The town plagued by dirt bikes that shows why levelling up needs to change

The idea behind “levelling up” has been explained in many ways: economic inequality, decaying high streets, local pride.

But for the Government’s new “towns tsar”, the need for the policy is summed up by the dirt bikes of Eston. This small ex-mining community near Middlesbrough is plagued by anti-social behaviour and crime linked to the use of off-road bikes being driven dangerously around the town, according to Adam Hawksbee.

In an interview with i, the part-time tsar- who is overseeing the implementation of the “new plan for towns” in 75 communities across the UK, with local people controlling how Whitehall money is spent – described being struck by the unique problems and solutions in each place he has visited.

“Eston police station has a massive sign which is a reminder that it is illegal to sell petrol to anyone under the age of 16,” Mr Hawksbee said. “I didn’t know that – but that’s a very important reminder in Eston because there are kids basically looking to get fuel for their dirt bikes. And it’s one of the only places in the country that is currently installing anti-cycling infrastructure, because they’re putting these metal grates on cycle lanes because the kids just whizz up and down.

“Now some of those are just, you know, speeding and causing disruption but others are involved in county lines, what they’re doing is running drugs.” The unusual issue – which is confirmed by how much warnings about off-road bikes dominate the Facebook page of Eston’s local branch of Cleveland Police – is explained by the fact the town sits next to picturesque hills where families have long enjoyed riding around.

Mr Hawksbee cites Eston as an example of why the Government is adapting its levelling up programme to give it a new hyperlocal focus on particular towns, with change managed by independent boards recruited from within those local communities.

“There’s no way the team in the Department of Levelling Up, or even Redcar and Cleveland Council, could sit there and come up with a plan for that particular corner of Eston and how you deal with that challenge,” he said.

“It’s about finding activities for those young people to do, wraparound support for the families where a number of members are involved in some of these gangs. It’s about hotspot policing that uses data on where these people are – you’ve got to have this very localised plan to deal with that challenge.”

Adam Hawksbee being interviewed by i (Photo: DLUHC)

The new plan for towns, launched by Rishi Sunak last autumn, is intended to convince communities, and voters at large, that the “levelling up” promises originally made by Boris Johnson are a reality rather than just a slogan, following persistent criticism over which towns were selected for funding under previous schemes – with an apparent emphasis on the marginal constituencies which the Conservatives won at the last election.

Mr Hawksbee was appointed earlier this year as the interim chair of the Towns Unit, a role he does alongside his day job as deputy director of the centre-right think-tank Onward (Sebastian Payne, the director of Onward, writes a weekly column for i). He appeared to admit that previous levelling up schemes made a mistake in forcing towns to bid against each other for funding, and in focusing on capital investment without ensuring that communities had the ability to fund the running costs of projects over time.

He defended the use of competitive bidding processes for major one-off Government investments, but added: “Where it’s not useful is if what you’re trying to do is build up places that have the lowest level of capacity or the lowest level of leadership, because they will always be least able to put together bids.”

The role of the Towns Unit has been to allocate a 10-year funding stream to 75 different towns, each receiving £20m to be distributed by a board which is independent of both the Government and the local council – an attempt to avoid the problem of cash-strapped local authorities using the money to top up their everyday activities rather than investing in new projects.

Mr Hawksbee has visited almost half of the towns to meet with their boards – all the chairs of which were invited to a Downing Street summit last week to compare notes – and see the specific problems they face, along with potential solutions.

As well as the dirt bikes of Eston, he pointed to a visit he made to Canvey Island in Essex where a large community of ultra-Orthodox Jews has set up in recent years. Mr Hawskbee said: “We’ve got a very different population that want a very different set of amenities, and often those amenities are pretty distinct from the rest of the population – but they’re bringing money, they’re buying houses. And how do they think about that challenge?

“The bingo hall had closed, shut down, not commercially viable. The Haredi community thought, ‘Well, we need a synagogue’ – bought the bingo hall, they only needed the back room as the synagogue so they said, ‘Look, we’ll buy it but if you want to open up the front again and get someone to run it, great.’ And so now there are some grateful gamblers in the front of the bingo hall.”

He said that despite the radical differences between the towns his unit is focusing on, there were a number of “threads” between them – including “youth-based antisocial behaviour” resulting from a lack of organised activities for young people, a small number of troubled individuals such as ex-offenders and drug addicts who are “an intimidating presence”, the decline in high street retail, and the rise in working from home which has disrupted long-established commuting patterns.

And asked why so many people feel they have not seen any improvement from previous incarnations of levelling up, Mr Hawksbee conceded that a focus on long-term improvements had sometimes made the concept seem remote from voters’ everyday concerns.

He insisted: “The fact we’ve got revenue funding alongside capital, so you can pay for a programme with neighbourhood wardens or activities for young people around sport and culture, that you can stand up in weeks and months as opposed to years, means that people are much more likely to see something.”

He added that there was still time for the public to see visible benefits in time for the general election: “Over the six month, a year period, it’s perfectly plausible if you launch a neighbourhood warden programmes to tackle antisocial behaviour that you might see an uptick in the number of people that say they feel safe walking around during the day or walking around at night.”

Labour is already pointing to what it calls the Government’s failings on levelling up as part of Sir Keir Starmer’s pitch to remove the Conservatives from office, and the party has suggested it would ditch the phrase if it takes power later this year. But Mr Hawksbee has been lobbying Opposition MPs to accept that the Towns Unit should become a permanent part of the Whitehall landscape, even if – as polls suggest – the party which set it up loses the election.

He concluded: “Maybe I would say this, but when I go around to councils and others, their message is that we might be frustrated with how you’ve ended up at this point, but we’re delighted you’ve ended up here. And let’s build on this, as opposed to scrap it and start something new.”