In the second of a series of profiles of candidates for Tees Valley mayor, Chris Lloyd puts the spotlight on Labour candidate Sue Jeffrey

FIVE months into Sue Jeffrey’s tenure as Redcar council leader, the steelworks closed, throwing more than 2,000 people out of work immediately and then, like dominoes, knocking down hundreds more as the supply chain collapsed.

“It was absolutely devastating,” says Ms Jeffrey, who is Labour’s candidate to become Tees Valley mayor. “My worst point was when, within weeks, we held a jobs fair. There was space in the room for 1,000 people and it was full, completely full, with ex-steelworkers, men with their families just wandering around, looking at the various stalls, trying to find what they were going to do with their lives.

“It was heart-breaking to see all those people, all that talent, thrown on to the scraphead – we had to get them, our people, back into work.”

To do that, the Government set up a £80m taskforce, much of which was administered by Ms Jeffrey's council and the combined authority, and it worked, in that 90 per cent are now off job-seeking benefits. “The telling statistic isn’t how many people are back in work but that the average wage in Redcar has fallen from one of the highest in the North-East to one of the lowest,” she says. “The SSI jobs were high value, and the issue for the Tees Valley is how we replace them with the same value jobs.”

The Northern Echo: Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council's leader Sue Jeffrey

LABOUR'S CANDIDATE: Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council's leader Sue Jeffrey

So Ms Jeffrey’s pitch to become the Tees Valley’s first mayor revolves around the need to invest in local entrepreneurs, and also in the skills that their future employees will need to have.

She was born in Somerset but has lived in South Bank for 38 years since coming to do social studies at the former Teesside Polytechnic, where she met her husband and then concentrated on raising their son. “I got into politics by mistake,” she says. “I’m a lifelong member of the Labour Party but wasn’t really active until there was some activity in South Bank around housing in 1987.” Her little smile hints that there was more to this than just “some activity”, as the local Labour leader, Arthur Seed, was accused of trying to secretly privatise the council’s housing. He was rumbled by a group he regarded as the “polytrots”, because of their connection to Ms Jeffrey’s alma marter. To cut a long story short, she says: “He ended up standing down as leader and resigning from the Labour Party, and I ended up standing for his seat on Langbaurgh council.”

She then came to specialise in housing, working at Teesdale and Middlesbrough councils before becoming director of policy of the Yorkshire and Humber regional assembly for ten years. She was the chief executive of the North-East equivalent for the last year of its life, which allowed her to return to her local council in 2009. By 2015, she was leader and so one of those who seized the Government’s offer of devolved power for city-regions.

“It is about us coming out of the shadow of what was the North-East, an arrangement that left us quite disadvantaged,” says Ms Jeffrey, who has already stood down as Labour leader on the Redcar & Cleveland council to campaign, and if elected will have to stand down as council leader. “We are in the first wave, with places like Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, and that has got to give us a distinct advantage and an important seat at the table.

“It gives us a chance to be leading from the front for a change, rather than following behind, and for us to say here we are, we are successful, we have potential and we are ready to get on with the next challenge.”