Houchen in Denial

over GE Renewables Crisis

The Dorman Long Tower, demolished to make way for the GE Renewables factory. Allegedly.

Scott Hunter

17 December 2021; 9.40

Yesterday Tees Valley Monitor published a report stating that GE Renewables had drawn back from signing the leasing agreement on their planned factory on Teesside. This is a major setback for the STDC programme and for economic regeneration in this region. That factory promised the creation of 750 jobs. Those jobs are now on hold. 

Our report was based on an article that appeared in the trade magazine reNEWS (where ‘re’ stands for renewable energy and reNEWS is a respected trade paper for the renewables industry). Having produced a report using the information contained there, we emailed Tees Valley mayor, Ben Houchen, for comment. We received none.

Instead, in the course of the evening, as some of our readers started to ask questions on Houchen’s Facebook page, Tees Valley Monitor was the subject of a series of derogatory and highly inaccurate statements on Houchen’s  Facebook as well as that of Redcar MP, Jacob Young.   We were referred to obliquely as ‘Labour Party propaganda pages’ and explicitly as ‘a small group of people committed to seeing our area fail’. 



Now believe it or not, we at Tees Valley Monitor can be on the receiving end of this kind of vitriol and still sleep easy in our beds. But there is an issue here. The crisis at GE Renewables was already known to Houchen. That much is clear from the reNEWS article. Yet the Facebook statements deny it. “I can confirm that GE is completely committed to coming to Teesside and we continue to work with them to finalise legal agreements and factory building specifications,” the page says at one point.

Put bluntly, while Houchen knows what has been happening, the people who ghost for him on Facebook apparently don’t.   In fact, Houchen’s ghost writers are programmed to push a never ending success story. Anything that interferes with that is to be rudely dismissed. At one point the page describes our report as ‘conspiracy theory’:

This comment has since been deleted, and the person blocked to whom this is the response.

The problem here is that if what Tees Valley Monitor is being accused of disseminating conspiracy theory, so, by association, is reNEWS.

Houchen has briefed his ghost writers (or, goons, as we call them at TVM) to treat all critical comment as Labour propaganda and respond accordingly. This unfortunately does not work well as a means of addressing inquiries in the public interest that are based on information from accredited sources. Inquiries like ours. Using information from sources like reNEWS. Houchen’s ghost writers simply don’t have the knowledge or sense to deal with that. The Facebook comment above is puerile. Houchen himself did not write it, but the person who did is employed by him to write in his name.



The issue of the retreat of GE is one that has serious implications for this region. It demands a grown-up response. It demands a grown-up response from the real Ben Houchen. A response that notices that the report issued by Tees Valley Monitor does not criticise the mayor. He is not responsible for the erstwhile failure of GE to secure enough contracts to warrant starting work on the factory. But he is expected to show leadership and make clear to the public how he is dealing with this setback. A simple denial of the facts will not do.