Other than hosting the UK’s largest Japanese community outside of London in the inter-war years, Middlesbrough is now home to the Riverside Stadium of Middlesbrough Football Club, venue for a seminar in November organised by the Institute for Local Governance at nearby Durham University. The seminar, ‘Who cares for the carers?’, heard from senior officers and practitioners working in the field of social care support, including networks for younger carers of the non-elderly (e.g. children looking after parents with life-changing injuries), which examined not only the funding climate for social care in the UK but also the role of service transformation and local interventions such as peer mentoring for new carers. In the subsequent discussion, Director Shima spoke on Japan’s system of social care insurance. The ILG is a collaboration between the North East’s five universities and 12 local authorities, aimed at providing research and knowledge for the region’s wider public sector.
Teesside has hit national headlines again of late with the sudden closure of its steelworks, the area’s major employer with 170 years of history. Since then the UK government has attempted to spearhead new investment opportunities through a new quango, the Tees Valley Inward Investment Initiative, chaired by former deputy prime minister and regional growth adviser Lord Heseltine. Part of the so-called ‘Northern Powerhouse’ agenda led by UK Chancellor George Osborne, Stockton-on-Tees is one of five local authorities which make up Tees Valley, who recently signed a Devolution Agreement with the UK Government which will see a new combined authority of the five elect a Mayor from 2017 in exchange for a package of decentralised powers and resources.
In Stockton, home of the world’s first passenger railway among other things, we met the borough council’s regeneration and economic team, as well as the political lead for regeneration on its cabinet. There we discussed the area’s significant Japanese investment profile, which has seen a growing number of Japanese owned businesses locate in the borough (largely Fujifilm and several Mitsubishi chemical process subsidiaries), particularly centred on the former ICI plant in Billingham (where, coincidentally I grew up and three generations of my family have worked at the plant, myself included). The team also briefed us on the new Fusion Hive tech hub for SMEs on Stockton’s Northshore, which has an agile and flexible model for SME promotion and also promotes university-business collaboration. We look forward to sharing this learning at officer level through future exchanges between Stockton and Japan.
Director Shima and I also took the opportunity to visit Billingham itself, where the town council (created in 2007) has several of its 14 members drawn from employees of those Japanese companies (UK town councillors are unpaid, unlike in Japan). There we heard from senior members and town council staff on the recent governance review which took place of the town council, on account of a social media campaign for its abolition. The town council were firmly of the view that the threat of abolition gave it the opportunity to prove its added value to local residents and allow it to address any perceived shortcomings, particularly around communication. A week later Director Shima attended the National Association of Local Councils’ Larger Councils Conference, of which Billingham is a leading member.
Andrew Stevens, JLGC Chief Researcher
