The ringmaster’s Big Tent
It was going to be a big week in Houchenland. First of all, the big reveal at the South Tees Development Corporation (STDC) Board meeting on Thursday 27 March. The new Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the STDC, John Barnes, would emerge from the shadows and reveal his star qualities. Some people had written Barnes off as the unfunny straight man of the Chris Musgrave and Martin Corney double act. But, after four years as their relatively unknown sidekick, now was to be the time for John to channel his inner Debby Reynolds, step into the limelight and say good morning to the STDC.
There’s no business like show business
Show business can be cruel. Was John’s moment in the spotlight to be cruelly snatched away at the last minute? John’s intended co-star, Alec Brown, couldn’t make the date, due to a last-minute double-booking. Alec is the leader of Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council, The arcane constitution of the STDC dictates that board meetings are inquorate if the Vice Chair doesn’t show and that’s, you guessed it, Alec Brown.
On with the show
But, the show must go on, as they say in the biz. Although showbiz advice can be confusing, because they also say that there’s no show without Punch. No, I’m not talking about Teesworks’ security chief Mark Buttitta. In fact, Mark showed up for his bit part, controlling the crowd (all two of us), and helping with car parking. No, for Punch, read Alec Brown.
A Hollywood ending?
Don’t be alarmed, all was not lost. The meeting would be saved if only we could find Alec’s nominated substitute. Was this to be another dream Hollywood ending, where the understudy emerges from their chrysalis like a sequined butterfly, and steals the show? No, Emma Simson, the TVCA’s legal officer, couldn’t contact the substitute on the phone and this performance was to be cancelled. Would another date be rescheduled? Emma didn’t know. The disappointed fans drifted away to drown their sorrows in the nearest hostelry. Which is difficult, because there are no pubs within two miles of the Teesworks Skills Academy.
But what did they miss?
Well there were lots of questions that the STDC Board could have answered. Had they, for example, confirmed Mark Buttitta as a director of the Teesworks Estate Management Company (TEMCo)? And why had TEMCo existed for three years before the TVCA/STDC took the trouble to register it at Companies House?
Land remediation
We were meeting in Teesworks’ Dorman Point zone. Only 60% of the land here has been remediated. This is in contrast to numerous STDC press releases over the past three years that have given the Tees Valley public the impression that all of the former steelworks sites are now ready to receive investors. No land has been remediated in the past two years, so when will the remaining 40% of the land at Dorman Point be fixed? Has Teesworks, as many people suspect, simply run out of money?
Demolition job
And why was the STDC claiming to have fully remediated the Foundry zone of Teesworks, when Redcar Blast Furnace still hasn’t been demolished? The list of questions to the STDC Board can be found in ‘Further Reading’ at the end of this article.
The circus has left town
Showbiz folk are troupers if nothing else. They dusted themselves off and Ben Houchen’s Circus hit the road for the next gig, the very next day, at an almost deserted airfield on the outskirts of Darlington.
TVCA Cabinet meeting, Friday 28 March 2025
So, this is the main gig in the TVCA calendar. The cabinet meetings are usually only held quarterly, but the last one was only two months ago on 31 January, hastily scheduled to confirm some TVCA and STDC appointments. However, the public had been excluded from that agenda item, and we never got to the bottom of what went on that day.
Primavera
Winter passed, and we were in springtime, so it was time to talk about a flourishing regional airport. But Newcastle Airport wasn’t on the agenda, so we’d have to talk about Teesside Airport instead. But first, Ben Houchen had an axe to grind and, my goodness, he’s been grinding this axe for a long time.
Public Participation Protocol
Just over a year ago, on 29 February 2024, a group of concerned members of the Tees Valley public submitted a list of questions to the STDC Board regarding the initial response to the Tees Valley Review Report, which had been published a few weeks previously. There were 51 questions on the list. Ben Houchen was taken aback by this. The TVCA hadn’t previously received that many questions in its entire existence. Houchen complained that many of his staffers (but not Ben Houchen, himself, fortunately) had had to stay up late the previous two nights answering these questions.
Burning the midnight oil
As soon as the meeting was over, Houchen went into panic mode. He’d just complained about his TVCA staffers having to be made to work evenings. But that didn’t stop him calling them in the next day, a Saturday no less, to hastily rewrite the TVCA’s Public Participation Protocol (PPP). The effect would be to change the notice period for public questions from two days to three clear working days, and to restrict questions to agenda items only. The agenda items would, of course, continue to be determined by the TVCA, restricting the democratic right of Tees Valley residents to ask questions on any subject unless they go through the Freedom Of Information (FOI) process.
Lip service
Only weeks earlier, The Tees Valley Review had recommended that “the TVCA and STDC invite the Centre for Governance & Scrutiny to undertake a review of the O&S function and produce recommendations as to improving it in line with the statutory guidance”. Ben Houchen complied with this recommendation, while simultaneously making a major amendment to the TVCA constitution via the PPP on a weekend. He did so without putting the amendment to the TVCA Overview and Scrutiny Committee, let alone the Cabinet, and with no public notification that it had been amended.
Tees Valley Review Recommendations
The recommendations can be found in ‘Further reading’ at the end of this article. Readers may wish to peruse them, and consider the many ways in which Ben Houchen has gone against the spirit and the letter of them since they were published in January 2024.
Frustration
However, Ben Houchens effort to stifle accountability didn’t work. Members of the public continued to find ways of circumventing his restrictions, and the questions continued to be submitted to the TVCA cabinet, committees, and to the STDC, which Houchen also oversees, throughout 2024.
Give it another go
A year after trying to kill public participation by amending the TVCA protocol, Ben Houchen and his subordinates came back for another go. This time it was the “Managing Unreasonable Behaviour Policy” The policy was as ludicrous as it sounded, and one could conclude that it was specifically targeted at the group of individuals who had been submitting questions over the previous year. The policy was submitted to the TVCA Audit and Governance Committee meeting on 16 January 2025. The members of that committee duly tore the policy to shreds.
Anger management
And so, on 28 March 2025, Ben Houchen’s third attempt to take down the people who would speak truth to power. His proposal would be drastic. There would be no further public questions to any TVCA/STDC cabinets, boards or committees. Period. The proposal is couched in weasel words, as usual. It can be found in ‘Further Reading’ at the end of this article. Questions from the public would be replaced by a monthly radio show and an in-person event moving around the Tees Valley twice-yearly. Both events would be hosted by local journalists.
Counter proposal
On 24 March, four days before the Cabinet meeting, members of the public emailed a counter proposal including the following: “Instead of removing the public’s right to submit questions and forcing us to go through local media, and increasing the numbers of FOI requests, the TVCA works with us, members of the public, and involves us, in drafting a public participation policy which satisfies all parties.” The TVCA did not acknowledge receipt of this proposal, and it did not respond to it. The full proposal can be found in ‘Further Reading’ at the end of this article.
Tirade
This meeting was the first and only meeting Ben Houchen actually answered one of the questions submitted by the public. It took him 13 months to do so. Unfortunately he did go on to state that the questions are ‘farcical’ and ‘completely insane’ and called members of the public ‘idiots’. Here’s the proof:
Inability to count
Ben Houchen insisted that 120 public questions had been submitted to this Cabinet meeting alone. The facts say otherwise. There were 19. The list can be found in ‘Further Reading’ at the end of this article. 87 questions have been submitted to the entire TVCA via the following meetings:
- TVCA Cabinet
- Overview and Scrutiny Committee
- Transport Committee
38 questions have been submitted to the STDC board which should have its own separate team to deal with questions if we are to believe the separation of the STDC and TVCA is complete. 23 questions have been submitted to the Middlesbrough Development Corporation. Another separate entity to the TVCA.
Is Ben Houchen exaggerating?
So, according to the most recent census the working adult population of the Tees Valley is 413,800 and with 87 questions submitted to the TVCA that is 0.0002 questions per working adult. If the TVCA lacks capacity for this amount of questions, then are they actually a functioning body?
Making matters worse
One explanation could be that a lot of these questions are sent through the FOI process by the TVCA governance team themselves, which actually takes up more capacity than just answering them when submitted. As for the mental stability of the questions, and those writing them, you can judge for yourself as they are all available on the TVCA website under ‘About > Meetings’. Click on a date for any of the named committees above and the link to ‘public questions and answers’. Members of the public can draw their own conclusions.
A compromise
After about 45 minutes of back and forth, the Cabinet reached a consensus. A motion proposed by Alec Brown, and seconded by Brenda Harrison, was accepted: Members of the public would continue to be allowed to submit questions to TVCA committees, with a maximum of three questions per person. Ben Houchen’s blood pressure reading at this stage is not publicly available.
Money pit
So much for that time-wasting from the Mayor of the Tees Valley. We now moved on to the main business of the day, a proposal to throw yet more public funding at Ben Houchen’s failing Teesside Airport. The proposal was to publicly fund some construction projects at the airport in an effort to draw in future private investment. But this has been tried numerous times since Houchen used £40mn of public money to buy the airport more than six years ago, and it has failed every single time. Prior to the meeting, a majority of the five leaders of the constituent local authorities of the TVCA expressed concerns to Ben Houchen about what they were being asked to approve.
The natives are getting restless
The leaders asked Houchen to make a small meeting room available at 9:00am, an hour prior to the Cabinet meeting, to discuss their concerns. The Mayor refused the request, so three of the leaders had to resort to meeting in the airport coffee shop. These leaders were Chris Cooke, the Mayor of Middlesbrough, Brenda Harrison, the leader of Hartlepool Council, and Stephen Harker, the leader of Darlington Council. As he left the coffee shop, Chris Cooke confirmed this sequence of events to journalists Daniel Hodgson and Ray Casey.
A modest proposal
The TVCA’s proposal had been previewed in a breathless press release on 17 March, 11 days before the Cabinet meeting, modestly entitled “Biggest Ever Combined Private Investment In Airport To Drive Jobs And Growth”. This was another crude distortion of the English language from Ben Houchen. Public funding of £12.5mn would be used to upgrade airport infrastructure, including new taxiways, roadways, etcetera, to allow hangars to be built for three separate private companies. The public funding would, allegedly, leverage £16.5mn in private investment. That sort of ratio is not a good use of public money.
But it’s worse than that
When you drill down into the numbers, you notice that one of the private companies, Airbourne Colours, isn’t going to invest a penny in this stage:
The full details can be seen in the ‘Investment Plan Refresh’ which can be found in ‘Further Reading’ at the end of this article. The Business Plan which formed part of the Cabinet meeting was heavily redacted, so we don’t know the full extent of the damage.
One way street
Brenda Harrison suggested that there seemed to be a one-way flow of public money. When would this end? Where, indeed? Brenda suggested that the Cabinet could set up a workshop to discuss further airport investment. Ben Houchen countered that he would rather have a series of one-to-one meetings with the local authority leaders. You bet he would. Throughout the discussion, the mayor continued to mention 250 future jobs over and over again like a mantra, begging the leaders not to talk Teesside down by refusing his cash request. You can read here about how meaningless such job promises are.
Déjà vu all over again
The proposal was agreed by the Cabinet. For once, the five local authority leaders had almost fought Ben Houchen to a standstill. But the mayor finally bamboozled them into submission yet again, and nobody had learned the lessons of the past eight years.
Thanks to James Waterson for providing additional material for this article.
Further reading
- Questions to the STDC Board, 27 March 2025
- Tees Valley Review Report, 28 recommendations
- Public Participation Proposal
- Questions to the TVCA Cabinet meeting, 28 March 2025
- Proposal to cancel public questions
- Investment Plan Refresh
CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT THE BYLINES NETWORK CROWDFUNDER!
