Yorkshire and levelling up lose out with Parliament’s democratic deficit – The Yorkshire Post says

Even though Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales have well-established parliaments and assemblies of their own, House of Commons committees remain in place at Westminster to debate policies that are relevant to them.

Contrast this with Yorkshire – a county more than comparable to Scotland in economic terms – and other English regions similar in scale to Wales and Northern Ireland. They have no such forum.

And, while readers will point to Prime Minister’s Questions and the work of existing selecting committees that, invariably, represent the best of Parliament, this misses the point.

There should be a forum where Yorkshire’s 54 MPs – and most do work collaboratively behind-the-scenes – to press Ministers and officials on those key issues and decisions that are integral to this region’s future prosperity.

As such, this newspaper is sympathetic to calls to resurrect the Yorkshire Grand Committee that was briefly set up – it even met in Barnsley – during Gordon Brown’s government before being quietly dropped by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition.

But it remains very sceptical about the level of political will amongst MPs to bring about such change when Boris Johnson was allowed to demote the role of Northern Powerhouse Minister and scrutiny of levelling up remains as opaque as the policy itself.

And, for the avoidance of doubt, this is not just a criticism of the stance taken by the more ambivalent Conservative MPs representing this region – it’s just a significant, if not more so, that Labour has been largely silent and not pressed for accountability to be more effective.

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