Wigan MP Lisa Nandy has announced that a Labour Government would scrap the government’s ‘levelling up’ missions
She said that that it was “fundamentally dishonest” to introduce measures of success without “even the faintest idea” of how to achieve them
She told the audience at the Institute for Government conference this afternoon that Labour will “change how we measure success” and condemned the government’s levelling up missions as “vague” and “disingenuous”.
She said: “Who can argue with the levelling up missions? But that is precisely why they offer so little. Thomas Jefferson once said the care of human life is the first and only task of government.
“These missions are the very essence of what it is to be decent government. Instead, they have been turned into ambitions that can be dropped or revised at a whim.”
Labour she said, will go “wide and deep” on devolution – spreading power beyond the cities she says the Conservatives have prioritised.
“Britain is almost unique trying to power a modern economy with a handful of people in a handful of sectors”
Nandy spoke on other issues.On local decisions, she said that central government has to get comfortable with decisions it disagrees with.
She said the Cumbrian coal mine was “the only game in town” and government should have been able to give them a true choice between coal and nuclear.
On housing, Nandy said “everything about our housing market is currently broken” and that Labour want to increase homeownership, restore social housing to the second largest type of tenure, and a higher quality private rented sector.
On relocating Parliament, Nandy says it is time to start modernising parliament, including moving into a modern office building “if I had my way”
