Grimsby man-turned-tech millionaire uses fortune to rebuild hometown

As he broke ground at the youth centre in he’d helped build, Greater Lincolnshire ­mayoral candidate felt his emotional roots to the area take hold.

“I thought about my nan who was born in 1916, one of eight kids, growing up in poverty about 50 yards away,” he says. “She couldn’t have dreamed of ever having something like the Horizon Youth Zone. I thought about being able to help kids like her. But I also thought how connected I am to this place, a century later.”

The millionaire was born on a council estate to a single mum, the third of four sons. “After the youth centre, I went to see my mum, who had , to tell her about it,” he says. “I took her out to the Wolds for a cup of tea. It was a beautiful day. The sun shone, we talked. And that night she died.”

READ MORE:

READ MORE:

He pauses over his tea at Oliver’s by Cleethorpes Pier. “My mum was a bit of a rubbish mum in some ways, but the youth centre is her legacy, and it’s a big part of why I’m doing all this.”

By “all this” Jason means running to be Greater Lincolnshire’s first ever mayor – as part of a new £720million devolution deal. The area includes not just Grimsby and Cleethorpes, but the cathedral city of Lincoln and the steel town of Scunthorpe, whose very lifeblood this week hangs in the balance.

is currently battling to save two blast furnaces in a town that has made steel for 160 years. “After 14 years of Tory failure, UK steel output has collapsed by 42 per cent, costing jobs and weakening our economy,” Jason says.

“Now the Tories are talking about nationalisation and workers’ rights – but only when it’s too late.” Labour is working on real solutions, he says, including “temporary public ownership”.

The tech investor, whose online insurance company was bought out for more than £400million in 2017, says he is ready for a new challenge in politics. “I don’t see that I’m anything special,” the former Oxford University Leadership Fellow says. “I’ve got some skills, but you really need luck to be as successful as I’ve been. And now I want to share that luck with others.”

Jason’s journey home began with helping to revive the neglected football club, Grimsby Town FC, where he became the joint majority shareholder, chairman and now vice-chair.

He has also helped support and connect social enterprises across North Lincolnshire. Through this he says he carries his mum’s memory in his pocket “like a smooth, small stone”.

Jason says he was motivated to stand as Labour’s candidate for mayor because he sees the huge potential of this often underestimated corner of the British Isles.

Added to which, his heavily tipped Reform UK opponent – former Tory cabinet minister of the middle-finger salute – is a ­steadfast net-zero denier. And it’s clear to Jason, and most people I met on the east coast, the future of the region lies in renewables.

“We’re at a precarious point in our politics,” he says. “I just thought, ‘I’ve got to have a go’ as the alternatives are really, really frightening.”

For years, Grimsby has been a one-industry town – – but now a seafaring community finds itself ideally placed for a green ­industrial revolution.

Jenkyns had been on message the previous night at a hustings at the Cleethorpes’s Parkway Cinema, calling herself the “Lincolnshire DOGE”, and decrying net zero. Jason pointed to Jenkyns’s campaign slogan, “Britain
is Broken”, which could be described as giving the middle finger to Lincolnshire.

“Why talk our county down?” he said. “We’ve had enough of people calling this place a sh**hole.” Jason is wealthy enough to know “there should be wealth taxes because most rich people will not miss one or two per cent”. And he says there can be advantages to the having low expectations.

“It means you aren’t scared of failure,” he says. “I was the third of four boys with different dads, and I never knew who mine was. No one paid any attention to me. So, I never got crushed by knockbacks like some of my friends.

“My mum’s dad killed himself when Mum was 12, and that had an impact on her. She never told us she loved us – something I now tell my kids every day.

“One of her ­relationships was with a violent alcoholic, so that’s something we lived through. But Mum was a grafter with four jobs. She worked as a cleaner and a debt collector, and my nana lived with us and worked in a factory kitchen.”

When Jason was 17, some of his football team got sports scholarships to American universities. “I went to the library and wrote loads of letters, and I got a place at a high school in Virginia offering opportunities for kids from poor backgrounds,” he says. “I picked the US because I’d watched Entertainment USA on the telly.”

The boy from the village of Scartho rose through the dot.com bubble. “Suddenly I’m in a CEO network with people who I’m thinking 100 years ago I wouldn’t even have been your butler,” he laughs.

Grimsby may not – yet – be Silicon Valley, but Jason’s homecoming has given him something else. “It’s so good feeling a connection to a place again,” he says. “I can feel a pull in my soul. People meet you as you are, and there is something profoundly beautiful in that.”

Lincolnshire has so much going for it from its windswept coastline to its cathedral city, yet when I call in at East Marsh United, a community group thriving at the heart of one of Grimsby’s most neglected estates, it’s also clear what’s at stake.

“Our challenge,” Josie Moon tells me over a full English, “is to build a future for kids that’s more magnetic than the county lines gangs.”

Jason’s dream is to build something for the kids like his mum who didn’t get much of a childhood – a new generation he hopes will see Lincolnshire rise. At the Horizon Youth Zone, 50p will get kids access to an indoor climbing wall, recording studio, football pitches and much more.

“People need to start realising Grimsby isn’t the end of the line – it’s the beginning,” says Lucy Ottewell-Key, the centre’s young Grimbarian CEO.

Down the famous Freeman Street – where trawlermen once docked as “three-day millionaires” – a pub sign promises “free beer, topless waitresses, and false advertising”. Vape and ­pound shops have taken the place of department stores, milliners and ­theatres.

But, by the cheerful pier at Cleethorpes, the sun has broken out over the Two Fat Seagulls chippy. And a group of eager Mariners fans are ribbing Jason about refs and results.

“I’m not looking for a job in politics, and I won’t stand anywhere else,” Jason says. “I want to create a positive story for Lincolnshire. I want to be mayor to tell a different story about a place I love.”