How times change:

APPG North East

is launched



Scott Hunter

1 October 2023

How times change. Yesterday, The Guardian reported that Conservative MPs from the Northern Research Group are demanding that a minister for the North be appointed, with a seat in cabinet. Twenty years ago this would have been unthinkable. But their initiative is not unique – on 12 September, the All Party Parliamentary Group North East was launched.

An advocacy group for the North East is something that many in this region might have welcomed had they known about it. Launched in the House of Commons, at a reasonably well-attended meeting co-chaired by Kate Osborne MP and Lord Beith, and featuring presentations from two of the group’s sponsors, Ben Maxwell for Go North East and Craig Gaskell for Teesside University.  Other attendees were stakeholders – representatives of charities, universities, local authorities, business, and more (and us). Absent were most of the region’s MPs, who were inexplicably delayed by some commotion in the chamber. Those who did attend also had to leave early. Which was unfortunate, but not unsurmountable.

Kate Osborne , in her opening statement, explained that the purpose of the APPG was to create a cross-party consensus on the priorities for the North East in terms of inward investment, education, housing transport and more. It was then left to the principal speakers and others to make their pitch for what those priorities should be.

Ben Maxwell then spoke about issues around improving transport connectivity within the region, while Craig Gaskell added to that with digital connectivity, the problem of the skills deficit in the workforce and the importance of collaboration. Other contributors from the floor added concerns about stemming the brain drain, and of challenging health inequality. Another recalled the success of One North East in previous years in promoting at least some of the aims that people were bringing to the meeting. The need for collaboration was one of the themes that many contributors spoke of (nice, but on the surface of it, a bit vague, to be honest).

A more disturbing statement came for Baroness Hilary Armstrong, chair of the North East Poverty Strategy Commission, who pointed out that in 2010 the prevalence of poverty in the North East was in line with the national average. Now, it tops that dismal league table.

But how can an APPG help to improve that situation? Come to that, what is an APPG anyway?

All Party Parliamentary Groups are very popular. The parliamentary register (which goes back as far as 2016) lists hundreds, representing a wide range of special interests. Seven, including the North East, have a regional focus. These have no legislative role and obtain no funding from the public purse. All are disbanded when a general election is called, to be reconstructed as the need arises when a new government is installed. Their existence appears, therefore, to be somewhat ephemeral; the reason for their popularity not immediately apparent. Perhaps it’s just the fact that that they allow MPs to conduct business in a rational manner away from the clamour of the Commons chamber. It also provides a point of contact between them and stakeholders, that otherwise might be difficult to achieve.

Even the fact that these groups are allocated no funding can have a positive impact. Inject direct funding to such a group and participants immediately have something to squabble about. So long as the group is focused purely on advocacy, cross-party co-operation is a realistic possibility. And so long as no one is being paid, access can remain fairly open. And groups of MPs acting in concert can constitute a powerful lobby in Parliament (as the various factions inside the Conservative Party have shown in recent years, the NRG among them).

It is reasonable to conclude that this group will have a positive, if possibly limited, impact on the future development of the region. But it is well to remember that other things are happening. One of these is the extension of the North of Tyne Combined Authority to include Gateshead, Wearside and County Durham, due to be launched in 2024.

North of Tyne mayor, Jamie Driscoll provided an example of the kinds of challenges the region (or, Tyne and Wear at least) faces. He pointed out that the Tyne and Wear Metro system is in urgent need of investment, but while the network serves both north and south sides of the Tyne, the North of Tyne authority has jurisdiction only over the northern part of it. It means that coordinating necessary infrastructure planning is unduly difficult. This situation will be alleviated, however, when the new North East Combined Authority is established.

The imminent creation of a new mayoral authority is the background to another key issue facing the North East, which is the matter of governance. At present, the region has two combined authorities – North of Tyne and Tees Valley, and a large area in between that has none. Governance is patchwork of different types of authority, which makes strategic planning for the region as a whole more difficult than it need  be.

We thought it curious that there had been no mention of governance in the opening statement from the chair, but when questioned the response was encouraging. Lord Beith indicated that his initial interest in forming the APPG was precisely because of issues around devolution. He went on to point out that, while it was entirely proper for the group to treat devolution as one of its priorities, it was still possible and desirable to tackle other issues that were being raised without waiting for the matter of governance to be finally resolved.

Look who's missing ...

So far so good, but all the while there was an elephant in the room. And that elephant was sitting in Ben Houchen’s chair.

At the start of the meeting Kate Osborne had read out a list of apologies, but Houchen’s name was not among them. So, afterwards, we asked why not. We were informed that he had been invited but had not replied. But so what?

Houchen, it seems, can be very shy of participating in any forum beyond the Tees Valley. In March this year the Northern Echo reported that, despite being on the board of Transport for the North (TfN) for five years, he had never attended any meetings. When criticized for this, Houchen branded the lobby group ‘a talking shop’. He is no longer a board member, his place being taken by Cllr Stephen Harker, leader of Darlington Council.

Despite his indifference to TfN, he has been a vocal critic of HS2, on the grounds that it will do nothing to improve connectivity in the North East. He has criticized it again this week (as reported in the Daily Express) Yet he appears to be oblivious to the fact that one of the places where his opinion could lead to a change in policy is in groups like TfN.

Houchen has not made any statement about his non-participation in the launch of the APPG, so it is unclear whether he considers it ‘a talking shop’ as well (given that it includes members of the House of Lords in its ranks). Yet for people living in the Tees Valley there are issues that need to be addressed at a wider regional level, transport being one of them. But Houchen is no advocate. Yelling his opinion at Express readers is not how it’s done.

Lobbying, for Houchen, is continued in a different environment, as Politics Home reported in 2021:

“Houchen happily says that the Tees Valley is getting more than any other region from the government on levelling up – however he attributes this to his own strong political relationship with No 10 and other government ministers …”



And therein lies the problem. Houchen relies entirely on his relationship with figures in government to achieve his ambitions. Figures in a zombie government that will almost undoubtedly be routed in the 2024 general election. At which point Houchen becomes powerless, if, in fact, he is still in office at that point.  Those ‘strong political relationships’ will simply no longer be there.

There are those in this region who believe that the Tees Valley Combined Authority under Houchen’s leadership is already hopelessly dysfunctional, where he leads an organisation staffed only with loyalists, where government oversight of how the money is being spent is remarkably light-touch, where decisions are made behind closed doors and there is a code of secrecy, as Tees Valley Monitor has reported on numerous occasions in the past three years.

Houchen’s is a regime that puts reputation before public service. Image management is always the top priority. Unfortunate for him that those who have chosen to look beyond that image have found evidence of extensive misuse of public money.

But to be fair to Houchen, he works with the hand he was dealt. When the government started to roll out its programme of mayoral authorities, it did so with a studied lack of uniformity. Different authorities have different devolved powers; oversight is ad hoc – in January this year Michael Gove  announced that two mayoral authorities would be henceforth be scrutinised by a panel of local MPs. Tees Valley was not one of those two. Funding is largely on a cap-in-hand basis. There is considerable variation in the size of different authorities, with Tees Valley being the smallest. And some areas have such authorities while others do not.

In short, English devolution is a tangled mess. The changes about to come into force in the North East may improve that situation, but will not resolve it. To begin to resolve the issues, an incoming government must put the funding of devolved authorities on a surer footing and do away with the pork-barrelling that has characterised the present government’s approach to regional authorities.

But the Tees Valley faces another problem, which is that, come the arrival of the new North East authority, the entire region will be served by one of two authorities, where the North East authority is one of the largest, serving a population of over 2 million, and the Tees Valley with a population of under 700,000. The smallest, and therefore inevitably, the one with least bargaining power.

For the region to be arbitrarily divided into two authorities is unsatisfactory in itself, but all the more so given the imbalance between them. Would the people of Tees Valley be better served if these were merged into one? It’s an issue that the new APPG needs to explore sooner rather than later.  

But for the time being, there is a more immediate concern, which is that, should consensus emerge about the priorities for the North East, they will be arrived at without the participation of Ben Houchen. Will the Tees Valley’s interests fall victim to his indifference?