Middlesbrough mayor responds to Rishi Sunak's comments

Ahead of the Local Government Finance Settlement being published on Tuesday, the Prime Minister was asked on a visit to Yarm about difficulties faced by many councils around the country as they fight to balance the books.

There are growing fears about the number potentially being forced to issue a section 114 notice which effectively declares a council bankrupt.

It comes amid calls from local Tory politicians for Middlesbrough Council to be brought under government control “before matters deteriorate further”. The Prime Minister, visiting the Strickland and Holt coffee shop on the high street, said blame rested on the shoulders of the Labour-run local authority.

“These are the facts,” he said. “We have put record funding in to local areas over the past year.

Middlesbrough Mayor Chris Cooke (Image: LDR)

“I did that shortly after becoming prime minister. On average, councils are having about ten per cent more money to spend this year than they had the year before,” he said.

“Middlesbrough Council has even more than that, more than the national average. And unfortunately this is just another example of a Labour-run council that is doing a bad job for its residents, mismanaging its finances.”

Middlesbrough Council was run by an Independent-Conservative administration until May when Labour took power. Politicians from all sides have repeatedly blamed each other for the council’s ongoing financial woes.

Responding to Mr Sunak’s comments, Middlesbrough Mayor Chris Cooke said: “The people of Middlesbrough are not daft, they know where these problems started and that there is a lot to be put right. We are getting on with that job in an open and transparent way.”

As reported, Tees Valley Mayor, Ben Houchen, MP for Middlesbrough and East Cleveland, Simon Clarke, and four Conservative councillors wrote to Simon Hoare, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government, requesting commissioners step in and take over control. Mayor of Middlesbrough, Chris Cooke, said the letter to Mr Hoare was “littered with inaccuracies” and insisted it was “a call to abandon Middlesbrough”.

Andy McDonald, suspended Labour MP for Middlesbrough, said the move by the Tory politicians was “vindictive and wholly irresponsible”. He himself has now written to Mr Hoare in which he accused the Teesside Tories of attempting to “throw a recovering Middlesbrough Council under the bus as it works to right the wrongs of the last four years.”

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (Image: LDR)

“In essence, the problems that the current council are grappling with hark back to the regime under the previous Independent Mayor who was voted out of office just seven months ago,” he said. “Middlesbrough Council is cooperating fully with the Independent Improvement Advisory Board in the interest of the town to avoid the very measures Sir Simon and Lord Houchen are calling for.

“The threat of further intervention during the currency of the previous administration was a live one but sadly there was at that time a distinct lack of acknowledgement by that administration of the scale of the issues which are now being addressed head on. Colleagues on the Council sensibly decided that the best course of action would be to confront these challenges and settle a plan to deal with them and that is exactly what has been happening for many months.”

He said the request from Sir Clarke and Mr Houchen would result in “the obvious loss of local democracy” as well as “significant additional costs for a council which is already having to make multi-million pound savings and efficiencies.” He added: “It is noteworthy that the IIAB, appointed in October, are best placed to make the judgement around the question of whether at any stage commissioners should be brought in and they are yet to report.”

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Mayor Cooke also insisted the council is “still haunted by the decisions” taken by the previous Tory/Independent administration. “The Council’s auditors raised serious concerns around culture and governance in 2022,” he said.

“The Government issued the Council with a Best Value Notice in January 2023. Labour didn’t take control of the Council until May 2023. We inherited a critically low level of reserves.”

Mr Cooke also blamed the financial challenges faced by the local authority on “drastic” funding cuts to councils over the past 13 years and “sky-rocketing” inflation. He also said the Government “has done nothing about the massive and increasing cost of providing social care to vulnerable people.

“To deflect the blame without addressing these systemic issues is incredibly disappointing.”