MIKE HILL: Hartlepool Council smothered out by the Number 10 machine

As the old saying goes ‘A week is a long time in politics’ and this Saturday it will have been a week since Hartlepool local lockdown restrictions were imposed by the Government, but also a week in which the Tories have shifted ground yet again on lock down funding for the Town while news has already begun filtering through of local business closures, especially in the food and hospitality sector.

The Government gave myself, your MP, no notice of their intentions and that is typical of their actions in other areas; my colleague in Middlesbrough was also not consulted and, like Hartlepool Borough Council, his local authority was informed of the move by a press release. This is happening up and down the country.

Hartlepool Borough Council were acting in good faith when they approached the Government with a request for them to intervene with restrictions tailored to tackling the spread of COVID in people’s homes while preventing a ban on families meeting in pubs and restaurants thus protecting the local hospitality sector, but we now know they walked into the equivalent of a Venus Fly Trap; lured in by false encouragement and snapped up and smothered out by the Number 10 machine.

I understood and supported the Council’s efforts to strike a deal to benefit the Town. We needed to take some kind of action to reverse the transmission spike, but the Government reaction was typically out of step with the real needs of the Town. Worse still their announcement that the additional £7 million in funding, which had to be shared with three other Councils in the same tranche, including the City of Liverpool, would now be shared between nine local authority areas.

Translated into hard cash that is around £1.50 to £2 per person in Hartlepool or roughly between £150,000 and £187,000 for Hartlepool, when the local calculation is that upwards of £4.5 Million is needed.

The people of Hartlepool deserve better, our businesses need support and we need a structured approach to local lockdown which involves a stepped approach to ending it.

It’s easy for the Prime Minister to pontificate and suggest that all will be well by Christmas, but will it? Given the present trajectory I very much doubt it.