BEN Houchen, Conservative candidate to become mayor of the Tees Valley, has dropped a clanger by attempting to put a positive spin on the Government’s handling of the SSI steel crisis and its aftermath.

Ministers’ efforts to prevent the closure of SSI Redcar were pitiful and they hardly covered themselves in glory once the blast furnace was switched off. 

So far they have done nothing to tackle the problem of what will be done with the derelict site. The Government is desperate to wash its hands of the problem and if he becomes mayor Mr Houchen will be expected to help lead regeneration efforts with a miniscule budget.

Neither David Cameron - who vowed to do all he could to save the Redcar works - nor the then chancellor George Osborne ever took the time to visit the Redcar works at any point. Strange when you consider that its benefit to the North-East economy was colossal. SSI kept more than 3,000 people in work and supported about 6,000 supplier jobs – contributing a whopping seven per cent to the total value of North-East exports. 

After the plant's closure business minister Anna Soubry claimed she was “shocked” to discover the extent of SSI’s financial plight. But how could the Government have been unaware of the firm’s woes when SSI’s published accounts laid bare how much it was struggling, and the local council had made clear it was owed millions in unpaid rates? This was either gross incompetence or negligence (perhaps both) by a Government that was content to see Redcar become victim of the meltdown in the global steel market but bent over backwards to save banking jobs after the financial crash. 

Mr Houchen believes what the Government did to support the local community rocked by the end of 170-years of iron and steelmaking should become a blueprint of how to rescue an area. The fact is that the first thing the Government did following the SSI closure was to try and spin a story to save its own embarrassment, saying it had allocated £80m towards a crisis fund when in fact £30m of that were the statutory redundancy payments it was obliged to meet.

It is true to say that the Tees Valley task force did valuable work in helping former SSI workers find training and jobs. But it was at times painfully slow to react, ex-steel workers were left waiting months to get onto courses, and had a battle to access benefits they were due. Skilled workers and apprentices were told to take any job going or see their benefits cut.

Redcar is now a former steel town. Some former workers have found good jobs, but many have not and the stress on them and their families has been huge and the impact on the local economy devastating. 

At an early task force meeting, it transpired that no-one had a comprehensive list of all those people who had been affected by the closure of SSI.

In the year after the steelworks was shut Redcar and Cleveland Mind recorded a 91 per cent increase in mental health referrals.

Mr Houchen is horribly misguided if he thinks this was a model for how to handle an industrial crisis.