Why criticism of Catterick’s £19m Levelling Up funding is wide of the mark - Tom Jones

But, unreported, is a whole wealth of detail which shows the truth; first of all, this bid was led by Richmondshire District Council, which is controlled by a coalition of Liberal Democrats and Independents.

Secondly I can assure people that whilst parts of Richmond are indeed wealthy, Catterick is not. Colburn, which is part of Catterick, is in the bottom 20 per cent of the most deprived areas in Britain.

I find it strange that so many people haven’t considered that a fund designed to address regional variations may, in fact, take into account regional variations - even inside the largely arbitrary boundaries of a Westminster constituency. Nor is Catterick just 'a small army town in the Prime Minister’s Richmond constituency.' It's the biggest military base in Western Europe and it's about to get a lot bigger under the Future Soldier plans. The population of service personnel alone is expected to expand by over 50 per cent by 2023; this is not including dependents, who will add to the population even further.

I feel that Rishi serving as the local MP - and now PM – has overshadowed the clear need for regeneration in Catterick, the need to improve conditions for our soldiers before it becomes home to thousands more and called into question the legitimacy of Catterick’s bid.

In fact, practically everyone with a failed bid has called into question the legitimacy of the Levelling Up fund. The headlines read that Tory areas have benefitted from higher amounts of funding than opposition areas.

This is true, but it’s a rather selective truth; over the last two rounds, 45 per cent of Levelling Up funding has gone to seats held by non-Conservatives, and Conservatives have just about 55 per cent of MPs.

I’ve always defined levelling up as reducing regional inequality of economic output and social outcomes. The challenge is huge; London’s economic output is comparable to Singapore’s. The rest of the nation’s is comparable to Romania. Outside of London and finance, almost every British sector has lower productivity than its Western European peers.

As the economic analyst Matt Klein puts it, “Take out Greater London—the prosperity of which depends to an uncomfortable degree on a willingness to provide services to oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union—and the UK is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.”

Addressing Britain’s huge regional inequalities is a process, by its very nature, that is going to take years. It can’t be achieved in just two rounds of Government funding, and we should treat with intense scepticism anyone who thinks it can. They’re either deeply unserious or they’re playing political games; perhaps, instead of trying to find fault with a system by looking at the things it didn’t fund, we could look at the strength of a system by looking at the things it did fund.

Tom Jones is a Conservative councillor representing Scotton & Lower Wensleydale.