Sometimes the past suddenly becomes relevant to the present. For me, this is one of them. I was born in Middlesbrough. Work and family eventually took me away, but I have never really left the place behind. I still return regularly to see family and, when I can, to watch the Boro at the Riverside.
So when I read the recent headlines about gangs, drugs, organised crime and disorder on Teesside, I feel sadness. Because the Middlesbrough I know is not the place I know from those headlines. The vast majority of people there are kind, generous, hard-working and fiercely proud of where they come from. They should never be defined by the actions of a minority. But neither should they be abandoned to them. All this reminded me of Ray Mallon.
The policeman who changed Middlesbrough
In the 1990s, Ray Mallon became one of Britain’s most famous policemen. The newspapers called him “Robocop”, but behind the nickname was a far more important idea: that Middlesbrough could change. Mallon took over at a difficult time and challenged a culture he believed had become too passive about disorder. He promised to cut crime by 20% within eighteen months and achieved it in about half the time. Cleveland Police went on to record the largest crime reduction of any force in Britain in 1997. Tony Blair, Jack Straw, and Michael Howard noticed. For a brief period, Mallon was the policeman that politicians on every side of the divide wanted to be photographed next to. And the people of Middlesbrough noticed too, because they were the ones living with the results.
Mallon’s philosophy was more sophisticated than zero tolerance. He believed the police had allowed low-level disorder to become normalised and that tolerating it created the conditions in which more serious crime could take hold. He wanted known offenders disrupted and intelligence used aggressively so that officers knew who was causing problems and where those problems were developing before they escalated. That is not a controversial idea. It is what community policing has always claimed to be about.
But success on that scale came with a price. Mallon was not simply changing policing in Middlesbrough; he was challenging established ways of doing things, attracting national attention and creating a reputation that extended far beyond Cleveland Police. The methods were controversial, the results were striking, and the man himself became increasingly prominent. And when someone becomes that prominent, scrutiny is never far behind.
An investigation followed, as investigations into successful, high-profile figures so often do. Operation Lancet examined the supervision of informants and the conduct of some officers around Mallon’s operation, and it ran for years at a cost of millions of pounds. What is easily lost in the retelling is what it did not find. When the criminal investigation concluded, the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against Mallon. He was never convicted of corruption.
What eventually ended his career was a disciplinary process, not a criminal one – and that distinction matters, but it is not the whole story. Operation Lancet investigated allegations that a hardcore of CID officers had been trading drugs for information and confessions and that senior officers knew about this but tried to cover it up. The CPS brought no criminal charges, but disciplinary proceedings followed. To bring the long-running process to a close, Mallon formally admitted disciplinary charges, including lying to senior officers, deliberately withholding evidence, and turning a blind eye to detectives who supplied hard drugs to obtain information; the tribunal also found he had supplied drugs to vulnerable suspects in custody to keep informants on-side. The chair ruled that those charges were individually serious enough to require resignation. There is no evidence that Mallon acted for personal financial gain; the admitted misconduct is best understood as instrumental – choices made to protect informants and operations in a results-driven policing model. Supporters argue this was a utilitarian trade-off for the greater good; the Code of Ethics and the tribunal took the opposite view, treating such conduct as corrosive to legitimacy and the rule of law, whatever the short-term gains.
The uncomfortable question
Mallon had, by any measure, become very famous. Perhaps too famous for some people. Contemporary reporting at the time described resentment inside Cleveland Police at his growing national profile, and his supporters believed that prominence had made him enemies within the organisation he served. I want to be careful here, because there is no proof of some grand conspiracy against him. But it is worth asking, honestly, what happens inside an institution when one determined local leader starts producing results that make everyone around him look inadequate by comparison.
The policeman who flew too high | The Independent | The Independent
Mallon had shown that a single, driven police leader could transform the crime figures of a struggling town. He had the ear of national politicians. He was more famous than the force he worked for. That is not a comfortable position for any organisation to sit with, and it is reasonable to wonder whether the scale of the response to his mistakes had as much to do with what he represented as with what he had actually done.
There is also a harder question about means and ends. Some officers and commentators defend tactics like tolerating certain offences by informants or key witnesses if it protects intelligence and secures convictions in more serious cases. In that view, Mallon’s team made instrumentally rational choices to deliver the celebrated crime reductions. The Code of Ethics and the tribunal’s reasoning take the opposite view.
Because Middlesbrough’s problems were never really about policing, they ran much deeper than that, and they still do.
The economy that disappeared
Teesside was once one of Britain’s great industrial powerhouses: steel, chemicals, engineering, shipping, and manufacturing. Those industries didn’t just provide jobs. They provided apprenticeships, skills, a customer base for small businesses, and a pathway into adult life for generation after generation of young people. When that industrial economy declined, something far larger than employment disappeared with it. An entire social and economic ecosystem was damaged, and we have never fully replaced it.
And this is where we need to be honest about what happened next. Teesside was not simply unlucky. It was neglected. Governments of different political colours came and went, promising regeneration, prosperity and a better future, but none managed to replace the economic strength that had been lost. There were initiatives, development agencies, regeneration schemes, enterprise zones, special funds and, more recently, devolution. Yet too often they have been short-term responses to long-term problems, designed in Whitehall and measured against spending rather than against whether people’s lives actually changed.
Successive governments have repeatedly talked about bringing prosperity to the North while allowing the underlying imbalance between London and the regions to persist. Teesside has had to watch decisions about its economy, infrastructure, skills and future being made by people who are often many miles away and who will never experience the consequences when those decisions fail.
The result is not simply that Teesside lost its old industries. It lost the ability to decide for itself what should come next.
Westminster’s response was also to keep redrawing the map rather than rebuilding the economy underneath it. Before 1974, the southern Teesside communities were part of the North Riding of Yorkshire. In 1968, a new Teesside County Borough had been created, bringing Middlesbrough, Stockton, Thornaby, Redcar, Billingham and Eston together in recognition of a simple truth: this was one economic and social area, and the old boundaries no longer reflected it. Six years later, the 1974 local government reorganisation abolished that borough and created the new County of Cleveland instead. In 1996, Cleveland itself was abolished.
The map kept changing. The economy didn’t. The river didn’t. The communities and the identity that had grown up around them certainly didn’t. The irony is that governments have repeatedly recognised that places such as Teesside need special help but have been reluctant to give them the one thing that matters most in the long term: the power to shape their own economic future. Instead, each new government has arrived with another programme, another funding pot and another structure.
The names change, and announcements change. The underlying problem remains.
I don’t believe the answer to any of this is asking Teesside to choose between being Teesside and being Yorkshire. It can be both. Middlesbrough, Redcar, Stockton and Hartlepool are Teesside, bound together by the Tees, but Middlesbrough and Redcar, and all south of the Tees, were also Yorkshire communities long before the administrative experiments of the twentieth century began, and the restoration of the historic county boundary in 1996 recognised what had always been true.
Teesside can be Teesside and Yorkshire. That isn’t a contradiction. It’s an opportunity if anyone in power were inclined to treat it as one.
Investment without transformation
There has been some investment in the Tees Valley, and it deserves to be acknowledged rather than dismissed. The devolution settlement has brought new powers, long-term funding, and opportunities ahead in offshore wind, clean energy and advanced manufacturing. None of that should be waved away.
But the way that investment has actually been managed deserves just as much scrutiny as the headline figures. The South Tees Development Corporation, overseen by Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen, and Teesworks were supposed to be the flagship of the whole project. Instead, they have become a case study in how not to run a public regeneration scheme.”
An independent review commissioned after years of Private Eye reporting found no evidence of corruption or illegality; however, decisions taken by the bodies involved fell well short of the standards expected when managing public money, and governance and transparency were insufficient to demonstrate value for money. Shares in the joint venture were shifted from an even public-private split to one overwhelmingly in favour of two private developers, without a public tender process. Public land was sold off cheaply, and those same developers were later reported in the media and under parliamentary scrutiny to have made tens of millions of pounds in profit. Mayor Ben Houchen has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and no one has been shown to have broken the law.
But “nothing illegal” is a low bar for a project that was meant to demonstrate what devolved power could achieve for one of the poorest parts of England, and the whole affair has done little to build confidence that Teesside’s own institutions can be trusted to hold that power to account.
The danger of putting too much power in one pair of hands
There is a wider lesson here about the way England has chosen to devolve power. Giving one elected mayor responsibility for a large regional budget and a growing range of economic and development powers may look like devolution. It can also concentrate too much authority in one person.
A mayor can be energetic and a good ambassador, but the concentration of power can become a weakness when decisions are controversial or when the checks and balances around that individual are not strong enough. Regional government should not depend on the personality of one politician.
That is one of the fundamental differences between the mayoral model and the regional government I would like to see for Yorkshire. A Yorkshire Parliament would spread responsibility across elected representatives from across the region, with decisions subject to proper democratic scrutiny. The region would have a government, not simply a mayor’s office.
Devolution should mean bringing power closer to people. It should not mean moving power from Whitehall into the hands of one person and calling that democracy.
Mayoral limits, regional solutions
The freeport model that underpins much of this only sharpens the doubt. Freeports were sold as engines of new investment and good jobs; critics argue they mostly repackage existing activity, hand tax breaks to developers and landowners rather than workers, and create exactly the kind of opaque public-private arrangements that landed Teesworks in this position in the first place. That is not a model for building a durable, well-paid industry on the south bank of the Tees. It’s a model for building a small number of very rich developers.
Investment has to be judged by outcomes, and the outcomes remain stubbornly unequal. Middlesbrough has some of the highest levels of deprivation anywhere in England. Places like South Bank and Grangetown have carried the burden of industrial decline for generations, and the fact that large sums of money have been spent without shifting that picture should not lead us to conclude that the money was wasted.
It should lead us to ask whether the scale, the distribution and the staying power of that investment have ever really matched the scale of the problem.
A place problem, not just a policing problem
Which brings us back to where we started.
Cleveland Police is once again warning that it lacks the resources to tackle organised gangs and street crime, and Chief Constable Victoria Fuller has been clear that the causes sit well beyond policing: drug misuse, unemployment, low educational attainment and deep-rooted deprivation.
It is important to say something here that can easily get lost in the argument. Cleveland Police and its Chief Constable should not be blamed for trying to police a problem that is much bigger than the police. They should be given the resources to do the job properly. Cleveland has one of the highest crime rates in England and Wales, yet its funding settlement does not adequately reflect the level of demand placed upon the force. The current funding system has been criticised locally for failing to reflect Cleveland’s particular combination of crime, deprivation and demand. Cleveland’s Police and Crime Commissioner has pointed to significant funding disparities between forces with very different levels of crime.
That cannot be right.
Fairer Funding, Safer Cleveland – Cleveland Police and Crime Commissioner
The government has now provided additional funding to tackle serious crime, and that is welcome. But emergency funding is not a substitute for a fair and sustainable settlement that recognises the particular pressures Cleveland Police faces. So this is not an argument for simply giving the police more money and hoping the problem disappears. It is an argument for recognising what the police themselves are telling us: this is a place problem. An economic problem. A skills, housing, education and youth-opportunity problem.
And none of those problems respects a council boundary.
This is why Ray Mallon still matters and why his story does not deserve to be reduced to a scandal. His real achievement was never simply the crime figures. It was proving that local leadership, properly empowered, could change a town’s fortunes almost overnight. He knew his streets. He understood his community’s problems better than anyone parachuted in from outside ever could. He was prepared to take responsibility and to try something different, and for a few remarkable years, it worked.
Teesside’s wider history tells the same story from the other direction: strip away local power and local economic control, and decline follows.
One Yorkshire doesn’t mean losing Teesside
This is where the argument for One Yorkshire needs to be properly understood.
The One Yorkshire I envisage would be a regional government with democratic responsibility for genuinely regional strategic transport, economic development, major infrastructure, skills, housing, energy, spatial planning and the long-term economic strategy of Yorkshire.
But instead of four separate combined authorities, different funding settlements, competing priorities and a patchwork of arrangements, Yorkshire would have one democratically accountable government capable of looking at the whole region.
That matters particularly to places such as Teesside.
The problems of Middlesbrough do not stop at its boundary. Nor do the economic opportunities. The same is true across Yorkshire. Transport networks, labour markets, housing, energy infrastructure, skills and investment all operate across administrative boundaries. The answer is therefore not to give Teesside another short-term regeneration programme from Whitehall. It is to give Teesside a genuine voice in a regional government with the scale and powers to make long-term decisions.
And crucially, that government would be accountable to the people of Yorkshire.
The point is not that Westminster has done nothing for Teesside. It is that after decades of decline, successive governments have never given the place the sustained power and resources needed to change its trajectory. That is the difference between spending money on a place and giving that place the means to determine its own future. Genuine devolution should mean more than moving a handful of government programmes from one Whitehall office to another. It should mean moving real power, real responsibility and real resources to people who understand the ground on which they stand.
For more than half a century we have experimented with Teesside’s political geography: the County Borough, then Cleveland, then the abolition of Cleveland, then the Tees Valley, and now a combined authority with modest new powers. It is time to stop endlessly redrawing boundaries and start building a settlement that reflects the reality that has been there all along. Teesside is an economic community bound together by the river. The communities south of that river have deep Yorkshire roots. There is no reason why those two identities should have to compete, and every reason to think the future strength of southern Teesside could come from having both.
I don’t want this to read as an attack on Middlesbrough. It’s the opposite. I am defending it.
Every time I go back, I am reminded of what the headlines miss: the kindness, the humour, the resilience, the pride, and the thousands who still turn up at the Riverside to support the Boro.
This is not a failed community.
They are people who have lived through an extraordinary amount of economic and political upheaval and kept getting up anyway. They deserve better than another headline about crime and better than another reorganisation imposed from above. The same applies to the police officers who are being asked to deal with the consequences. They deserve proper funding. They deserve proper resources. And the chief constable deserves the chance to do the job without constantly having to fight for the resources required. Ray Mallon once showed what could happen when Middlesbrough was given determined local leadership and the freedom to act. Teesside’s industrial history shows what happens when real economic power disappears. The current pressures on Cleveland Police show what happens when public services are left to manage the consequences alone.
So perhaps the question for Andy Burnham’s government isn’t simply how much emergency funding Cleveland Police receives this year. It is whether Westminster is finally prepared to give Teesside the long-term power, resources and accountability it needs to fix its own problems.
And perhaps the question for Yorkshire is just as important. Can we imagine a future in which Middlesbrough and Redcar don’t have to choose between two identities that were never really in competition?
A future in which they can say, without contradiction, that they are Teesside and they are Yorkshire.
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