Darlington councillor owes £1,700 in unpaid council tax
Plus: Ben Houchen reined in during four-minute long meeting rant and Net Zero Teesside gets the go-ahead
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Yesterday saw the news that paperwork was completed and the Net Zero Teesside project can begin in earnest. I also cover last week’s STDC board meeting which saw a bizarre, unprompted tirade from Ben Houchen.
However, to begin, the latest in my ongoing investigation into councillors who owe money to the councils they represent…
The Teesside Lead can reveal a councillor on Darlington Borough Council has council tax arrears of more than £1,700.
As part of my ongoing investigation into council tax arrears owed by councillors on the Tees Valley’s five local authority councils, a freedom of information (FOI) request to Darlington Council has revealed independent councillor Thom Robinson owes them £1,763.10.
For the financial year 2023-24, Cllr Robinson had accrued council tax arrears of £1,293.63. He was first elected as a Green Party councillor representing the Hummersknott ward in May 2023, but left the group unexpectedly around six weeks ago.
It’s not thought the Green Party was aware of his arrears.
In the current financial year, to 8 August 2024, Cllr Robinson’s arrears totalled £469.47.
Cllr Robinson did not respond to a request for comment from The Teesside Lead by the time of publication.
He was absent from February’s council meeting to approve this year’s budget. If he had attended without declaring his arrears he would have committed a crime under Section 106 of the Local Government Finance Act 1992, and been liable to pay a fine of up to £1,000.
Darlington Council confirmed to me that prior to meetings about setting council tax, the council’s Monitoring Officer - its head legal officer - is notified if any councillor is in arrears.
“The practice of the Monitoring Officer,” they said, “is to follow this up with the individual member before the relevant meeting and advise them they will need to declare at the meeting that they are in council tax arrears and that they will be unable to vote at the meeting.”
It’s the latest revelation in my ongoing efforts to get local councils to reveal which councillors owe them money. A judge ruled at the Upper Tribunal in 2016 that local authorities are obliged to reveal the names of any councillors who are in arrears.
Despite this, Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council has repeatedly refused to name the two councillors who owe a collective £6,443.57 to them.
Meanwhile, a response to another FOI request I submitted to Hartlepool Borough Council suggests there’s at least one councillor in arrears there. I’ve asked them to review the decision, citing the 2016 case law, and insisted they must provide more information.
In their response, they confirmed “Less [sic] than 5” councillors had unpaid council tax arrears, but refused to disclose more information, saying: “Due to the small numbers involved there is a risk that persons may become identifiable if the figures are disclosed.”
In her judgement, Kate Markus KC said, “it is not reasonable for a councillor to expect not to be identified where he is summoned for non-payment of council tax.”
Middlesbrough Council has confirmed none of its councillors are in arrears, while Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council is still considering my FOI request.
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News came yesterday of confirmation paperwork had been completed to begin work in earnest on the Net Zero Teesside project on the Teesworks site.
The first phase of NZT, a joint venture between BP and Equinor, will see a gas-fired power plant built on a 150-acre site, where the blast furnace of the former Redcar steelworks stood. Its location symbolic of the changing shape of Teesside’s industrial identity.
The second phase will see carbon capture and storage (CCS) added to trap carbon emissions, potentially for polluters across Teesside on both sides of the river.
In October, the government awarded £21.7bn of funding for companies to develop carbon capture technology in the UK, including NZT. However, later that month it was reported that Equinor had been overestimating its carbon capture capabilities on its flagship project for years.
On Monday, BP announced its intention to “significantly reduce” investment in renewable energy until 2030, by entering a joint venture with Japanese company Jera to reduce costs. The oil giant has scaled back its green ambitions since the appointment of Murray Auchincloss as chief executive in January this year.
In October it abandoned plans to cut oil and gas output by 2030 in order to protect its share price, according to Reuters.
NZT has been criticised by campaigners for being an excuse to continue extracting and burning fossil fuels, and is currently subject to a legal challenge by an academic who claims permission had been granted because of a calculating error about the emissions expected from the plant.
I understand the government has awarded contracts to develop CCS, including the one for the East Coast Cluster which encompasses NZT, which incentivise performance by tying payment levels to the rate of carbon captured.
Commenting on yesterday’s announcement, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: “Today’s investment is proof that this government is taking a different approach by putting growth first and investing in the industries of the future. That means thousands of jobs secured in the North East and across the UK for years to come.
“This is only the start. Our Plan for Change puts more money in working people’s pockets, secures home-grown energy and protects billpayers, so tyrants like Putin can’t attack the living standards of working people again.”
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband added: “This investment launches a new era for clean energy in Britain – boosting energy security, backing industries, and supporting thousands of highly skilled jobs in Teesside and the North East.”
Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen said on social media that work will begin in the new year on the site, as he thanked the private partners at Teesworks for their work.
TVCA’s legal chief had to interrupt Ben Houchen as he went on a four-minute long rant during a board meeting of the South Tees Development Corporation (STDC) last week.
After comments from Conservative councillor Carolyn Curr that perception of the Teesworks project had been affected by poor communications strategy, Lord Houchen told his fellow board members that it was incumbent on them “to be robust in the response to what is being reported, in the way that a small number of individuals try to purposely mislead what the actuals are.”
Earlier in the meeting, when addressing conflicts of interest found by the government’s Tees Valley Review into the regeneration scheme, Lord Houchen said, “while the review found that there weren’t any conflicts of interest, there could be a perceived conflict of interest. So sometimes perception is more important than reality. We know the truth isn’t always the top of everybody’s priority list.”
Continuing his rant, he said: “It goes back to my earlier point that people aren’t actually interested in the truth, they’re interested in an agenda. And that agenda is to try and stop the investment, stop the jobs for political purposes. We need to make sure that we as a board are robust in pushing back when what’s being reported is demonstrably untrue.”
He then turned his attention to Liberal Democrat peer Lord Scriven, who had been quoted in an FT article that day discussing STDC’s auditor’s failure to sign off their accounts.
“You’ve got a guy called Lord Scriven who’s never been to Teesside, and has never understood what we’re doing, but just hates the idea of Brexit, freeports and anything remotely positive. He’s suggested in a news report today that this is an ongoing issue, but this is from three years ago. So there are people that are just saying things that are demonstrably untrue, that are trying to disrupt the progress that we’ve made.”
Lord Scriven had called for the government to take action in the wake of the failure to sign off STDC’s accounts. Knowing he has ties to the area, I asked him what he thought of his House of Lords colleague’s comments.
Lord Scriven told me:
“It’s astounding that the ignorance of Lord Houchen knows no bounds. Whether it’s a personal attack on me, who is in Teesside often and pays local council tax, or about the laws and rules governing best value, or his continually trying to mislead the public on the actual investment made or jobs created to date. You can see why the external auditors referred to weakness and why the lessons of the Tees Valley Review haven’t been learnt.”
Back in the meeting, Lord Houchen then suggested calls for transparency at Teesworks had scared companies off.
“We saw it with Global Interconnector who were supposed to come to Teesside but ended up going somewhere else,” he said. “Because of that noise which we now know is completely demonstrably untrue.”
Global Interconnector is an undersea cable start-up which declared it was ditching plans to invest in Teesside around the time the government review into Teesworks was announced. Its founder is Edi Truell, who was pensions advisor to Boris Johnson when he was London mayor, and has donated more than £500,000 to the Conservative Party since 2010.
In August this year it had announced plans with a joint venture partner to build its factory at the Port of Tyne, which will be operated by LS Group.
Lord Houchen then turned his attention to Middlesbrough and Thornaby East MP, Andy McDonald, who he called “potentially the worst elected politician we’ve ever had in Teesside,” saying he, “continues to lie about the project, which causes disruption.”
Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council leader, Alec Brown, interrupted Lord Houchen, saying his comments were “overtly political”.
“I’m a politician,” fired back Houchen. “I’m directly elected by the people of the Tees Valley to create jobs and investment, I will call out as I see fit people who are actively doing things to damage our local communities. And you as leader of the council should be doing the same.”
Cllr Brown replied: “My request, chair,” referring formally to Lord Houchen in his role as chair of the meeting, “is that we leave scathing political attacks like that away from the constructiveness of this boardroom.”
“I’ll continue to call out the nonsense,” was Houchen’s reply, before they continued to bicker.
“We wouldn’t have had the 28 recommendations had everything be perfect,” said Cllr Brown.
“We wouldn’t have had the review if Andy McDonald hadn’t lied,” was Lord Houchen’s retort.
Shortly after this, and more than four minutes after Lord Houchen began his rant, TVCA’s chief legal officer, Emma Simson, intervened saying: “I think the point councillor Brown made was a fair one, around press coverage of Teesworks and the joint venture partnership. If you can take the board back to that”
Earlier in the meeting, the board approved the appointment of STDC’s chief operating officer, John Barnes (not that one), as director of the publicly-owned South Tees Developments Ltd (which owns the freehold of the Teesworks site), South Tees Site Company Ltd, and as STDC’s appointed director to Teesworks Ltd.
He replaced TVCA chief executive Julie Gilhespie in each of those positions, after the Tees Valley Review was highly critical of her failure to notice potential conflicts of interest, much less declare them, by holding those roles along with leading TVCA.
According to the review, “conflicts of interest are not routinely recorded or articulated, particularly in the case of the Chief Executive and her role as a Director of [Teesworks Ltd].”
Lord Houchen said in the meeting that replacing Julie Gilhespie was a result of the Tees Valley Review.
Discussing the decision to nominate Mr Barnes for his new directorships, Ms Simson said: “Following John’s appointment in March of this year [as STDC COO], it seems logical and sensible to have the knowledge and background of that site on that board.”
Quite how Ms Gilhespie hadn’t acquired that knowledge of the site in her four and a half years as director of STSC remains anyone’s guess.
In the next edition, I’ll be looking into who John Barnes is, and how his connections to Teesworks pre-date his employment by STDC. Make sure you subscribe and get it straight to your inbox on Sunday…
Thank as always for reading.
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Thanks again!
Leigh
I'm confused regarding what links Lord Scrivener has to Teesside/Northern East.
AFAIK he has links to Sheffield. Any chance of clarification?