Wes Streeting met Andy Burnham twice while ignoring Ben Houchen requests for meetings

Emails reveal the snub to the Teesside Mayor from the Health Secretary

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ICYMI… As councils start voting on their budgets in the new year, there was a great post on The Lead’s national title earlier this week going through the changes to funding for local authorities…

The Lead Untangles: Has the government kept its promise of a radical overhaul to council funding?

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Health Secretary met with Greater Manchester mayor twice while ignoring meeting requests from Ben Houchen

Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting, Ben Houchen (Images: GMCA, Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street, TVCA).

Health Secretary Wes Streeting met with Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham at least twice while ignoring meeting requests from Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen.

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests by The Teesside Lead revealed the correspondence between Andy Burnham’s team and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) during the first year of the current Labour government.

They show that while Conservative Ben Houchen sent twelve letters which received no response, Labour mayor Andy Burnham’s team could request a meeting with Wes Streeting and get given the Secretary of State’s availability the next day.

After Lord Houchen made the extraordinary claim on BBC Radio Tees earlier this year that he’d written to Wes Streeting 13 times to arrange a meeting with no luck, I FOI’d TVCA to get my hands on the correspondence. At the same time, I FOI’d DHSC to see how other regional mayors were treated by the department.

The results show Andy Burnham met with Wes Streeting on 8th October 2024, only three months after the general election. By the time of this meeting between the two Labour politicians, Tory Ben Houchen and his team had already sent six emails to the Health Secretary’s team which had all been ignored.

At the meeting of 8th October, Wes Streeting had invited Andy Burnham to become a member of his Health Mission Board.

Mr Burnham next reached out to Streeting on 4th March this year to outline concerns with plans for NHS workers’ pay. Burnham also sent a number of letters to the Health Secretary representing the concerns of constituents he had met.

A month later, on 8th April, Burnham’s team had contacted Streeting’s SPADs to ask for a meeting with the secretary of state. A response, with a potential time and date for a meeting, was provided in the space of 26 hours. Burnham used the meeting to lobby for money to develop his authority’s “Prevention Demonstrator” scheme for integrated health and social care.

By the time of that meeting, Ben Houchen’s team had sent their 14th email to Streeting’s team to ask for a meeting, only to be told they were emailing the incorrect address, despite previous acknowledgements of earlier requests.