It is a truth universally acknowledged: Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen has turbo-charged the Tees Valley over the last seven years, creating tens of thousands of jobs and transforming Teesside into the economic powerhouse of the UK. 

But only if you listen to Ben Houchen

But what if this isn’t true? What if the whole thing is a 100% myth created by the unrelenting propaganda operation of the Houchen political machine? The wealthiest political campaign in the country, backed by obscure donors, and a docile media apparatus dominated by the Conservative party? Well, the it worked, and got Ben Houchen re-elected, but the statistics show otherwise.

That darned graph

On 20 March 2024, just weeks before the mayoral election on 2 May, Rob Parsons of the Northern Agenda and David Dubas-Fisher, senior data analyst at Reach PLC, teamed up with the Teesside Gazette to hand Ben Houchen a major propaganda coup. Their story, including a wildly inaccurate graph supplied by Ben Houchen, was headlined “We asked experts if Tees Valley’s jobs growth really is outstripping the rest of UK”. The graph indicated a sudden spike in job growth in the Tees Valley, outstripping both the North East of England and Great Britain. The source of the figures was NOMIS, a service provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Dubas-Fisher had taken a look himself “and found a similar picture to that being painted by Lord Houchen.”

Schoolboy error

A senior data analyst at Reach PLC wouldn’t rely on just one month’s data, without reference to previous trends, would he? That’s breaking the first rule of Statistics 101. And what of his stats expert, Emeritus Professor Alan Townsend? Surely he wouldn’t make the same basic error of relying on one reading of the notoriously volatile Labour Force Survey (LFS)? Let’s take a look:

A professor writes

In the Gazette article, Professor Townsend kindly reminded us that the spike in the numbers in the LFS was “of a kind which ONS warns us about”, but then immediately contradicted himself by welcoming the spike, and trying to explain it. He says: “the increase of the last recorded year lies in a credible increase of employment among white collar females” and “does not necessarily mean that the figures are faulty. Indeed, about half the increase occurred in Darlington and Hartlepool together” which “could partially be explained by recruiting at the government’s Darlington Economic Campus over this period.” He doesn’t seem to realize that unlike Darlington, Hartlepool doesn’t have an economic campus, but he’s correct that the ONS have warned against relying on one set of LFS data, particularly during the period covered by Houchen’s graph.

This doesn’t pass the smell test…

Townsend (and David Dubas-Fisher) shouldn’t have been so hasty. The LFS indicated that, between June and September 2023, female employment in Darlington leapt from 25,000 to 26,900. But, by March 2024, the number of females employed had dropped precipitously to 24,700. In Hartlepool, a jump of 900 female employees between June and September was followed by an identical drop three months later, and another fall of 100 in the quarter after that. There has been no female jobs boom in Darlington or Hartlepool. The LFS, as Townsend himself had warned, had created an anomaly, and the success was an illusion. And the ONS has got questions to answer too. Who selected the company surveys that grossly exaggerated job creation in Darlington and Hartlepool?  And, when the LFS was complete, why didn’t the ONS interrogate the data that produced such clear statistical outliers in two different local authorities?

Crunching the numbers

Instead of taking a snapshot of the statistics from one time period, I have made some comparisons between the creation of the Tees Valley Combined Authority in May 2017 and the present day:

Seven years bad luck?

Despite almost daily press releases and photo opportunities, showcasing the latest blockbuster £1 billion project bringing tens of thousands of jobs, in reality, the dial just hasn’t moved.  An analysis of NOMIS/ONS data confirms it. Since Ben Houchen came to power, just 1,400 more people have moved into employment in the Tees Valley, taking the total number from 292,900 to 294,300, a statistically insignificant 0.48% increase. The North East of England has outperformed the Tees Valley, with a 1.34% increase. And the UK has outperformed them both with an increase of 3.46%. If you listened to the mayor, particularly during his re-election campaign from January to May 2024, you would have seen and heard the exact opposite, particularly the oft-parroted refrain of 20,000 new highly-skilled high-paid manufacturing jobs at the former Redcar steelworks site alone. Ben Houchen has created zero manufacturing jobs in the Tees Valley to date, and those 20,000 jobs won’t ever exist.

A rising tide lifts all boats

And this booming Teesside economy would tackle that scourge of modern Western economies, the low labour force participation rate, wouldn’t it?. But, as with the jobs metric, no inroads have been made here either. In terms of the percentage of the population who are economically active, Darlington and Redcar/Cleveland have done okay. However, the two largest local authorities, Middlesbrough and Stockton-on-Tees, have gone backwards. The Tees Valley, along with the wider North East of England, and Great Britain as a whole, is making no progress in improving labour force participation. 

Claimant count

Statistical analysis of unemployment data, using the preferred metric of the claimant count, is difficult during the changeover period to full Universal Credit service. But the Tees Valley and the North East of England appear to have bucked the trend here, with only small increases in the claimant count, as opposed to a larger increase in Great Britain as a whole. Hartlepool has actually reduced its claimant count over the past seven years, with a corresponding 2,900 increase in jobs. But the other four local authorities combined have lost 1,500 jobs over the same time period. So, the rollout of full Universal Credit service in the Tees Valley seems to be creating a greater pool of employable people, but isn’t finding jobs for them.

How can the Teesside media bust the Houchen jobs myth?

Well, assuming they wish to, there is a simple step that journalists can take. Just don’t accept press releases and photo opportunities from Ben Houchen and the TVCA at face value. A useful step forward occurred on 13 August, when Houchen announced a ‘profit’ of £309,000 at Teesside Airport for the financial year to March 2024. But Gareth Lightfoot of the Local Democracy Service, BBC Look North, and Tees Valley Monitor didn’t fall for the same trick that the Teesside Gazette, Northern Echo and ITV Tyne Tees did.  They pushed back until the TVCA confirmed that the ‘profit’ was, in fact, a £3 million loss. We need more of this.

Calling out lies

Prior to the May election, Ben Houchen promised to ‘bring steelmaking back to Teesside’ by building an Electric Arc Furnace (EAF).  But the Teesside EAF is third in the queue now, as Keir Starmer is in advanced negotiations with TATA and Jingye to build EAFs at Port Talbot and Scunthorpe respectively. For once, Houchen’s boosters at the Gazette and Northern Echo could go back to him and ask why he made a promise that he couldn’t hope to deliver. Perhaps their reporters will also pause for thought the next time that the TVCA runs yet another press release about hundreds of jobs at the Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility (TV ERF), and ask the TVCA why this was never a serious proposition. 

Taking out the trash

If it had been, it wouldn’t have taken five years after the announcement of the project to discover that the site doesn’t have an adequate connection to the National Grid.  The project is now being re-tendered, and won’t be complete until 2029 at the earliest, ten years after it was first promised. And Teesside’s waste will continue to be burned in Billingham. Five years of promises have meant nothing, but remember it’s always Jam Tomorrow in Teesside. 

Further Reading

NOMIS Labour Market Profile – Darlington

NOMIS Labour Market Profile – Hartlepool

NOMIS Labour Market Profile – Middlesbrough

NOMIS Labour Market Profile – Redcar and Cleveland

NOMIS Labour Market Profile – Stockton-on-Tees

NOMIS Labour Market Profile – North East

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