Marine die-off:

 How North East

 Fishers got their

 Brexit Dividend

Redcar Blast Furnace, April 2023

Scott Hunter

30 June 2023

Last Friday was the Brexit referendum’s seventh birthday, and the result, when announced, heralded the Great Disappearance, when the architects of the Leave campaign disappeared for the entire weekend without further comment on the outcome or their plans for the future.  POLITICO marked the occasion with a lengthy article on the fate of Britain’s fishing industry: Hook, line and sinker: How Brexit betrayed the UK fishing industry. Now, Tees Valley Monitor, in turn, looks at the fate of North East fishers and how the dearth of practical solutions on how to deliver Brexit led eventually to the widespread marine die-off that has all but destroyed their industry.

The Politico report charts how the government has done little to fulfil the aspirations of the group that became icons of the Brexit campaign in 2016 - restrictions on catches, increasing difficulty for fishers in accessing European markets, a top-down approach to policy. 

Their support for Brexit won the fishing industry the temporary friendship of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, but opprobrium elsewhere. For those opposed to Brexit, who might condemn the fishers for their actions, we should point out that they had what others who rallied to the Brexit cause did not have, which was a genuine grievance against the EU. Lose-lose, then.

What the Politico article doesn’t do, perhaps wisely, is include any discussion of the fate of fishers exploiting the inshore waters around Teesside and North Yorkshire. Wisely, because what happened here was unique, but a close connection to Brexit also runs through it. Specifically, the relationship between the crustacean die-off that began in the autumn of 2021 and the development of the Tees freeport. 

Destruction of Inshore Fishing in and around Teesside

The inshore fishing industry around Tees Bay and beyond has been all but destroyed since that time. Through 2022, crab stocks did not recover, and both fishers and merchants complained that lobster caught alive were dying soon after. Further North, Hartlepool fishers observed that prawn stocks vanished from the waters in which they normally operated, and kale beds were destroyed. 

Investigation by the Environment Agency into the original incident in 2021 had quickly uncovered high levels of pyridine in affected crab, a chemical to be found in abundance on the industrial land on the South Bank of the Tees. That pollution originating in or around the Tees Estuary was the cause of the die-off was, however, vehemently denied by Defra as well as Tees Valley mayor, Ben Houchen and local Conservative MPs.

When Defra was forced to set up an independent panel in November 2022 to investigate the evidence for competing explanations for the die-off it ensured that the South Tees Development Corporation site was not subject to investigation. Neither was the estuary and its toxic sediment.

Was the site being shielded because it had been allocated freeport status by the Government? 

It was in the months following the 2016 referendum that phrases like “buccaneering, free-trade loving Global Britain” started to be bandied about. But, initially at least, there was little detail of how this was to be realised. It wasn’t until November 2016 that the Centre for Policy Studies published Rishi Sunak’s paper proposing free ports as a route to post-Brexit economic growth:

“Brexit will provide the UK with new economic freedom, and the Government should take the opportunity to create Free Ports across the nation. Free Ports will simultaneously: increase manufacturing output, create employment regionally where it is most needed, and promote trade. Using Free Ports to drive economic growth will also re-connect Britain with its proud maritime history as a trading nation and act as a beacon of British values, signalling the country’s openness to the world.”

Given that it was only four years since the government had phased out an earlier generation of free ports, the enthusiasm with which this less-than-original idea was welcomed by the right-wing press may come as something of a surprise. But then, under the watchful eye of the European Union, the earlier free ports just weren’t very buccaneering.

Whether or not free ports are an engine of economic growth may be in dispute, but it wasn’t long before the idea reached Teesside. And Teesside rapidly acquired a pivotal role in the project. Thus the Northern Echo reported in August 2019:

“THE Government will use a North-East port as a base to announce a new advisory panel to look into the establishment of up to 10 Freeports across the country.”

This was a week after it quoted Ben Houchen, saying,

“Only a few weeks ago Boris announced in Darlington that he backed my Freeport policy and that Teesside could get a Freeport post Brexit.”

Unsurprisingly, in the smoke and mirrors of Conservative politics, Houchen presents, about a year later, a video which appears to be a sales pitch to an undecided Johnson to allocate freeport status to Teesside: Ben Houchen: Freeports are a key priority for the North.

One interesting feature of this piece is that it claims that the freeport could generate 32,00 jobs, the highest estimate we’ve seen. Another is the unforgettable line that the freeport would generate “… thousands of proper manufacturing jobs, the skilled roles people want, as well as billions of pounds of economic activity, all delivered without costing the treasury, or indeed the taxpayer, a penny.” This is something that committee investigating Teesworks for corruption probably need to learn more about.

One aspect of this that has received little consideration in discussion of the freeport project is just how unlikely a candidate the site on the South Bank of the Tees is. Of the freeport locations around the country none require quite the amount of preparation that Teesside does. In 2019 the land had the highest tier COMAH status (control of major accident hazards) on account of the large number of decaying industrial structures there, that were in need of constant maintenance. All of the land is contaminated to some degree, in places very significantly, and to considerable depth. At that point no remediation work had been carried out.  This appeared to be a site it would take years to prepare for use. And in 2019, the South Tees Development Corporation didn’t even own the whole site. It didn’t take full ownership until 2020.

And this wasn’t all. The estuary is the most polluted channel in the UK and needed to be extensively dredged as part of the redevelopment of the site. But the freeport status came with its own timetable, and demolition, land remediation and construction of the new South Bank Quay had to fit into a new, tight schedule.

Did this result in a lapse in safety standards for workers on the site, in a light touch oversight by the Environment Agency of remediation and demolition work? Information has been hard to come by, but a little evidence comes to light from time to time.

One recent visitor to the site observed to Tees Valley Monitor that there is a discrepancy in health and safety standards between Teesworks and the nearby Wilton site. At Wilton, any visitor, in order to obtain a pass to enter the site, must watch a health and safety video at reception. Such a procedure is common at potentially hazardous sites. However, there is no corresponding health and safety requirement at Teesworks. Yet the hazards there are considerably greater, not only because of the presence of contaminated material, but also because of ongoing construction work. There have been at least three serious accidents on the site. In the first of these, in 2019, two workers were killed. The investigation into the cause of their deaths has not yet concluded.

The Politics Behind the Freeport

Two issues predominate in the politics that gave rise to the allocation of freeport status to Teesside – one is the election of a Conservative as the first mayor of the Tees Valley Combined Authority, the other is so-called ‘levelling up’.

Houchen is a creature of the age of insurgency. In December 2016 Conservative Home, when announcing his candidacy, barely dared to hope that he might succeed:

“Of course it is not the easiest territory for us. But after this year who is going to be too emphatic about predicting any election result?”

Houchen then pulled off an election victory that would have been unthinkable even twelve months earlier. This put the Tees Valley firmly on the Conservative’s map, its significance growing as Houchen’s popularity became increasingly evident. That it was well beyond traditional Conservative heartlands was also significant.

Which is where levelling up comes into the picture. It is well to remember that at the time of Houchen’s 2017 election, ‘levelling up’ had not been invented. So, for example, when, in 2018, the Department of Transport allocated a fund to devolved authorities to improve local transport infrastructure it did so on a per capita basis. This meant that well-heeled Cambridgeshire and Peterborough received a larger share of the pot than the Tees Valley.

Furthermore, the South Tees Development Corporation was operating on a shoestring budget. Thus, when a compulsory purchase order for the steelworks site was made, its owners made the legitimate objection that the Corporation could not afford to pay the market value for the land.

That changed after the 2019 election when the levelling up agenda began in earnest. A great deal more money started to flow into the region, or rather into the Tees Valley Authority’s coffers. But by this time, Houchen had created a joint venture partnership between two local property developers and the Development Corporation. The developers invested no money in the venture but started to earn a great deal from it. A development to which the relevant government departments – BEIS and DLUHC – remained curiously indifferent.

So, what did Johnson’s government stand to gain from the special treatment accorded to the authority run by Houchen? The answer is, quite simply, propaganda. Teesworks and the Tees freeport, closed off to the outside world, can be presented as an example of successful levelling up. Michael Gove has been the cheerleader for this, using the myth even in the introduction to his 2022 White Paper on Levelling Up.

Few are in a position to challenge Gove’s sales pitch. Teesside, for most of England’s Tories, remains a place in the Land of Far, Far Away. In order to gain a true impression of what is going on at the site, any member of the public requires both perseverance and wellingtons. Houchen meanwhile feeds the electorate news of massive, and imminent, job creation. Here he is an op-ed in The Times:

“In Teesside, Darlington and Hartlepool, 2022 has started out with a bang. We’re securing investment, delivering jobs and creating the growth that local people want to see. We’re preparing local workers for the thousands of good-quality, well-paid jobs that are coming to my region thanks to the Teesside freeport, the largest and first in the UK.”

All carefully set in the present continuous. Language matters when you’re trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes.

Teesworks has become a symbol of success for the government, which is what, in recent years, has given it its potency. Now, of course, the mask is slipping, with Houchen accused of financial impropriety at Teesworks, and the government forced to abandon its make-believe world and confront realities in this one.

For many of the fishers, however, there has been no respite. An indigenous industry left to work out for itself how to deal with this crisis (and in this region the fishers are independent. No supertrawlers here). There is no denying that fishing is not a major contributor to GDP in this region, but there is something egregious about allowing a home-grown industry to atrophy, whose demise is treated by the powers that be as an acceptable level of collateral damage in the pursuit of the buccaneering economics of England’s Libertarians.