Bombast and
Belligerence:
Ben Houchen
at the BBC
Tees Valley mayor, Ben Houchen
Scott Hunter
3 September 2026
It has to be said that Ben Houchen, TVCA mayor, doesn’t shy away from tough questioning in the media. His performance on the BBC Radio Tees phone-in yesterday morning (2 September) is evidence of that. First question from a member of the public, Rob from Middlesbrough, linked high levels of crime in the area and high levels of youth unemployment with the disingenuous claims made about levelling up, inevitably referring back to the A66 crash on 22 August where two police officers and five others suspected of involvement in organised crime died in a collision.
That was hostile, but the mayor has a technique for dealing with hostile questions. It’s one he’s learned from studying the work of a well-known president: if you don’t like the question, patronize and insult the questioner. Repeatedly expressing how morally repugnant you find them is particularly suitable on these occasions. And so it was.
Ben Houchen found the question ‘distasteful’; the questioner should be ashamed of himself; and was trying to score political points rather than show any real interest in Teesside. And on it went. And in between the ad hominem comments the mayor avoided answering the question at interminable length.
We now know what we already knew, that the mayor is not responsible for policing in the Tees Valley, and dealing with crime is a police matter. That neighbourhoods with high welfare dependency, high unemployment and poor housing could be considered to be incubators for crime did not feature at all in part one of his answer.
These didn’t feature in part two of his answer either. Part two was also interminable and concerned that runaway success that is Teesworks, currently employing thousands of people, and shortly to employ thousands more. The lucky number is currently 12,000 (down from 20,000 previously announced on innumerable occasions both by Houchen and his supporters). This was in response to the questioner’s second point that youth unemployment in the region has remained stubbornly high.
The Teesworks website currently gives a figure of 2,725 jobs but Houchen claims that’s out of date. He also wished to celebrate that Teesside no longer has quite the highest unemployment in the country, even though it’s still near the bottom of the league table (he has a point, to be fair. Figures supplied by Ray Casey (thanks, Ray) show that numbers of people in the region in employment has risen at a higher rate over the past nine years than the national average, even though the change is quite small).
The benefits to Teesside, the mayor adds, will be so great that he is recommending that a sovereign wealth fund be set up, whose representatives will dispense largesse to worthy causes, including tackling anti-social behaviour if they see fit.
And on it went, the mayor happy not to spot the connection between high youth unemployment and anti-social behaviour and criminality, which was the point the questioner was trying to make.
The interview moved on from that, and shortly the presenters played the mayor back a clip from a previous interview where he had claimed that apprentices working on the Net Zero Teesside project were earning £500 a day. He was asked where he got this unlikely figure from. Houchen rambled on for a while about the potential for overtime and then suggested that the BBC contact the main contractor for the site, which is Balfour Beattie, if they wanted verification of that.
We hope that Balfour Beattie is more forthcoming with figures to the BBC than they were to us. When we asked them a few weeks ago to corroborate Houchen’s claim they didn’t reply.
But before the mayor started not answering the questions put to him, however, he had the softball question that kicked off the session. This concerned the recent statement by Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood that Cleveland Police were to be offered a one-off payment of £2 million to help with the policing crisis in the region.
At this point, Houchen was able to agree with everyone, including Cleveland Police and Crime Commissioner, Labour’s Matt Storey, and Middlesbrough and Thornaby East MP, Labour’s Andy McDonald, that this was wholly inadequate to address the problems Cleveland Police face in dealing with the high levels of crime in the area. He went on to say that he thought the amalgamation of police forces in the Northeast was probably the best way to resolve the funding issues faced by Cleveland Police. He was keen to stress that this was a cross-party issue.
It might have been better had the interviewers left this question until the mayor was in full Trump costume. Perhaps he might then have concurred with our view on Shabana Mahmood’s announcement that, in light of the tragic events of last week, it is nothing short of insulting.
Matt Storey (quoted in the Teesside Lead ) describes the award as ‘a drop in the ocean’, pointing out that ad hoc gestures are not adequate and the formula for police funding as a whole needs to be overhauled. Andy McDonald MP, has observed that the Cleveland Police deal with inner city levels of crime but is funded as if it were a rural force.
Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood’s response has been to provide sufficient funds to buy everyone on Teesside an ice cream. It is the kind of patronizing gesture that this region has received before from the ministries of an over-centralised government. Anyone in search of a reason for devolving power away from Westminster will find it in Mahmood’s announcement.
The Tees Valley mayor, meanwhile, habitually overpromises, underdelivers, and refuses to take responsibility for his actions among other things. The region suffers as a consequence. But we have to ask the question, is that worse than being fobbed off and overlooked by the powers that be at Westminster?