MAYOR DAN JARVIS SAYS STILL NO PLAN FOR LEVELLING UP IN PM’S SPEECH

Published 6 October 2021 at 4:37pm

Responding to the Prime Minister’s speech today at the Conservative Party Conference, South Yorkshire Mayor and Barnsley MP Dan Jarvis said:

“Thanks to this government and their choices, thousands of families in South Yorkshire are facing awful decisions this winter. Cutting the Universal Credit uplift at a time of great hardship, will take food off the table and money out of our local economy. So it was dismaying to hear, once more, that the Prime Minister has no real plan for ‘Levelling Up’ this country. 

“Almost two years after the Prime Minister pledged to ‘Level Up’ our communities, we heard one policy announcement – and that sounds suspiciously like an old Department for Education scheme. It’s just not good enough. There is no detail, no plan and no commitment. 

“While we welcome the Prime Minister’s statement that Northern Powerhouse Rail will be built, and his acknowledgement that the Trans-Pennine route is poor, again, where is the policy? The North is crying out for better transport links, and we’ve waited months to see the government’s Integrated Rail Plan. This continued delay is fuelling suspicions that what we’re about to get falls far short of what we’ve been promised. 

“I was further dismayed to hear the Prime Minister describe the airlift out of Kabul as a “great triumph”. This was a failure of foreign policy, and people are still trapped in Afghanistan more than a month later. To paint it as a great triumph is pure revisionism and beggars belief. 

“On the day millions of families in the UK – and a quarter of households in South Yorkshire – are losing vital income, when we have a cost of living crisis, when working people are facing National Insurance hikes and when we’re being warned about empty shelves at Christmas, the best the Prime Minister can offer is a few jokes and some vague promises."