Could the humble parmo be the new Champagne or Wensleydale?

Yorkshire’s devolution plans face an uncertain future, but next door to the region is a newly elected metro-mayor who is relishing the powers handed to his office by central government. Political Editor Rob Parsons went to meet him.

IT’S A culinary delicacy that’s synonymous with Teesside and wellknown to hungry punters across the North-East and parts of Yorkshire.

The newly elected Mayor of Tees Valley has gained plenty of publicity for his campaign to earn the parmo, made from flattened and breadcrumbed chicken breast or pork topped with béchamel sauce and cheese, protected status like that of the Cornish pasty or the Melton Mowbray pork pie.

Conservative Ben Houchen has told The Yorkshire Post that his application to the Government for Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status will be submitted early in 2018.

And, though the calorieladen snack is unlikely to be well-known among Whitehall mandarins, it turns out the civil servant likely to be dealing with the bid will be more familiar than most.

“The officials here have spoken to the officials in DEFRA and the guy who is assigned to look at protected status applications is from Thirsk,” he said.

“So apparently when the officers picked up the phone and had a brief conversation about ‘the mayor wants to do this, can we have a chat’, he knew exactly what the parmo was.

“He got it completely and also it was interesting because part of the conversation was that there aren’t any protected products in the North-East at the moment.

“I would like to think they should be quite keen to at least start to get some protected products up here.”

The mayor’s office has registered its interest and will be assessed in the new year, during which time local officials will aim to get more public support from producers, restaurants and takeaways.

If successful, the parmo would rank alongside products such as Champagne, Melton Mowbray pies, Wensleydale cheese and Parma ham.

The European scheme offers a stamp of authenticity to food produced or processed in a specific geographical area with features attributable to it.

IT LEFT him with three fractured vertebrae in his back and unable to do any physical activity for 18 months, but the painful accident sustained during a rugby match in 2002 may have been the making of the young Ben Houchen.

The Leeds Tykes academy player, who was part of the England RFU Development squad and dreamed of turning professional, was playing against rivals Bradford & Bingley when he suffered the injury.

“I was in a ruck, so I sat down on the floor and a big prop forward hit me and he had me in a headlock. It was an accident. I couldn’t twist so my back just kept on curling and (there were) big cracks,” he says.

The two weeks spent in hospital and the lengthy lay-off afterwards meant he did not recover sufficiently to resurrect his rugby career, and he was forced to reconsider what the future might hold for him.

Some 15 years on, he is speaking to The Yorkshire Post from his modern Tees Valley Combined Authority office building in Stockton-on-Tees, with a half-a-billion-pound budget at his disposal and representing a constituency of nearly 750,000 people.

As the directly elected Mayor of Tees Valley, he’s arguably one of the most powerful Conservative politicians outside London and, alongside fellow city mayors like Manchester’s Andy Burnham, London’s Sadiq Khan and Liverpool’s Steve Rotheram, has influence the like of which politicians over the border in Yorkshire can only dream.

At the age of 31, it’s been a remarkably quick ascent. His time at university preceded a five-year spell as a solicitor before starting his own business, sportswear firm BLK.

And in May this year, with less than three years under his belt as leader of Stockton Borough Council’s Conservatives, he pulled off a major shock by winning the mayoral race in an area considered to be a traditional Labour stronghold.

Reflecting on his current position from his desk overlooking the River Tees, he describes the experience so far as “absolutely brilliant”. “I have loved every single minute of it,” he said. “It’s been the best six or seven months of my life but also the most difficult and tiring.”

Under the deal agreed with the Government in 2015, the Tees Valley had a variety of economic growth powers handed over to its combined authority, along with the funding to support the plans, as part of the devolution agenda pushed by George Osborne.

Mr Houchen is, he reveals, now working on a second devolution deal with the Government that would see a host of new powers and funding transferred from Whitehall. One proposed power for his office would be to deal with planning applications for power stations rather than having to wait for approval from central government, a move he says would make the process more accountable.

It’s hard not to imagine civic leaders in Yorkshire, where a devolution deal for the whole region has yet to be agreed and a mayor will be elected in May for the Sheffield City Region with no powers after Barnsley and Doncaster withdrew their support, with anything other than envy.

And Mr Houchen has few words of comfort for those in his native Yorkshire hoping to secure a devolution deal for the whole of the region. Such a deal, he says, just isn’t going to happen.

“There is an economic sense to Redcar being linked with Stockton being linked with Darlington, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough”, he says. “In effect it is a single economic bloc, but in and of itself that is not enough; the second part you have got to have is a single community or a sense of a single identity across that area.”

He goes on: “The problem with somewhere like Yorkshire is that, with the best will in the world, people from Thirsk and Northallerton have absolutely no community connection with people from Bradford, Rotherham and Sheffield. The theory of a standalone Greater Yorkshire devolution deal is nice in theory but in practice it can never work.”

He hasn’t been afraid to pull up trees during his tenure so far, appointing a 23-year-old former Parliamentary assistant as his special advisor and publicly criticising the owners of Durham Tees Valley airport, an underperforming asset he says is in serious decline and that he wants to bring back to public ownership.

He hopes to bring his experience in the business world to bear on his new environment in the public sector, including plans in his first mayoral budget for an access-to-finance fund to bridge the gap in support he says many firms feel due to a lack of working capital from firsttier lenders. Some £200m has been released from the Teesside Pension Fund and conversations are ongoing with the UK Bond Agency about releasing municipal bonds to raise muchneeded money for infrastructure and economic growth.

Also in his budget will be a challenger fund, offering millions for whoever can come up with solutions to some of the region’s most intractable problems, such as the relatively poor performance of Teesside’s secondary schools compared to its primaries. “It is having the confidence that sometimes we will fail, but only through taking a risk will you take big strides forward,” he said. “If you play it safe, you will never go anywhere.”

BEN HOUCHEN is an unlikely politician – he’s the former Leeds Tykes rugby player who has drawn inspiration from the injuries inflicted 15 years ago that cut short a promising sporting career.

Now his chosen sport is politics after the 31-yearold, who retrained as a solicitor, was elected this May as the first metromayor of the Tees Valley as part of the area’s devolution settlement.

Yet, while Mr Houchen’s scepticism about One Yorkshire will not play well with all those, including voters in Doncaster and Barnsley, who contend that this county should move forward as a single entity, his new experiences leading from the front offer a number of lessons for this region’s decision-makers.

First, the Mayor of Tees Valley is entitled to attend the Government’s discussions on Brexit while this county has no such representation. How long does Yorkshire, which prides itself on being the biggest and most important county, intend to sit on the sidelines?

Second, issues pertaining to economic growth, inward investment and skills transcend artificial local authority boundaries and decisions should no longer be taken in isolation. For example, access to and from Hull’s ports matters to the whole region, whether it be trade, tourism or East Yorkshire’s burgeoning green energy sector.

Finally, Mr Houchen’s election proved that it is possible for Tory politicians to be elected in areas traditionally associated with Labour – a reminder that the electorate is open to change if candidates are independent-minded and know how to make a difference. Now who wants to be mayor of Yorkshire?