DERAILED -Government inertia blocks levelling up hopes for former North East coastal town of Horden Colliery Unpublished article

 

DERAILED -Government inertia blocks levelling up hopes for former North East coastal town of Horden Colliery

Unpublished article

A much-needed boost to the local economy from re-opening Horden Colliery railway station on the North East coast is floundering due to government inertia. Now residents of the former mining village have been overlooked by Michael Gove for levelling up funds.  All of which has angered local MP Grahame Morris, who chairs the Unite parliamentary group.

Adding to local people’s problems is recent news that a £24m submission to the levelling up fund from Easington-Horden has been rejected by Michael Gove in favour of more prosperous Tory constituencies such as the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s. All five bids from County Durham, much of which is rural, were rejected.

Horden Colliery was opened in 1900. At its peak in 1935 it employed 4,342 people. During the 1984/5 miners’ strike only a handful of colliers crossed the picket line.

Despite its large reserves the colliery was closed by the Thatcher government in 1987. Following which the village went into permanent decline with only 8,000 residents today and far too many of which are unemployed and living in poor housing. Horden has gradually lost most of its services including the police and fire Stations, secondary school, many local shops and cinemas. Anti-social behaviour is a problem.

The U2 song Red Hill Mining Town is based on a book about Horden.

Horden station closed under the Beeching cuts in 1964. Durham County Council and various MPs, all Labour as Horden is part of the Easington Constituency that has voted in large numbers since 1922 for the Party, campaigned for many years for its re-opening.

This was finally achieved in June 2020 when the Transport Secretary and Northern Powerhouse Minister Grant Shapps said: “Our ambitious plans to restore and revitalise the North East railways sits at the heart of our commitment to level up infrastructure across the country, build a railway that works for everyone, and kickstart our economy.” The new facilities cost £10.5 million and enable up to 70,000 people living nearby in places such as Peterlee, (the only place in the UK named after a trade unionist – Peter Lee) a chance to travel by train.

Only months before the opening the government had been forced to take over control of the troubled railway company Northern Rail with Snapp’s stating passengers had "lost trust in the north's rail network".

That trust, has according to Grahame Morris MP, not been regained in the last three years. Morris who chairs the Unite group in Parliament, is extremely proud of following in the footsteps of previous Easington MPs such as Manny Shimwell, who as an Atlee government minister nationalised the mines and electricity industry in 1947.

“Re-opening the station widens employment opportunities. People can live here in relatively low-cost housing and travel to employment on Teesside, Wearside or Tyneside.  It should help encourage investment in new businesses and better housing, which is vital as many former social housing properties have been bought up by absentee landlords and left to rot.

“But an hourly service consisting of just two carriages, which can get so full at peak times that some passengers cannot get on them does not encourage commuter confidence especially when trains get cancelled at short notice.  We get contacted regularly by disappointed constituents. The operator has to improve the frequency and the reliability of the service.”

 

Morris sits on the Transport Select Committee that last year examined bus services outside of London. “Durham, much of which is rural, has been hammered. If you compare the buses and tube services and overground trains that serve the capital with what we have here in the North East we really are the poor relations and Third World in many respects.”

Morris believes bus companies are playing the public by threatening service reductions to secure more local government funding and he accuses the government of failing their own levelling up commitment by ignoring the threat to regional and rural bus services from companies driven by shareholder profit rather than an affordable, frequent and reliable bus service run in the public interest.

“Trains and buses are both in private operators hands whose principal responsibility is to the shareholders. We’d have a far better bus and train service if a future Labour government was running the service,” said Morris.

Adding to local people’s problems came the news in January that a £24m submission to the levelling up fund from Easington-Horden had been rejected by Michael Gove in favour of more prosperous Tory constituencies such as the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s. All five County Durham bids were rejected.

New social housing, training opportunities for young people, a pilot project on community energy using surplus heat from abandoned mine workings, enhanced community assets including a nature reserve and woodland plantation plus funds to improve business units were all part of the bid. Further south in Sedgefield-Newton Aycliffe the plan was to use new funds to construct new cultural attractions whilst at Willington, Crook and Tow Law it was planned to improve the infrastructure of industrial estates.

The levelling up fund makes equally deserving parts of the country battle for limited funding against each other. Many of these projects would previously have been properly funded by local authorities. Under Tory – aided by the Liberals between 2010 and 2015 – rule since 2010 these authorities have become a shadow of their former selves. Really deserving places such as Horden have lost out to more prosperous places such as Sunak’s North Yorkshire Richmond constituency.

“People are furious because government rhetoric about one nation and levelling up meant expectations had been raised that resources would be spent here. People can see they have been directed towards more affluent places.

“It has wasted many council officers time. There should be an easily quantifiable needs-based assessment looking at levels of deprivation. ill health, employment, skills or lack of them. Then resources should be directed accordingly. In that scenario Horden would be top,” said a clearly angry Morris, who hopes a future Labour government would prioritise the regenerating of once proud mining communities such as Horden.