Tees Valley: a leading light in Northern export

Export is an important part of Teesside’s rich heritage, and its future.  

From its industrial roots in steel and chemical manufacturing, the region has played a pivotal role in building the modern world.   

Now, as the world works toward achieving Net Zero, the region is drawing on its unique combination of innovation, skills and natural resources to be a leading light in clean energy and hydrogen.   

The opportunity lies in not only supporting the UK’s own Net Zero targets through producing clean energy, but in developing and testing solutions that can be adopted worldwide.  

Ben explains: “We currently have weekly delegations from Singapore, Saudi Arabia and America visiting to see how the Net Zero Teesside project is developing – the world's first industrial-scale carbon capture and storage facility.  

“We're already producing more than 50% of all the hydrogen produced in the UK.  

“And now, we're looking at piloting putting hydrogen into people’s homes – potentially with the UK Government – as the UK's first hydrogen village and hydrogen town. If it were successful over the next 10 years, it would see 20,000 homes in the Tees Valley converted to 100% hydrogen.  

“It’s then about getting into things like hydrogen transport, such as hydrogen vehicles at airports and hydrogen planes.” 

This work will build on the success the region has already enjoyed in offshore wind, which will continue to develop as the region strengthens its position as the premier cluster for Net Zero. 

Creating an industrial cluster has positive benefits for the whole of Teesside and the wider Northern Powerhouse region.  

Ben continues: “What we're seeing is not just the building of those large facilities – whether that’s offshore wind manufacturers or Net Zero Teesside – but also the securing of the local supply chains that will service those businesses. 

“The opportunity is for new and existing businesses to get on the back of the bigger stuff that's going on and solidify the rest of the supply chain in the region that will ultimately be able to export not just to the rest of the UK, but the rest of the world.  

“You develop the engineering and professional services specialisms to deal with economies that don't exist today – or are only just starting to exist – working on projects that are the first of their kind in the world, then you’re giving yourself a real head start. If we can keep those projects in the region, then this becomes the go-to place.” 

A growing industry cluster naturally attracts more people to the area for work, requiring the wider infrastructure to up-level to be attractive too. Everything from hotels, high streets, leisure and culture to schools, transport and housing grows up alongside the developments.  

It’s also important to keep talent in the region, to fill job opportunities and create new businesses. Ben points to the importance of universities developing talent and retaining and scaling spin-outs to keep innovation in the local area. 

Rather like a big jigsaw puzzle, all the pieces need to be in the right place to complete the picture of economic prosperity in Tees Valley.  

These are huge projects, and the Mayor and his team and partners in the region have been working hard on creating the political and practical support needed to realise them. 

Pace and scale characterise these projects.  

The Teesside Freeport is the UK’s first and largest freeport, with Ben one of the architects of the UK’s freeport policy.  

He explains: “It's built on a model of having large expanses of developable land, ideally in big chunks rather than small development blocks. 

“The benefits of a freeport are focused around employee and capital intensive schemes. We're trying to achieve significant capital investments and make it cheaper for a business to employ somebody.  

“It makes us more competitive, particularly with mainland Europe, and other parts of the world as well. The ultimate goal is to try and re-shore manufacturing industries.” 

The freeport is broken down into two parts: customs zones and tax zones.  

Teesside Airport serves as a logistics hub within Teesside Freeport and enjoys customs zone benefits.   

This means manufacturers can import raw materials and products via the airport, hold them in cargo facilities and use them in their manufacturing to create finished goods. As they are within a customs zone, they don’t have to pay tariffs on the imports – only on the finished products that may then be exported.  

Using the airport in this way complements Teesport and strengthens the manufacturing centre that is built around it – which is located in the tax zone.  

With the clear benefits of the freeport starting to be realised, demand is high for cargo facilities, which is an area the Mayor is tackling, announcing six new hangars at the airport. Four of these will be built by Willis Aviation and the other two by Teesside Airport, which have already attracted interest before construction has started. 

Another highly attractive selling point is that Teesside Freeport already has planning permission for 14.5m sq ft of investment space. 

Ben enthuses: “From a regulatory point of view, we have taken away the biggest hurdle to investment, which is planning. 

“We can go to any investor and say, ‘if you put your specific plans in for development, we can guarantee you full sign off of planning (often called permitting in other countries) within 12 weeks.’  

“If you look at SeAH Wind, who are building the world's largest monopile manufacturing facility at 1.1m sq ft, we had that signed off within seven weeks. That's huge because every investor we're speaking to builds in somewhere between 18 months and two years to secure planning because of the scale and the capital spending.” 

There’s no doubt that there is a big focus in Tees Valley on its most lucrative manufacturing and clean energy opportunities. But it isn’t putting all its eggs in one basket – the region is also nurturing its fledgling digital and creative sectors.  

“We think there’s an opportunity for us in digitising industry,” Ben says. “We’ve got some fantastic companies like Double Eleven and other games companies emerging.  

“We're not going to become the Silicon Valley of the UK, but we have huge expertise that we can build upon to use digital to make efficient, safer products for industry that we can then export around the world.” 

There is also a growing appetite in the region for the creative sector – particularly film and media, Ben explains.  

Again, the idea is to build a cluster around this and provide as much infrastructure as possible.  

Ben adds: “By nature, the film industry can be quite nomadic and transient. Somebody might come and hire a film studio for a month and bring a hundred people to work on the film. But then they disappear. 

So, the new film studios we’ve already built in Hartlepool is a great anchor, but the next phase is the important one. You then need to get great acoustics, the pre-production and post-production in place.  

“That means that rather than it being a place where people come to hire some fantastic facilities, they locate themselves here.” 

Along with the facilities, having local talent available is also important. Teesside, along with Salford and Sunderland are benefiting from the Northern School of Art, which is renowned across the UK for nurturing talent across all forms of visual media including costume and set designers, computer animation and filmmaking. 

Proud Teessiders will tell you of the past, ‘we built the world,’ and of the future, ‘anything is possible’. With the trajectory the region’s on, who could argue with that?