation.

It is the only way to build an economy that works for most of us again, so we can fund our public services and sustain thriving places.

In short, it is the only way to build a country that works.

Why would you trust us to do our part?

When you’ve had commitments to change from every aspiring government in recent decades.

That have spawned too many enterprise zones to count.

An endless round of northern powerhouse press releases with every single promise broken.

That lives or dies at the whim of whoever happens to be Prime Minister from week to week.

Well, I’ll tell you why.

Because we’re going to bake this into our programme for government, across the whole of government – a covenant between us, you and the British people - and today I want to tell you how.

Firstly, we believe that to have strong, thriving and resilient communities - particularly in industrial and coastal towns - this country doesn’t need one national growth plan but hundreds of local and regional growth plans driven by you and the people you serve.

Based on the brilliantly diverse assets, skills and geography across our country.

For too long the plan for most of our country has amounted to one word: redistribution.

From here on in we will replace that with contribution – to empower our communities to take control of their own economic future.

Today we’re firing the starting gun on the biggest transfer of power out of Whitehall and Westminster in British history with one simple ask – tell us what you need to create strong local economies and thriving inclusive communities and we will back you.

There are a million good jobs on the road to net zero and a global race to get them. Why shouldn’t young people in Barnsley and Bolton have the chance to power us through the next century like their parents and grandparents powered them through the last?

That is why we have committed to the biggest programme of investment in the green energy transition.

To underwrite the economic growth plans, created by the people who live in those communities and see assets and potential where Whitehall sees only problems.

To bring back good, well-paid jobs to places that were once the engines of Britain.

If you write the plan, we will support the jobs of the future and hand you the tools to deliver – in all places not just some.

So secondly, in our first King’s Speech we will bring forward plans to flip the presumption of power from Whitehall to the Town Hall through the Take Back Control Act.

Oppositions tend to like the idea of handing over power. Governments less so.

But if you ask for powers, we will hand them over or explain why not. And if there are reasons why not we will be obliged to set out a path for communities to realise that ambition.

No more top-down determinism of which communities qualify for powers and which don’t. An end to central government dictating local governance models as a bargaining chip.

In the Act will be a promise, written into law, that leaders can request anything that has already been devolved to another area of a similar scale within England.

So that every part of Britain that wants to will be able to take charge of its own destiny – on housing, transport, energy, childcare, skills, employment support and training.

With the right to run their own bus services and invest in the rail, tram and bus networks they need.

And drive major infrastructure projects not from Westminster but from South Yorkshire, Merseyside and Teesside – working together across the north. 

Because if Northern Powerhouse Rail had been in the hands of the north, without constant interference from government, you can bet we would have delivered it by now.

And we won’t stop there.

We know that the power to deliver services means nothing without the ability to plan for the long-term on how you deliver them.

Rachel Reeves has been clear that the next Labour Government will have iron-clad fiscal rules, because it’s people’s money and they don’t have a lot of it. So, every penny will be spent wisely - and that means spent by the right people in pursuit of the same aims.

That is why national government spending will be lined up behind local growth plans, not ad hoc pots of funding. Is there anything more absurd, unstrategic or anti-growth than having to bid into two different departments for buses and bus charging points?

I am hopeful there is an emerging political consensus that longer term funding settlements with more flex are the future.

The current system is deeply frustrating for you. In Government, it would be frustrating for us. And it is completely undemocratic, leaving you accountable to Westminster, not the people you serve, for how money is spent.

Time is up. We’re going to do things differently.

So we will usher in a new generation of civic leadership by empowering and supporting local government offices everywhere to rebuild their capacity for consistent and first-rate management of public money. The planners and architects you need to build beautiful places. Expertise in procurement, trade and finance.

We know how badly this has been hollowed out. And we will provide the support to rebuild this capacity across local government, drawing on those places first and foremost where it still exists and from whom so much can be learnt.

With this capacity in place, we will provide the route for local authorities to take on properly integrated, longer-term funding settlements, providing them with greater financial certainty and the ability plan for the future.

No more smoke and mirrors from central government. Genuine power, decision-making and resources for communities to deliver themselves.

In a brilliantly diverse country, we are comfortable with people doing things differently.

But some of us are not more equal than others. And never again will we behave as though we are.

That is why the Take Back Control Act will also put into place the recommendation by the Future of the UK Commission that there should be a constitutional requirement to rebalance the UK’s economy and equalise living standards across the country over time.

The route to achieving this doesn’t lie through raising more taxes on working people who simply cannot afford it, whichever region they happen to live in. It lies in empowering every part of the country with the capacity, tools and investment to deliver sustained growth.

For too long the relationship between national and local government has been disrespectful, based on dependence, the begging bowl culture that Andy Street excoriated last week.

We seek a new relationship, of equals, based on mutual respect. A covenant between national, regional and local partners – and the people we serve.

And by the end of our first term, we want to see a significant expansion of economic devolution in England, with local leaders using a range of powers to drive growth and prosperity in communities across the country.

That will ask more of you than ever before.

The frontline workforce who deliver the services that sustain jobs and growth, the investors who stand ready to play their part in rebuilding Britain’s public services, social housing, town centres and physical infrastructure.

They can only build a country that works if they have national and local leaders who have a vision, and the ambition, skill and staying power to see it through.

Who are prepared to embrace a different sort of leadership from the broken models that have cost us the trust of the British people, felt most acutely at national level but without any question in many local communities too.

One that is more open, accountable, transparent – willing to partner with whoever it takes – business and workforce, across political boundaries, and govern not to the people but with the people.

I know that is a lot to ask.

13 stormy years that have battered our communities.

And Local Government has been asked to step up over and over again.

Leading this country through the pandemic when central government floundered. The last line of defence for children broken by hunger and homes without heat in the winter.

Our councils have been hollowed out. Burned out. Trying to spin gold out of thread for a decade takes its toll.

It is tempting to look back to previous decades when the taps were on and funding flowed from national to local and to seek only this – a better resourced, dependent relationship in which a small group of people would continue to hold all the power.

To replicate such a system would squander the visionary leadership at local and regional government, from Bev Craig here in right Manchester to Shaun Davies in Telford.

We can do better than this.

We have to do better than this.

Our broken political system must change or die.

But it is precisely in these times when so much is broken, when nothing is certain, and where so much is at stake that real change because not just possible but inevitable.

And this is what is at stake.

To build the country we’ve believed in all our lives but never yet seen.

A confident country again. Big, diverse and generous enough to contain all its people and celebrate the contribution they have to make in every part of Britain.

Because in every part of Britain, despite all the decay and drift of the last decade, hope burns brighter than ever before.

So no more excuses. It’s time to build.