Ben Houchen calls public's questions "completely insane"
Plus: "Flawed process" of approving £12.5m for Teesside Airport
This is edition number 44 of The Teesside Lead.
It marks a change to things here. As a freelance journalist work ebbs and flows, and for the next three months I’ve secured full-time work elsewhere, which means I won’t have as much time to commit to The Teesside Lead.
Instead of twice-weekly, we’ll be moving to just one edition a week each Sunday. Paid subscribers will still get exclusive content, and the bits which would have been in a Wednesday edition will now just be part of a bumper Sunday edition instead.
The same rigorous, independent investigations, reporting and analysis will be delivered, but at a different frequency. When time allows, the occasional Wednesday edition will still make an appearance.
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This week’s edition is totally free before next week’s second half returns behind the paywall. You won’t get this sort of insight or analysis of Friday’s TVCA Cabinet meeting elsewhere, so look at it as a free preview of the sort of thing paid subs get.
Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen called questions from the public “completely insane” in a public meeting, but accepted an amendment to limit the number permitted rather than scrapping them completely as he had originally proposed.
At the Cabinet meeting for Tees Valley Combined Authority on Friday, chaired by Lord Houchen and consisting of leaders of the Tees Valley’s local councils, it was proposed to remove the provision for the public to submit written questions to statutory meetings, as the mayor put forward new plans for scrutiny and public accountability.
The new plans will see him holding two in-person Q&A events a year, as well as a monthly phone-in show on BBC Radio Tees.
It was proposed to remove the current provision for members of the public to submit written questions to statutory meetings, which are subsequently answered by officers at TVCA.
Lord Houchen claimed some meetings received 120 submissions, and said: “Most of those questions are completely insane.”
Members of the public in attendance immediately took the bait and raised their objections, but Lord Houchen was quick to shoot back: “Can we have silence in the public gallery please because people will be removed.”
Anybody who’s spent time paying attention to Ben Houchen knows he thrives in conflict. As a result of Houchen forcing this skirmish, any TVCA officers who feel their workload is increased by answering the public’s questions will most likely have left that meeting believing more strongly in the us-versus-them culture instilled in the authority - whether that’s appropriate or not.
Trying to return to the agenda, Redcar and Cleveland Council leader Alec Brown said, in reference to the Tees Valley Review and criticism of transparency at TVCA: “We’re playing with a different deck aren’t we, compared to other combined authorities?”
“I really don’t think we are,” replied Houchen. “I think we’re dealing with a specific set of circumstances not necessarily because of where we are as an organisation but because of a very small handful of individuals who choose to try and gum up the system and stop us from being able to achieve the things we want to achieve.”
Lord Houchen later made the claim that the Information Commissioner’s Office had told TVCA they were “the most FOI’d public body outside central London”.
The ICO told me they do not hold data on the number of FOIs public bodies received, but are working to clarify what information relayed to TVCA Lord Houchen may be referring to.
He added: “68% of all those FOIs are coming from two people.”
Cllr Brown put forward an amendment to limit the number of questions each member of the public could submit to three, which was unanimously backed by Cabinet, including Lord Houchen.
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£12.5m for Teesside Airport approved despite “flawed process”
Elsewhere on the agenda for Friday’s Cabinet meeting was the £12.5m funding pencilled for development of new hangars at Teesside Airport. I’ve previously reported on how Ben Houchen has politicised that here.
The funding was approved by Cabinet, but the lead up to the meeting, and the discussion between leaders, summed up how dysfunctional the entire current set up is.
As I’ve mentioned previously, Houchen is very good at politics, while his Labour opponents in Cabinet aren’t really near his level in that respect.
Before the meeting started, Lord Houchen posted on social media about the pending approval of the £12.5m funding, saying, “it depends on Labour votes”.
“I hope they do the right thing,” he wrote, “[and] put politics aside,” somehow ignoring his own blatantly political approach.
More than an hour was spent discussing the plan to provide the £12.5m grant to the airport, of which £6.5m was from the UK Government’s Shared Prosperity Fund, and the remainder new borrowing at a cost to TVCA.
Middlesbrough mayor Chris Cooke raised concerns about how the proposals had been presented to the Cabinet. “I’m not quite comfortable with how the process has been handled so far,” he said.
“I would have liked an earlier conversation about this,” added the Labour mayor.
A lot of the conversation revolved around the fact the airport had made a bid for the funding, and only Redcar Council had also submitted a bid (which was unsuccessful).
Council leaders complained they hadn’t had enough time to put a bid together for the money. Though to be fair to Ben Houchen, he patiently explained how it’s good practice for local government to have proposals “on the shelf” and ready to go when funding becomes available at short notice, as was the case for this money.
One of the contentious issues was that it was the airport getting the money.
“It’s unfortunate that it’s going to a place that’s already had a lot of money put in. The perception for people in the area is that it keeps getting money. How long is it going to be before that need for putting money in stops?” asked Hartlepool Council leader Brenda Harrison.
It sums up the inherent issues with the way TVCA operates. Council leaders attend the meetings with their chief executives in the hope of getting crumbs for their financially-squeezed authorities.
Lord Houchen said “we wouldn’t be thinking twice about this” if the £12.5m - a relatively small amount in the motion being discussed - was being proposed for somewhere like Thornaby Industrial Estate.
He’s right.
But the airport is a special case, having had over £150m of cash pumped into it since being taken over by the public sector six years ago.
The £12.5m will build two new hangars at the airport for Draken and Airbourne Colours, respectively. The former was the recipient of £173m from the UK Government in January, and the latter apparently has a full order book for the next two years.
Gary Macdonald, Group Director of Finance & Resources at TVCA, said private finance had been sought, but there was a “viability gap” which meant any loan couldn’t be paid back through rent on the hangars.
Darlington Council leader Stephen Harker raised concerns about the cost of the borrowed money sitting on TVCA’s balance sheet, and not on the airport’s.
Meanwhile, two new hangars are currently being built at the airport. One of which has been let, the other of which is still being advertised to potential tenants. Did any members of the Cabinet raise this at the meeting? Any chance it could be questioned how those were being financed, and by whom?
The council leaders who make up the Cabinet have enough on their plates having to run local authorities on tight budgets, so they’re understandably not across this detail. And when a 34-page document has a single approval - yes or no to everything contained within - it’s almost impossible for them to pick things apart as you would hope they can.
Lord Houchen correctly pointed out that members of each of the councils are on the airport’s board since they’re shareholders. It’s not really his responsibility to feed information to council leaders about how the airport is being run since there should already be a chain of communication back to officers of the constituent authorities.
When it came to a vote, the Tees Valley Investment Plan Refresh - which included the £12.5m for the airport - was unanimously approved. It was a plan for over £100m of investment across the region.
However, Cllr Harrison voiced her concern before giving the nod that she wanted it noted her approval was “With the caveat that the process that we’ve outlined has been flawed”.
The minutes might note that, but TVCA’s plans were approved without amendment. From their perspective it might not look like the process was flawed.
I’ll be back for the next edition in a week’s time.
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Thanks as always for reading. Get in touch at teesside@thelead.uk or via Bluesky.
Leigh