Public private partnership

[The demolition of the blast furnace and hearth at Redcar Steelworks to make way for the development of Teesworks, a flagship project for the governing Conservatives © David Forster/Alamy]

Once upon a time, when this country was big into steel, there was a state of the art facility on the River Tees at a place called Redcar. Not any more, so we are left with a large brownfield site. The idea might be to make it into a freeport, one of those places where you don't pay tax and the writ of woke bureaucrats does not run. Broadband connections to financial and legal services in places like the British Virgin Islands.

So our government spends hundreds of millions clearing up the site and then makes a present of it to a small group of local businessmen who fly under the flag of something called Teesworks, to be found at reference 2. With the promise of lots of tax breaks to come.

At least this is my rather superficial reading of reference 1. Hopefully the story is a bit more complicated than that.

One angle, not touched at reference 1, is proximity. If you bribe or otherwise cut a deal with a local businessman, he is apt to want to strut about in your golf club, which might annoy. Whereas if you do the same thing with some far eastern corporation - say Mitsubishi or Huawei - you are more likely to be dealing with a principal rather than a commission taker. All grist to the mill for the competition bureaucrats.

PS: seeing Hartlepool to the north, I seem to remember that my father once used to pull teeth there, before the second world war - and being profoundly shocked by how few teeth some of the children there had. He also used to wangle rides on fishing boats heading out into the North Sea, the idea being that he paid for his ride with his conversation.

References

Reference 1: Taxpayer support for controversial Teesworks project set to hit £650mn: Inquiry into governance of regeneration initiative is expected to report back this month - Jennifer Williams, Financial Times - 2023.

Reference 2: https://www.teesworks.co.uk/.