§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Pope.]
10.15 pm§ Mrs. Louise Ellman (Liverpool, Riverside)Liverpool's urban renaissance is under way. It is seen most clearly in the city centre, which has been identified in the north-west economic strategy as the engine of growth for both city and region. That is despite the shadow cast by the speculating and exploitative Walton group plc, which has stifled regeneration by acquiring key city centre sites, securing public sector grant, yet failing to develop.
The Walton group stands guilty of impeding commercial growth, blighting the old post office site, Exchange Flags and now, in bizarre and unacceptable circumstances, Chavasse park, leaving Liverpool without a flagship millennium project and costing the city more than £200 million of committed investment, which has now been withdrawn.
I thank the Minister for authorising an inquiry into the group's questionable acquisition of £4.5 million of public money, paid between 1992 and 1994 to regenerate Exchange Flags. At the end of 1999, that building remains largely empty. The group is increasing its wealth through capital appreciation of its undeveloped properties, while Liverpool has been sold short. The group's activities are against the public interest. It has committed a fraud on the city of Liverpool. I ask for an assurance that the inquiry will be thorough and determined.
Regeneration must address economic, social, physical and environmental aspects of urban decline. Much progress has been made in Liverpool. City centre successes include the £90 million Queen's square Neptune development, including one of Liverpool's new four-star hotels, cultural, retail and office facilities; and the imaginative multi-million pound brownfield regeneration in Everton, led by Hope university college, transforming a derelict area into a place of higher and further education opportunities, linked with housing and shopping.
There has been a significant increase in inner-city housing. Since 1991, there has been nearly a 300 per cent. increase in people living in inner-city Liverpool. Regeneration of the Hope street quarter is under way as one of the city's major cultural areas.
Much has been done to realise the economic potential of Liverpool's thriving arts sector. The Government have given a lifeline to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society and to the theatres in Liverpool. Nationally, the arts are the fastest growing sector producing employment.
Examples of new developments in Liverpool include the imaginative FACT—Foundation for Arts and Cultural Technology—media enterprise project; ACME—Arts, Culture, Media Enterprises—investment; and the Centre for Arts Development Training.
The trail-blazing Merseyside special investment fund has invested more than £65 million of European and private funding in 4,000 Merseyside jobs. It is hailed as a national and European example of good practice.
Liverpool's expanding universities provide educational opportunities, together with an economic spin-off, for example, through technology transfer. The CIMS—Centre 124 of Intelligence Monitoring Systems—project at the university of Liverpool is spinning out technology into new and exciting projects. For example, new means of monitoring premature babies are being used at Liverpool Women's hospital.
Major waterfront development in Liverpool is bringing hotels, housing and tourism and the growing trade in the port of Liverpool brings jobs. The north-west and Irish trade group is identifying investment opportunities for business with Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The Government's new deal for communities has started its work in Kensington and Smithdown.
All those initiatives rest on the imaginative use of funding attracted from a wide variety of sources, but the focus needed to effect major and visible change in Liverpool city centre is absent. That is why I welcome Liverpool Vision, which is the first urban regeneration company in the country to be set up following Lord Rogers' report, "Towards an Urban Renaissance". It brings together the North-West development agency, Liverpool city council, English Partnerships and the private sector to produce strategy and design for the city centre. International competition has produced a shortlist to conduct the design. Public consultation will follow.
I call on Liverpool Vision, its partners and the local community to show that they can act decisively and collectively. The Government must consider whether additional powers are necessary to bring about the swift action that is needed. I urge Liverpool Vision to use imagination and determination to secure a prosperous city centre, which, with its internationally renowned waterfront and fine architecture, will be the pride of country and continent.
Liverpool's economy is improving. Unemployment in my constituency has reduced by more than 26 per cent. in two years, but there are still more than 5,000 people out of work. Liverpool still ranks number one in the national index of local deprivation. The recent CACI report found that nine of the 20 poorest postcodes in the country were to be found in Liverpool.
What is the way forward? It is for local knowledge, commitment and determination to ensure that European, national, regional and local initiatives support all people in Liverpool, including all its ethnic and racial groups, and that those initiatives attract private investment. Examples of good practice, such as the community-led Eldonian co-operative housing, leisure, employment and environmental regeneration in Vauxhall, should be replicated. The North-West development agency must keep Liverpool as its priority, backing local partners. The local authority must show initiative and leadership. Strategies must be turned into action.
I should like an assurance that the Government will co-operate in identifying matching funding to enable the £840 million second phase of European objective 1 funding for Merseyside to be fully utilised as additional spending. I call on the Government to review regulations that impede the most effective co-ordinated use of funds from the diverse sources available.
There is much more to achieve. Major companies must remain in the city centre and others should be encouraged to join them. Small and medium-sized enterprises and microbusinesses must be backed. I welcome the proposed new regional and local enterprise funds. The new deal must be used imaginatively. It has already brought great 125 benefit to Liverpool and it should be used together with funds for small businesses, training, retraining and skilling to bring new opportunities to all the people of Liverpool. Intermediate labour market schemes must be supported. Education, training and retraining must be accessible. Local people must have the opportunity to take jobs in Liverpool. Universities, which are already making a great contribution to the city, must promote the information society and back the local economy, spinning out more of their knowledge and expertise for the people of Liverpool.
All housing tenures should be encouraged, particularly as part of regeneration schemes looking at environment and employment at the same time as housing provision. The proposed cuts by the Housing Corporation because of the new formula being applied must be reconsidered. Cuts in Housing Corporation funding of around 13 per cent. for Merseyside are simply unacceptable at a time when we are trying to support and encourage the regeneration of the inner city.
The Daresbury laboratory must continue to benefit Liverpool and the north-west with its fine research capacity. Integrated infrastructure investment in air, rail, sea and road must be increased. Regeneration cannot take place simply in the place where it is being experienced. Wider investment is necessary, too. Urban spaces and parks must be valued, and investors in Liverpool must continue to be welcomed.
I call on Liverpool Vision to take up the challenge of restoring Chavasse park as a flagship project and to address the blight left elsewhere in Liverpool by the Walton group's dereliction of duty. It is not good enough for Liverpool city council simply to wring its hands because of problems that may well have been created by others.
As things stand, Liverpool will be one of perhaps only two cities in the country not to have a flagship millennium project within its precincts. That is simply not acceptable. If the millennium project has collapsed mainly because of the Walton group, and because of the bizarre circumstances surrounding it—and possibly also because of inaction by Liverpool city council—it must be up to Liverpool city council, together with Liverpool Vision, to restore what has been lost and to find new ways forward.
Lord Rogers, in his urban task force report, concludes:
If we are to succeed in creating an urban renaissance we have to change the image of urban areas to one of attractiveness, opportunity and growth".Liverpool is already changing both image and reality. We must all rise to the challenge of making Liverpool the prime city of the future.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Ms Beverley Hughes)I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman) on securing this debate about the regeneration of a very important city in the UK. I recognise also her long experience in working to secure regeneration through local government, and her hard work since becoming a Member of Parliament to help Liverpool get back to where it ought to be—one of our foremost cities.
My hon. Friend has outlined some of the ways in which we can begin to see the seeds of change. There has been much progress in Liverpool city centre recently.
126 Liverpool Vision—to which my hon. Friend referred—is the first urban regeneration company, and is building on that progress. The city centre is the prime location of high-quality jobs, business and tourism.
My hon. Friend is right to say that Liverpool Vision must ensure that the wonderful potential of the sites and historic buildings of Liverpool can make the city a place for the new millennium—more jobs, more homes and more places to visit. That means improving accessibility, and the public realm, and adding value to what is already there.
If we are to achieve sustainable growth in those areas, we must involve people and communities, and build real partnerships that draw on the strength and experience of everybody. It will be important for Liverpool Vision to produce a top-quality bid in single regeneration budget round 6, which embodies the principles of sustainability and social inclusion.
We have noted that the North-West development agency has produced its strategy for the region, and that strategy recognises the regeneration of Liverpool city centre as an early priority. The agency is a founding member of Liverpool Vision and is working closely with all the partners to bring forward a strategy to help Liverpool become a world-class city. The agency believes that concentrating on the city centre is crucial to changing the economic prospects for the city as a whole. Many of the proposals likely to emerge from Liverpool Vision will require resources from the agency over the next 10 or even 15 years.
There has been much movement in the city council, with a new chief executive with an excellent track record of achieving change. Sweeping changes are taking place in the council's management, with clear portfolios of responsibility, a new Cabinet-style structure and a smaller management team. I wish David Henshaw well in his new role and assure him of our continued support.
The Liverpool democracy commission has tapped into, and revealed, tremendous popular concern about the kind of local government that the city needs for its future and has made some radical and exciting proposals, including a directly elected mayor. Many winds of change are blowing and things are beginning to happen that bode well.
My hon. Friend rightly raised the issue of the Walton group and the Exchange Flags project. The Walton Commercial Group Ltd, was awarded a grant of £4.5 million in July 1992 towards the refurbishment of the Exchange Flags building in the city centre. It was to provide 400,000 sq ft of refurbished office space and a museum. Total grant payments of nearly £4.5 million were made between November 1992 and May 1994, against claimed qualifying expenditure of more than £27 million. The situation regarding the project's realisation is much as she described.
The Government are taking the issues extremely seriously. English Partnerships, acting as agents for the Secretary of State, is reviewing the project and the use to which the grant has been put. English Partnerships has given notice of its intention to exercise its right under the terms of the agreement to enter the premises and carry out an inspection of the works and of the relevant books and records of the Walton group. I assure my hon. Friend that the Government will ensure that a thorough and determined approach is taken to investigating all those matters involving the Walton group.
127 I stress that the Government are trying to help regeneration in Liverpool across the board, through a variety of mainstream programmes as well as specific regeneration initiatives. That includes health, education and housing.
Liverpool has been chosen to have two new education action zones, in Dingle, in Granby and Toxteth and in Speke-Garston. Both will begin work next spring. That is an important success for Liverpool. More than 120 applications to run zones were received in round 2 and only 48 were shortlisted for further development.
As part of "Excellence in Cities", two new beacon schools for Liverpool were announced by my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Education and Employment on 23 November: the King David high school and St. Malachy's primary school. They are among the best-performing schools in the country and are examples of successful practice that are being brought to the attention of others with a view to sharing that practice. City learning centres will provide state-of-the-art information and communication technology-based learning opportunities for pupils, teachers and the wider community and will be based in the inner city.
Merseyside has a strong health action zone comprising the local and health authorities across Merseyside. It is the largest HAZ in England and has been allocated £13.7 million over the next three years. It has been operational only since May but several projects are already under way. It is concentrating on developing the strongest possible partnerships with delivery agencies in a well-focused attack on health inequalities. The first mid-year review, conducted in October, was well received and the mood was upbeat.
The work to find housing solutions for the inner core of Liverpool is crucial but we must have a strategy linking into Liverpool Vision's across-the-board work. Liverpool has already done excellent work on homelessness, refugees and asylum seekers, anti-social behaviour and supported housing. I am aware of the concerns of my hon. Friend the Member for Riverside about an 11 per cent. reduction in housing provision for Merseyside from the Housing Corporation as a result of changes in the way the figures are calculated. However, that figure needs to be read alongside the housing investment programme for Merseyside. We will make some important announcements on the housing investment programme shortly, and I ask that my hon. Friend waits for those announcements before making her judgments on the matter.
We need to know much more about demand for housing in Liverpool, because otherwise we are fighting in the dark. I am glad to say that Liverpool has engaged the university of Birmingham to undertake a full assessment of the housing demand picture. It has also commissioned land surveys by Grimleys. It is too early to judge the outcome of the surveys but, so far, the city council has stuck to the task and put resources behind it.
In addition to those mainstream initiatives that have benefited Liverpool, there has also been the single regeneration budget. Round 5 is the latest, and Liverpool city centre secured £475,000 in total. Liverpool Vision has been asked to submit a comprehensive bid for round 128 6 of the SRB in the context of a strategic regeneration plan for the city. The round 5 proposal, which was supported, is a preparatory move for the round 6 bid. The round 5 proposals can shape the round 6 bid, especially in terms of developing genuine community capacity building and testing innovative approaches to regeneration. The bidding guidance for round 6 will be published next month. We are looking for Liverpool Vision to put in a really good proposal for Liverpool in that round.
In addition, the round 5 scheme for Speke-Garston—a total of £10 million, with an SRB contribution of more than £4 million—will build on the jobs and other benefits of the round 1 schemes in Speke-Garston. The development company there has been a major player in attracting investment, such as the Jaguar X400 investment in Halewood, which has also attracted other companies to the area.
My hon. Friend the Member for Riverside raised the issue of European objective 1 funding for Merseyside for 2000–06, and we are pleased that Merseyside achieved objective 1 status. However, it has never been the case that the Government have had to make matched funding available for objective 1 European funds. It is not correct to state that the Government have to match objective 1 EU funding for £844 million for Merseyside on a pound-for-pound basis in order receive that funding. My hon. Friend will know from her previous experience that objective 1 funds from the EU can be used to fund up to 75 per cent. of regeneration schemes, with applicants having to find the rest from UK sources, either public or private.
For the previous Merseyside programme, the regeneration partners thought that they could find pound-for-pound matched funds for European objective 1 funds. However, some regeneration scheme applications found it difficult to locate the funding on that basis. The Government are trying to maximise the grant rate from European funding to reduce the matching funding that needs to be found here and also to ensure that the maximum amount of European funding is drawn down, so that the maximum number of projects can be funded. That approach will also free up Government funding for other regeneration schemes in the area. We are not at odds with the spirit of what my hon. Friend the Member for Riverside is trying to achieve, but the position is not as simple as she seemed to suggest when one tries to ensure the maximum resources from all possible sources end up in Liverpool supporting regeneration projects.
The economic revival of Liverpool is there for us to begin to see. The transformation of Merseyside includes the complete refurbishment of the Albert dock area, where a media cluster has begun to develop. Planet Wild is an independent television production company that has received three Royal Television Society awards since it was established 18 months ago. A company called Amaze, situated in the Port of Liverpool building, is a world-class designer of software, websites and expandable movies—I am not sure what they are, but they sound interesting—and is a leader in computer-mediated communication.
The transformation of a 64-acre former railway marshalling yard into the Wavertree technology park is further clear evidence of Merseyside's determination to play a major part in the new, technology driven economy. Equally, several automotive companies are locating, 129 or will be doing so, in the Speke-Garston-Halewood area, and the Speke-Garston development company has been a major player in attracting that investment.
I mentioned the Jaguar initiative earlier, and other companies—including Lear, Conix and Johnson Controls—have also brought investment to the Halewood area. That has linked parts of Liverpool such as the Speke-Garston area to areas of need, and thus represents a real opportunity for the city.
We have heard tonight about the progress already being made in Liverpool. The process of regeneration has already begun. Partnerships between local communities and the business and voluntary sectors are building a foundation for change and growth, along with local and regional government, and central Government. Government initiatives such as the single regeneration budget demonstrate what can be achieved through working together. We recognise the importance of involving local people in finding solutions to Liverpool's problems, and of giving the people of the city a greater stake in the success of its development and its future.
I hope that we have learned a critical lesson from Liverpool's long history. The change being brought about cannot be sustained unless people are properly involved and have ownership of it. We must build people into the programme of change, from the outset and from the bottom up.
The Government, and other bodies, are trying to take a holistic approach to Liverpool's regeneration, by combining health, economic and environmental initiatives 130 with lasting benefits for the community. I have great hopes for Liverpool Vision, our first urban regeneration company. I am sure that it will benefit the city and demonstrate the value of such companies, of which I believe that there will be more. I am also sure that the North-West regional development agency will be important in implementing economic and social change in the area.
A great deal of work remains to be done, as my hon. Friend the Member for Riverside will know. However, we are putting in place a framework that I hope will provide opportunities to raise the quality of life in Liverpool for all those who work there.
My hon. Friend knows Liverpool very well. I hope that she will agree that Liverpool now has something that it has needed for perhaps 25 years—a constellation of people, business, local governance and local organisations working together and pulling in the same direction.
In the past, Liverpool has been dogged by the lack of a consensus about what needs to be done and how to go about doing it, and its people have suffered as a result. Matters are different now, and people are willing to pull in the same direction. The work done by my hon. Friend and her colleagues in that regard has been very important. I wish Liverpool well, and assure her that the Government want the city to succeed as it ought to.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at sixteen minutes to Eleven o'clock.