Labour and Tories on same side on levelling up, Tory MP says

Labour and the Conservatives are not on different sides when it comes to levelling up, a Tory MP has said.

Danny Kruger told a fringe event at the Labour Party conference the government was not "abandoning" the aim of reducing regional inequality.

He said there was some consensus between the two parties on the need to tackle the problem.

But Labour shadow minister Lisa Nandy said that consensus had "completely disappeared" under the new government.

In a rare appearance from a Tory MP at Labour's conference in Liverpool, Mr Kruger told an event hosted by the Onward think tank: "We have the makings of and we can build a proper consensus among our parties and we need that as a country.

"There's a different focus on national taxation but the idea that we have to have local growth and it has to be about place-led development absolutely continues.

"The levelling up agenda is alive and well," the MP for Devizes, in Wiltshire, said, adding, "we're not on totally different sides".

Mr Kruger highlighted the government's plans for "investment zones", where business will benefit from tax cuts and planning rules will be relaxed to encourage house-building.

• Inflation threatens levelling up, councils warn

• Tories have abandoned levelling up, Labour says

Boris Johnson put levelling up at the heart of his election-winning manifesto in 2019.

The strategy aimed to close the gap between rich and poor parts of the country by improving services such as education, broadband and transport.

However, Labour's shadow levelling up secretary Lisa Nandy said the "brief moment" of consensus which started under Prime Minister Theresa May and continued under Michael Gove as levelling up secretary, had "completely disappeared from this Conservative government".

"That means that it falls to Labour to step forward... with credible, realistic and radical plans to change the way that we've done things in politics over the course of my entire lifetime," she said.

Last week, new Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled plans for the biggest package of tax cuts in 50 years, including scrapping the top rate of income tax.

The pound fell to a record low against the dollar, as markets react to the new economic approach.

Mr Kruger told the BBC the situation was "serious" but he thought markets would respond when they realise "the long-term value" of the chancellor's mini-budget.

However, Ms Nandy described it as "the most regressive budget of my lifetime".