Ben Houchen has a plan. A grand plan, even. A plan he is sure will warm the hearts of the people of Hartlepool. A plan to turn the town centre into a mayoral development corporation. As leader of the council, Shane Moore, says:
“I’m not saying this is big, but it is kinda big”
Now, the fact that Houchen having a plan and Hartlepool having a development corporation are not the same thing, is a detail that Houchen and Moore hope voters will overlook as they flock to the polls on 5 May.
Giving the game away
In fact, of the papers that reported the big announcement this morning, it was the Northern Echo that, perhaps inadvertently, gave the game away. Having stated that Houchen and Cllr Moore will finalize the plans and then submit them to Michael Gove at the Department for Levelling Up Housing and communities, it goes on:
“The Hartlepool Mayoral Development Corporation will formally be created later this year once the parliamentary process to establish it is complete.”
In other words, Houchen has the power to make plans, but not to create development corporations. Only parliament has that power. And the fact that the Houchen/Moore announcement does not mention access to funding, but merely trumpets funding already allocated to projects in the town, does not inspire confidence either.
Nonetheless, Moore’s excitement was palpable as he enthused:
“I am delighted to be working alongside Mayor Houchen to turbocharge the redevelopment of our town. With the breath-taking speed of development on the Teesworks site in Redcar over the last 12-months we’ve seen the power a Mayoral Development Corporation can unleash when it is coupled with a forward-looking innovative plan for the future.”
Right.
Presumably, the fact that Houchen ceded 90% of the shares in Teesworks Limited to two property developers last November, has escaped Moore’s notice. Perhaps also the fact that Houchen’s stated reason for doing so was because there was a £207 million ‘black hole’ in funding for the scheme, and the only alternative would have been to ‘mothball’ it. And it may be that it has never occurred to him that inadvertently allowing Teesworks to run into such financial difficulty is nothing short of careless when its CEO (Julie Gilhespie) is an accountant.
Dubious accounting practice
And dubious accounting practice has come back to bite Houchen again this week. Funding allocations from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund have recently been announced. This fund is the UK replacement for EU investment funding. The 2019 Conservative Party election manifesto reassured voters that this fund would match pre-existing EU levels.
It turns out, however, that it doesn’t, and several people have had quite a lot to say about it. One of these is Henri Murison, director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership. Having criticised both organisation and the level of allocation of funding, he has, more recently, had a bit to say about Houchen and the TVCA.
The reason for this is that, as he pointed out in a recent article, areas across the north are set to lose out substantially from the new deal. In the case of the Tees Valley, this is £26.9 million. Houchen, meanwhile, has presented figures to show that the level of funding is equal to that obtained from the EU. Murison points out, however, that this result has been obtained by double counting some of the funds. Houchen, a little irritated by the criticism, as it appears, told the Gazette,
“The information is in black and white and our accounts show that we will have at least the same amount of money as we did when we were in the EU.”
What he omits, however, is that there is a difference between presenting such figures to the general public, and doing what Murison appears to have done, which is to present them to accountants. It requires expertise to spot bogus accounting. And Murison has provided that.
Houchen goes on:
“Indeed, with Levelling Up funding and other grants coming into the region, Teesside, Darlington and Hartlepool will actually have more money than when we were in the EU.”
As indeed it should. That is the whole purpose of levelling up. Houchen conveniently sidesteps the fact that the EU was never responsible for running the British economy. That is the job of the British government, whose over centralisation led to the chronic neglect of the regions in the first place. All the EU could do through the ESIF was to alleviate some of its worst excesses.
Less money going to the regions
That there is, on the contrary, less money going to the regions overall, is observed by the Financial Times:
“Documents seen by the Financial Times show that even in 2024-25 the English regions will receive £78 mn less in real terms than under the EU deal.”
Whether or not the Tees Valley will buck the trend, as Houchen claims, through levelling up funding and other grants is, at best, unclear. Given the proliferation of funding pots under this government, and the need to bid often competitively for grant funding, Houchen can not realistically justify his claim.
Moreover, the willingness of the government to fund projects in this region is a moveable feast. It was only in January that Houchen claimed to the papers that he had asked the government for assistance to plug the purported £207 million black hole in STDC funds, and they had refused.
On the other hand, when asked if he thought Johnson should resign after being fined over Partygate, Houchen, in an interview with Times Radio, insisted that he should stay. He described his reasons as “selfish”, and went on to explain:
“the only Prime Minister that has taken a real interest and now injecting focused finance and investment into the region is this Prime Minister. So, to put that at risk seems nonsensical to me.”
Not real devolution
As for “injecting focused finance”, that is something that Murison would see as cause for concern. As he explains:
“Our concerns don’t end at the lack of money. Funding cycles are now delivered for three years rather than seven, meaning less certainty and more superficial short-termism, rather than long-term strategic thinking. Plus, metro mayors and local leaders will get less of a say over how the money is spent, as all decisions must be run past Whitehall first. This is not real devolution.”
And running everything past Whitehall is precisely where Houchen’s plan to set up a mayoral development corporation in Hartlepool is headed (except that it will then go on to parliament afterwards).
Meanwhile, some businesses in Hartlepool might benefit from getting more information on just what is in Houchen’s plan. As has happened to several business at the North Side Business Park at Teesside Airport, some may shortly find that they don’t fit into the plan. And when they don’t, the TVCA can be a difficult organisation to deal with. Coming on to Houchen’s radar can be a poison chalice.
