Houchen Sees Red
During Mayoral
Question Time
Tees Valley mayor, Ben Houchen (right), during Mayor's Question Time
Scott Hunter
25 July 2025
Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen’s first Q&A with the public was held on Wednesday night in the plush surroundings of Yarm School. While the event, according Eventbrite, was fully booked, in the event fifty-one attendees were ushered into an auditorium with capacity for at least 500.
LDRS reporter and host, Daniel Hodgson, started with a few gentle questions allowing the ever-loquacious mayor to answer with his customary loquacity, then opened the discussion to questions from the audience just before the larger part of it fell asleep.
First up, as it happens, was Tees Valley Monitor, with a question linking two press reports that had appeared earlier in the day. The first was from the Financial Times (Government picks Teesworks site for AI data centre), which reported that Teesworks has been selected to be a so-called ‘AI Growth Zone’, whereby a large data centre will be constructed on the site. The second was from Private Eye which reports that Teesworks Ltd, the company in which two developers, Martin Corney and Chris Musgrave, have a 90% shareholding, acquired the 20 substations that will power the electricity network on the site for £10.91. These will handed over to another company, Steel River Power, in which Corney and Musgrave own 45% of the shares, which will supply site users including the power-hungry data centre.
Asked for clarification, Houchen confirmed the news about the data centre but had no further comment to make about it. Perhaps it was because he was so upset at the mention of Private Eye that a mist came down and he couldn’t concentrate on the relatively good news story of the data centre project. He briefly agreed that the data centre would be a good thing before getting started on Private Eye.
Private Eye, we were told, is a comic and everything in it is rubbish. If we’d like to look back at all the articles that have been written there about Teesworks we’ll see that they’re full of contradictions. And all written by a self-confessed communist. And he recommends that we cancel our subscription.
We listened politely without interrupting him to observe that the authors of the Tees Valley Review, among others, do not appear to share his opinion. And it was largely the revelations in Private Eye written by the ‘self-confessed communist’ that led to the setting up of the Review in the first place. That Review, in turn, was less than flattering about the way the South Tees Development Corporation and the TVCA is run. Given that the Review led to the Authority being served a Best Value Notice by the MHCLG, it came as something of a surprise that the mayor continues to be so lightly dismissive of Private Eye’s reports. Perhaps he was just playing to the gallery, but if so, no one applauded.
As for the matter of the acquisition of the electricity network, the mayor stated that the asset has huge negative value, as some of the substations are 70 years old, and the company will have to invest millions to upgrade the system. When asked about the profitability of the electricity network, especially given the fact that the data centre will have a huge demand for power, the mayor illustrated his point about the sale of the network by talking about a hypothetical house purchase where the property some unspecified liability. This is from the transcript:
“let’s talk about this power company. It’s like saying I’m going to sell you this house and I want that, I want it, to, to buy my house, there’s a liability that comes with it of £300,000. So when you buy my house you have to write out a cheque for £300,000. How much are you paying for my house? You’re not paying anything for it are you? Because if you’ve got it on the market for £200,000, you’re not paying £200,000 and then paying £300,000 of liability. You say, well hang on, if I’m having to cover the problems with this site, you’re going to have to give me that site for free. So, the idea that we stole something that shouldn’t have been sold for undervalue or a pound or all this nonsense, completely misunderstands the commercial reason of that site.”
What point he is making here is obscure, given that the acquisition of the HV networks provides the company with an income stream. The mayor went on to explain that many of the substations require updating (but omitting to mention that in 2024 STDC completed construction of one at South Bank, as shown on p27 of this document). The same document anticipates expenditure in 2025/6 on “Steel House Park and Ride HV requirements”.
We recall that the argument of assets on the Teesworks site having negative value is one that the mayor has used before. In 2022, in an interview with the Northern Echo, Houchen defended giving the developers, Corney and Musgrave, a 90% shareholding in the Teesworks site on the grounds that “this site is still worth a negative £200 million”. The developers were to help fund the regeneration. By the time of the Tees Valley Review, however, there was still no sign of them investing any money at all in the project.
Furthermore, in the course of his response the mayor repeatedly named the company Energy North West ENW), referring to it as “our joint venture partners”. On fact, however, ENW holds only 50% of the shares in Steel River Power, the other 50% being held by Teesworks Ltd, i.e. the developers Corney and Musgrave (with STDC being entitled to 5% dividend on the profits of Steel River Power through its shareholding in Teesworks Ltd).
The handing of remarkably lucrative contracts to the developers, Corney and Musgrave, was discussed at some length in the Tees Valley Review (especially section 19), and the authors questioned whether the public interest was well served by them. The question about the acquisition of the HV network was intended to elicit from the mayor a defence of how the public interest was served by it. No such defence was forthcoming.
Shortly afterwards, when asked by another member of the audience about security for the freeport being handled by a company whose owner has a substantial debt to HMRC, and whose most senior employee has a conviction not yet spent for drug trafficking, the mayor brushed it off, asserting, we believe falsely, that neither allegation was true.
Meanwhile, unbeknown to those of us sitting near the front of the auditorium, there was an altercation going on at the back where one of the numerous security staff approached an audience member who was filming the event on her mobile phone and demanded that she stop filming. Prior to the meeting, all attendees were sent a long list of instructions and draconian warnings about what they were allowed and not allowed to do. Filming the event was not among them. However, it appears that this was not conveyed to security staff. The audience member did not immediately capitulate, however, and instead asked to see the officer’s ID. The officer refused to comply, which he was not entitled to do.
So, we hope that in preparation for subsequent events where the public is invited to meet the mayor, the powers that be not only brief security staff properly about what is expected of the audience but also ensure that they are aware of their statutory responsibilities. It can then be left to the public in attendance to try to ensure that the mayor answers the questions.