Pirates ahoy!
The MDC, just like the HDC, is one of the four Charter Cities of Ben Houchen’s Teesside, consisting of Teesside Freeport and three development corporations. Rishi Sunak and his 55 Tufton Street think tanks are betting the house on Teesside as a model neo-liberal free-for-all of deregulation, tax dodging, union busting and the avoidance of all of the checks and balances that form the basis of any civilized, democratic nation.
Taking back control, and the will of the people
On 25 January 2023, Levelling Up secretary Michael Gove and Ben Houchen announced the founding of the Hartlepool and Middlesbrough development corporations. A month later, on 24 February 2023, Middlesbrough Borough Council held an extraordinary general meeting to determine whether the council approved the proposal to create the MDC. They sensibly saw it for the asset-grab that it was and voted it down. Three days later, Middlesbrough mayor Andy Preston wrote to Gove, then sent Ben Houchen and Middlesbrough South MP Simon Clarke to meet Gove and plead for his charter city. Gove obliged, over-rode the democratic decision of the elected representatives of Middlesbrough, signed the statutory instrument to confirm the MDC on 27 February 2023, and Preston and Houchen took a victory lap. Gove’s language in making this decision would have shocked us before June 2016, but the man who railed more than anyone else against corrupt, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels riding roughshod over democracy, blithely and arrogantly dismissed Middlesbrough’s democratic decision as having been born of “misinformation and mischief making”.
Andy Preston’s prototype charter city
But, similarly to the activities of managing director Denise McGuckin over in Hartlepool, the ground had already been laid for the MDC with the election of ‘Independent’ Middlesbrough mayor Andy Preston four years before in 2019. In his previous bid for the role, multi-millionaire hedge fund manager Preston had hoodwinked the town’s voters into thinking that he lived in the town by giving his parents’ address in Middlesbrough on his electoral nomination form, when he actually lives in Grade II listed mansion, Otterington Hall, 45 km from the town, in the heart of rural North Yorkshire. Topiary, stables, and 91 acres of famous gardens are important when heading one of the unhealthiest towns in the UK, with the worst child poverty in the North East of England. Preston, the ‘mini me’ to the mayor of the wider Tees Valley Ben Houchen, would govern Middlesbrough as his personal fiefdom, ignoring the niceties of democracy, and anticipating the licence for mayhem that Michael Gove would eventually bestow on the MDC.
It looks like a development corporation….
In June 2020 Preston used £9 million of taxpayers cash to buy the failing Captain Cook Square Shopping Centre and the former Binns (House of Fraser) department store. Two years later he blew an astonishing £12 million on 1970s shopping mall the‘Cleveland Centre, saddling the people of Middlesbrough with an expensive, ongoing, repair and maintenance liability. Ben Houchen would repeat the same tactic a year later by buying the Middleton Grange Shopping Centre in Hartlepool for the HDC. It simply makes no sense for development corporations to invest in retail real bricks and mortar, an obviously declining sector. But they’ve got nothing to lose. They are using our money to buy these buildings, and can dispense lucrative refurbishment contracts to their cronies in the construction industry. When the development corporations are eventually wound up with enormous debts, this burden will be loaded on to the public as it always is.
February 2023 – the MDC goes live
The shadow MDC gave way to the real thing in February 2023, when DLUHC Secretary of State Michael Gove instigated a ‘smash and grab’ raid on £14.7 million of the town’s assets and gave them to the MDC, along with a cash injection of £18 million. This is all very odd, because the MDC is only supposed to be a planning authority, yet it suddenly has £32.7 million on its hands. Unlike the HDC, the MDC consists of one zone, although there’s something going on at Vulcan Street in the north of the zone, where the MDC Area actually overlaps with the Port of Middlesbrough, which is an exclave of another charter city – Teesside Freeport. From a practical point of view it would seem to make more sense to move the Port of Middlesbrough into the neighbouring MDC area. But, of course, the port is one of the Customs Zones of Teesside Freeport, not to be confused with the Tax Zones of Teesside Freeport, although both seem to provide a tax avoidance bonanza. And the MDC isn’t either of these, at least not yet. This still doesn’t explain the overlap between the MDC and the Port of Middlesbrough. This is probably a mapping error by the notoriously incompetent Tees Valley Combined Authority, who are responsible for the admin for all of these entities.
Jobs for the boys. And girls
Ben Houchen was always going to pack the development boards with cronies, but the appointment of failed former Cleveland Police and Crime Commissioner Steve Turner to the board of both the HDC and the MDC took this to a whole new level. The other chief crony on the MDC board is Middlesbrough councillor Mieka Smiles, a woman for whom the description ‘dilettante’ could have been invented. Smiles was selected for the board by virtue of being mayor Andy Preston’s deputy. When Preston failed to get re-elected in May 2023, Houchen should have replaced her with the current deputy mayor Philippa Storey. But cronies gonna crony, and Smiles stayed. She’s only attended three of the seven board meetings convened since the MDC was created, and doesn’t seem to care about any of this. But it does look good on her LinkedIn. Smiles’s day gig is News Reporter for the Daily Express.
Commercial space
In his four year tenure as Middlesbrough mayor, Andy Preston focused on building new low-rise office accommodation around Centre Square. To his credit, this has been a success. But it has been at the expense of the neglect of the town’s stock of older high-rise office blocks. The four largest ones have been empty for years. The MDC has been in place for 15 months now, and has failed to move the dial on this. Church House, empty since 2006, is being refurbished by developer Jomast using £1.4 million of our money, in yet an uncanny parallel with events over in Hartlepool. It remains to be seen whether Jomast will come back for more cash when the upgrade suddenly and unexpectedly escalates in cost. But Church House is being converted from office space into apartments, and this won’t work for the other three buildings. Centre North East, Middlesbrough’s tallest building, has been empty for 14 years, apart from the hospitality units on the ground floor.
Dundas House has been almost empty since the BT call centre closed 15 years ago, and it’s about to lose its last tenant to the Cleveland Centre shopping mall. Mayor Chris Cooke is robbing Peter to Pay Paul – trying to prop up a failing shopping mall by transferring the Live Well Centre centre from Dundas House.
But the fourth of these office buildings, Gurney House, holds the record, having remained vacant since Cleveland County Council was abolished in April 1996.
The Crown pub
The recent history of the Crown pub provides a microcosm of the greed, corruption, cronyism and incompetence that typifies Middlesbrough in the 21st century. This former cinema, on the edge of the Gresham area, has been derelict since 2015. The building has a central dome, which spills rainwater on to the surrounding flat roof, and it accumulates in large puddles. This, combined with decades of accumulated dirt, provides an environment where three metre tall birch trees thrive. The entire building is ravaged by water ingress, and the basement, always notorious for flooding, is probably inundated now. This visual survey was conducted by me. I don’t have any surveying qualifications, but professionals have calculated that it will cost £5.5 million to repair the Crown pub. In January 2023, just weeks before the MDC came into existence, Andy Preston, having conducted no such building survey, bought this building in an action that will surely be subject to legal scrutiny at some time in the future. Preston did not consult any colleagues or council officials, made no attempt to establish a business case, and bought a building worth £460,000 for £750,000. Then, weeks after Middlesbrough council taxpayers had coughed up 60% over the odds, Michael Gove insulted them still further by gifting the Crown to the MDC for the princely sum of zero pounds.
Übermensch
There was no reason for Andy Preston to do what he did, other than to demonstrate that he wasn’t going to be constrained by the laws that apply to little people who don’t live in mansions. And to further show that he absolutely does not care, he visited the Crown on 15 May 2024 to congratulate Ben Houchen on his plans for the Crown. Which may, or may not, include demolishing the building while retaining its facade, then building a multi-storey car park, or student apartments, or whatever he comes up with five minutes before his daily 7:00am Facebook post. Houchen will use the excuse that, by demolishing the Crown, he’ll be saving the public that estimated repair bill of £5.5 million, something that Andy Preston must have been aware of when he overpaid for it.
Note: I’ll be following this article with an in-depth analysis of the built environment of the Middlesbrough Development Corporation area. About how, since 1979, Middlesbrough has suffered the consequences of electing a series of incompetent and venal politicians from all parts of the political spectrum. And how, by handing the town over to the property developers of the MDC, the situation will deteriorate further as we enter their pointless, destructive cycle of demolition and construction.
I’m grateful to James Waterson for providing additional material for this article
