Ben Houchen: "I Don’t Have A Bad Word To Say About How No 10 Have Engaged With Me”

Ben Houchen (Photography: Christopher Owens)

Tali Fraser

@TaliFraser

Ben Houchen is the last Tory standing: once a poster-boy of the Boris Johnson realignment, now the only remaining Conservative metro mayor. And he’s not going down quietly.

Modern politics is, he says, a “street fight”. A Labour MP is “full of shit” and politicians in London – of all stripes – still don’t understand what the North of England needs.

It is, of course, not unusual for elected politicians outside of the capital to blame Westminster – and by extension their own London-based party leadership. But it wasn’t enough to save Andy Street in the West Midlands, and Houchen only hung on with a vastly reduced share of the vote last May, down 72 to 54 per cent.

It also didn’t stop him from taking a peerage from Boris Johnson. But Lord Houchen of High Leven is not the sort of politician to take lectures on consistency. What he cares about, he says, is making Teesside great again.

We do not live in a world of academia and think tanks. That’s not what modern politics is about. It’s a street fight

Since becoming mayor in 2017, the derelict steelworks near Redcar have been demolished to make way for new projects (though not without controversy), a failing airport has been taken into public ownership and the Treasury has opened a new office in Darlington.

The interests of Teesside “always” trump those of the Tories. Not that that stops him from giving his London colleagues some political advice. “What the Conservative Party needs to realise is that we have not done enough in the last six months to earn a right to be heard by the public.”

The Teesside-first attitude helps deal with the Starmer government, about which he is full of praise. “I think No 10 and the Prime Minister have been extremely generous and have worked with me very openly. I don’t have a bad word to say about how they’ve engaged with me,” Houchen adds.

“They’ve been very open about some of the things that they’re wanting to achieve and they’ve been very open to suggestions from me as to how they could achieve them.”

Even his relationship with Angela Rayner, the Deputy PM whose department most affects his own work, is “really positive” – something he admits he believed “unlikely” before the election.

Notably less warm are relations with Labour politicians closer to home. “There’s a strange kind of schizophrenia within the Labour Party at the minute, where the local politicians do all they can to try and stop the progress that I’m making, but central government are working very closely with me to make sure that I can make it work.”

Houchen maintains that the work going on in Tees Valley has shown that “with the right plan, the right attitude and the right organisation around you, actually you can bring manufacturing jobs back to this country”.

“You can restore manufacturing jobs, the likes of which we haven’t seen for the last 50 years. It is doable and we can compete on an international level, but unfortunately many of the politicians and the people that work in Whitehall don’t understand our manufacturing communities,” he adds.

Donald Trump’s move to impose tariffs on steel, including that made in the UK, has highlighted a debate around whether the country should ensure it retains its own manufacturing capacity in a de-globalising world.

Houchen – who was re-elected on a promise to restore steel-making to Teesside – worries that the closure of the last blast furnaces further down the east coast in Scunthorpe will reduce the government’s leverage over British Steel’s Chinese owners to make good on promises to build new greener arc furnace plants, including on Teesside.

He suggested Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds might need to invoke the Civil Contingencies Act to effectively nationalise the plant on the grounds of national security. “I got the impression that they were probably looking into it,” he says. “National security is at risk if British Steel blast furnaces in Scunthorpe are allowed to close.”

The issue has brought him into sharp conflict with Scunthorpe’s Labour MP Nic Daiken, who has accused Houchen of “making mischief” and being “a genius at misinformation” over the potential closure.

“The government is negotiating… and saying, ‘We will give you potentially billions of pounds of UK taxpayers money to close down the steel works at Scunthorpe, and we will allow you to import cheap Chinese steel into the UK when you do that, but we hope at some point in the future, you’ll build a nice green electric arc furnace that will replace thousands of those jobs’,” Houchen says.

“But why would the Chinese ever spend their own money to build a new steel plant in the UK when they’ve already spent the money in China? It’s cheaper to produce, and geopolitically it gives them a hell of a strong card against the UK economy.”

He continues: “The world has turned upside down when a Conservative mayor is doing all he can to try and keep steel-making in this country, and when I am openly reaching out to all of the three major trade unions involved in steel, and they reply and say: ‘We’re not going to work with you, even if it’s for the benefit of the steel industry.’

“I reach out to local Labour politicians who refuse to work with me, and then you get people like Nic Dakin saying that I’m spreading misinformation – he hasn’t said what misinformation I’ve spread, by the way; I’d love to know because he’s clearly full of shit – but all I’m trying to do is make this happen.”

It is not the only time the Tees Valley mayor has been in favour of market intervention; a more unusual tendency for a Conservative politician. He brought the loss-making Teesside International Airport into public ownership in 2019, but it still continues to make a loss and offers only a handful of flights during the week.

I don’t have a bad word to say about how No 10 have engaged with me

He believes no political party has so far communicated in a way that demonstrates they truly understand how to re-industrialise the country: “It fundamentally means that UK PLC is not performing and firing on all cylinders, because one of the wheels has been blown out and nobody seems to want to fix it. The North is that example, and I just don’t think London politicians get it, of any colour, to be honest.”

Does the Conservative Party under its new leadership get that? After a near 10-second long pause, he answers: “I don’t know, is the answer. I don’t know.”

It is creating, he says, an “anti-establishment and anti-politics feeling” that Reform as a party is able to feed off, especially around areas of de-industrialisation, following things like the closure of the last blast furnace at Port Talbot: “Labour are going to lose a huge number of seats in Wales at the assembly election next year. Reform are going to clean up.”

It also speaks to a bigger picture issue with the government, according to Houchen, in there being little strategy or plan to take forward plans to do with levelling up or the Northern Powerhouse.

“I’ve seen no evidence since the election that this government has any interest in their own version of levelling up or the Northern Powerhouse,” he says. “They seem to have completely ignored the need for a specific strategy and a plan for the North of England.”

Houchen adds: “That does worry me… I think the North will suffer as a result. That’s not just me saying that. I know, speaking to my Labour mayoral colleagues, they are also equally as concerned that there is a big black hole where the Northern Powerhouse once was that the Labour government is not choosing to fill at the moment.”

The old Redcar steelworks site has been at the heart of Houchen’s ideas for regeneration in the area through the Teesworks project, providing a freeport hub for low-carbon industries.

But the project has been dogged by controversy. An independent review last year found no evidence of corruption but described “issues of governance and transparency” and said a number of decisions had not met “the standards expected when managing public funds”.

The freeport happened “only because of the political will of the prime minister at the time [Boris Johnson]” – and even then, Houchen says “it got watered down by the Treasury”, with talks about abolition of corporation tax, income tax, tax breaks for certain research and development, and tax credits that could be included in the zone dropped.

“The Treasury don’t really believe fully that freeports really realise huge benefits. You have a very stereotypical economic outlook of the Treasury that tax breaks don’t generate investment and generate more tax revenue, which is utterly alien and bizarre to me,” Houchen says.

“The UK system is not fit for purpose in a 21st-century economy… The whole state needs to be rewired, otherwise it doesn’t matter what this government says, and I agree with a lot of it, on growth. At the minute, it’s all rhetoric. Unless they want to actually take the tough political decisions to change that, we’ll be sitting here in four years having the same discussion.”

It is an area where “we could have gone much, much further”, the Tees Valley mayor says. The country “hasn’t fully capitalised” on the opportunities of Brexit.

“It has demonstrated that the civil service system, and actually some of our politics, were not prepared to take back control. Therefore they didn’t have the understanding and the ability to pull the levers that Brexit gave to make us a more reactive, efficient and productive country.”

The lack of a reactive system means that in Teesside, where hydrogen combustion engines are being produced, the only emission of which is water, all of their products are being exported to the United States as the UK doesn’t have a regulatory model to allow the engines onto the roads.

“The system doesn’t understand how to draft and publish and implement flexible, business friendly regulations that give that sector certainty,” Houchen says.

Despite net-zero scepticism within his party, with the Tory leader among the doubters, the Tees Valley mayor is willing to grasp whatever opportunities and investment come from the sector: “Teesside is a place that is appealing to some of the big net zero investments to locate themselves. If my job is primarily to create jobs, to put money in people’s pockets, it doesn’t matter what the investment is, I want to bring it in.”

For Houchen, Reform’s response to net-zero policies only prompt more concern, after the party announced its policy of imposing taxes on the renewable energy sector.

“It shows a more fundamental problem with their lack of understanding of basic economics,” he says, “whether it’s a tax on renewable energy or energy itself, you’re basically putting a tax on the consumer bill.”

“Reform is trying to be two things. Reform is a Nigel Farage, small-state Conservative Party on one hand. On the other side of the coin, it’s a very large-state, social democrat, protectionist party. At some point Reform is going to have to pick a lane, and when it does, that’s going to be a very tough time for them,” he says.

There should be a “fundamental relook” at how the UK taxes energy and energy intensive industries, Houchen says: “We should be de-regulating energy entirely. We should be agnostic about the energy source, and we should be creating an environment nationally where whether it’s solar, onshore wind, gas fired power plants or nuclear, actually they stand on their own two feet or they don’t.”

Houchen is not exactly full of praise for the current Conservative outfit either, however. “We need to do more and we need to work much harder to earn the right for the public to listen to us again. Because the problem we have in the Conservative Party, particularly after the defeat that we had, is that many people within the Conservative Party now were there when we were in government.”

Houchen thinks it was the last five years of Tory government where things “went wrong” and that is where the new leadership needs to focus its analysis. But he fears the work is not happening: “I just don’t think that people recognise that yet, nor have they started to come up with the answers that will give the public the excuse that they can start listening to us again.”

One of the issues he identifies is the party not being reactive enough and letting Reform fill in the gaps.

“Rather than not being on the playing field, and allowing Nigel Farage to get the job on things like immigration or the economy… we’ve got to be out there saying sensible Conservative things,” he says. “To be honest, Nigel Farage isn’t saying anything that a Conservative Party back in 2012 wouldn’t have said, he’s just saying it first, he’s saying it before us, and he’s saying it more often.”

Does the Tory Party have a strategy to deal with Farage? “I don’t think it has a specific Reform strategy,” Houchen says. “My impression is it doesn’t, and it thinks it doesn’t need one, because as long as we can kind of put forward our best foot forward ourselves and put forward our views, that will ultimately win the day. There is some credence to that argument, but only if we start today, rather than in three years’ time.”

In a swipe at the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, who has been courting the think tank scene, delivering three big set-piece speeches at Onward, Policy Exchange and the Centre for Policy Studies, he adds: “We do not live in a world of academia and think tanks. That’s not what modern politics is about. It’s a street fight. You’ve got to get out there. You’ve got to dig your nails in. You’ve got to dig your heels, and you’ve got to make progress one inch at a time. We’re not doing enough to earn the respect from others, journalists, political parties or the public, because we’re not doing that.”

In his second term as the Tees Valley mayor, Houchen has found it personally difficult, even facing death threats, with the police knocking on his door one evening with reports that there was potentially an imminent threat.

“From that night onwards, nothing’s been taken forward,” he says. “It’s interesting because despite all of the rhetoric from Parliament around the protection of MPs, there is an issue where, whether it’s myself or Andy Burnham or other mayors across the country, there is no similar protection afforded to us.”

Although Houchen has his eyes fixed on Tees Valley, the mayor has shown he is still prepared to wade into Westminster issues when it matters – and Houchen’s own party may need to brace itself. 

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