So nearly one year on from its publication, the Tees Valley Review has claimed its first scalp. The CEO of the Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA), Julie Gilhespie, has ‘resigned’. In one fell swoop, this move has the advantage of staving off a potential ‘Best Value Notice’, while removing the person who abjectly failed to bring the Teesworks Joint Venture partners Chris Musgrave and Martin Corney to heel.
Gilhespie had also been singled out by the Tees Valley Review for not recording conflicts of interest related to her role at Teesworks Limited. See page 14. So, the CEO can carry the can for that too. This situation is a win-win for Houchen.
Hold the front page
So has the perfect solution been found? Not so fast. This is the TVCA we’re talking about, so let’s unpack this.
The rumour mill started turning on the morning of Friday 13 December. Richard Brooks of Private Eye had been told by reliable sources that Gilhespie was about to resign, so he contacted the TVCA for comment. Nothing was forthcoming. The Northern Echo then published a scoop by Mike Hughes, with a face-to-face interview, in which Gilhespie complained, among other things, of the pernicious influence of social media.
Epic trolling
This might be the same social media that Houchen seems to spend half his waking life on, sniping at his political opponents when he’s not pretending to be bi-partisan, and blocking his own constituents for slights, both real and imaginary. The same social media on which he spent an eye-popping sum during his re-election campaign only months ago. According to Gilhespie “what we are seeing now is that people are triangulating information from LinkedIn, where all our staff have a profile, and then turning up at public meetings, taking photos of staff and matching them”.
Gilhespie employed two of her daughters at the TVCA. I would argue that Tees Valley citizens have a right to know where their hard-earned money is going, and members of the public are perfectly entitled to view LinkedIn profiles.
Retirement and interim CEO?
Hughes reported a salary of £170k, which was correct for 2021, though Gilhespie’s current salary is £180K. Later that day, Local Democracy Reporter Daniel Hodgson provided an update in the Teesside Gazette, making a much more thorough job than Hughes had done. Hughes had seen documents that showed that the TVCA were preparing for Gilhespie’s retirement in 12 to 18 months time. Either these documents were a year old, or perhaps the TVCA brought forward the date of her retirement.
The TVCA intends to abolish the role of CEO in April 2025, so if the incumbent is leaving now. Will they appoint an interim CEO or bring the changes forward? If Gilhespie hasn’t retired and intends to remain in employment beyond April 2025, the TVCA will need to find another role for her after this date.
I’m rich! Rich beyond my wildest dreams!
But there’ll be a generous severance package for Gilhespie, regardless of whether the Northern Echo is correct (she’s retiring) or the Teesside Gazette (it’s redundancy). The third possibility is that she has been dismissed.
But how generous might the package be? I asked a HR consultant to crunch the numbers:
- If it’s retirement, Gilhespie could eventually be entitled to a pension pot of £52,500.
- If this is redundancy, the payout is expected to be £144,374.
- A firing would generate a payment in lieu of notice (PILON) of approximately £43,750.
Value for money?
The TVCA no longer needs a CEO, and I question whether it ever did. For the last six year, Gilhespie has earned a total salary of about £960,000 from the TVCA alone. External auditor Mazars still hasn’t signed off on the ‘value for money’ aspect of the 2021/2022 South Tees Development Corporation (STDC) accounts. Gilhespie was also CEO of the STDC, so perhaps they could revisit this.
Somebody has got to run the TVCA, at least you’d like to think. A replacement will need to be found, with a modified job title, description and salary. But wait a minute, what’s this? When Nolan Gray resigned as Teesside freeport director in May last year, the TVCA didn’t replace him and the role was abolished. All of the other freeports continue with their directors. It seems that Teesside is always the outlier here.
John Barnes gets the call up
A few minutes ago I thought that Houchen was allaying suspicions of conflict of interest by getting shot of Gilhespie, but now he makes a fool of me by hiring the slim and energetic non-footballer John Barnes as CEO of the STDC, only seven months after he was appointed as chief operating officer. Keep in mind that only nine days ago Houchen and his board removed Gilhespie as a director of Teesworks Limited and replaced her with Barnes.
Scott Hunter of the Tees Valley Monitor has written about Barnes’s close connections to Teesworks Joint Venture partner Martin Corney through his previous employment at Duchy Homes. On 15 December, Leigh Jones of the Teesside Lead had news about Barnes’ Duchy Homes connection to the other JV partner Chris Musgrave. So, it would appear that Barnes now as CEO of the STDC, will be making arms-length decisions about Teesworks Limited while being a director of it, and having close business ties to the two people who own 90% of it.
In other news
How are things going in Hartlepool? Is a question that not many people are asking, but I’ll answer it anyway. On Thursday 12 December, chair Houchen was 50 minutes late for the Hartlepool Development Corporation (HDC) board meeting. Due to the arcane constitution of the HDC, meetings of the board are only quorate if Houchen attends or sends a nominated substitute. He didn’t do either, at least at first, and the board had to meet informally, having to approve decisions pro tem until ratified by the mayor.
Houchen had been meeting with the chancellor of the Exchequer and other metro mayors over in Darlington, and the meeting overran. Who would ever have thought that a meeting could run late? When Ben arranged his meeting with Rachel Reeves, why didn’t he nominate Tees Valley Business Board chair Siobhan McArdle to substitute for him at the HDC board meeting, just as he did at the previous one in October? I had assumed, quite wrongly, that the TVCA’s response to the Tees Valley Review recommendations would include an end to nonsense such as this.
Thanks to James Waterson for contributing to this article.
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