Funds for
Teesside Airport
Fly Under the Radar
Tees Valley Mayor celebrates Teesside Airport's success in social media post
Scott Hunter
2 January 2026
‘Twas shortly before Christmas, and Teesside International Airport published its latest set of accounts, showing a tidy £1.1 million profit. Had Santa Claus come early this year? Tees Valley mayor, Ben Houchen certainly thinks so. But maybe things are not quite as they seem. Teesside Live reports that airport revenues were boosted by a £10.1 million Government grant. Nice, but it’s odd that we hadn’t heard about it before given that it’s a significant boost to the airport’s income.
While Teesside Live claims that that the grant was to fund the building of new hangars, it gives no further detail about where the money came from. If it is central government funding, which department dispensed it? Leigh Jones in The Teesside Lead, meanwhile, asserts that this is actually the grant of £12.5 million agreed at a Tees Valley Combined Authority cabinet meeting on 28 March 2025.
At Tees Valley Monitor, we were not entirely convinced by either of these explanations and so conducted our own search for the source of the money. What we found was, frankly, surprising.
Teesside International Airport Accounts
The mystery additional income is shown in the statement of accounts here:
source: Companies' House
The accompanying notes to the accounts reveal that “[o]ther operating income comprises income recognised on release of government grants”. What, among other things, attracted our attention is the amount which is not precisely the £10.1 million reported by Teesside Live, nor the £12.5 million asserted by Leigh Jones. The amount, at £10,108,008 is odd; grants tend to be in round figures. This, we suspected, was an aggregated figure. The question remains, however, about the source.
Teesside Live reports that the funding was intended to enable the building of new hangars. And the £12.5 mn agreed by TVCA cabinet in March contained within it a grant of £6.5 mn from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund also intended to assist in the construction a new hangar. The timing of the £12.5 mn is problematic, however, as it was agreed only a week before the end of the financial year, leaving very little time for the transaction to be completed if it were to be included in the airport’s accounts for 2024/5.
TVCA Expenditure Records
We reasoned that any grant funding of the airport would be processed by TVCA and so appear in its expenditure tables, of which there are two – expenditure over £500 and purchase orders over £5k, each published quarterly (here). Everything that appears in the latter, we would expect to appear also in the ‘expenditure over £500’. So, this was our principal information source. A section from one of those tables is shown here:
Source: TVCA Expenditure over £500, Jan - Mar 2025
The fifth column in the table shows which expenditure pot the payment comes from. The last two columns are both labelled ‘expenditure category.’ (The expenditures labelled as ‘TVCA Core Costs’ cover things like rent on the TVCA offices, which are not included in the calculations below).
The items in column 5 that are of interest and those labelled TVCA Investment Fund, Capital Grant Schemes and TVCA Investment Fund. For the 2024/5 financial year, we have identified a total of sixteen payments from these funds to Teesside Airport between 31 May 2024 and 25 March 2025.
No payments were made in the week following the 28 March cabinet meeting. Similarly, in the expenditure table for the first quarter of the 2025/6 financial year, no payments are made to the airport that would correspond to the £12.5 mn agreed by cabinet. We conclude, therefore, that this grant had not been handed over before the end of June 2025.
When we looked at the expenditure tables for 2023/4 we found no evidence of similar payments. These payments appear to be an innovation in 2024/5.
The sixteen payments in 2024/5 amount to £10,270,730 in total, close, but not identical, to the £10,108,008 shown in the latest set of accounts.
What did the TVCA Cabinet know of the £10,270,730?
On 28 March 2025, local council leaders in the TVCA cabinet reluctantly agreed to the £12.5 mn grant funding for the airport. But what of these earlier payments? Did they also receive cabinet approval? The simple answer is that they did not. Minutes of cabinet meetings during the course of the 2024/5 financial show no discussion of airport finances prior to the meeting on 28 March. In fact, the airport is mentioned only in Medium Term Financial Planning documents, where the amount of funding it is said to receive is £3,561,000:
There are further questions. Of those payments originating from the TVCA Investment Fund, some are shown as grants, others are unspecified. So, it is unclear if these are grants to the airport or loans. Either way they are significant injections of public money to a venture that seems to have the capacity to swallow public money while showing little in return, so that many now believe it will default on all of its loans.
Teesside Airport Annual Statement to Cabinet
At the TVCA cabinet meeting in March the airport presented its annual statement in which it argued that small regional airports cannot function without financial support as their operating costs are too high. This is an interesting departure, an opinion that was entirely absent from the original business case for the airport by TVCA in 2019. The previous owners, Peel Holdings, received no public subsidy, and were losing money year on year. As a result, they proposed eventually to close the airport, which has since led them to be demonized by the mayor and his acolytes.
Yet, in a document produced by Peel in 2016 (Durham Tees Valley Airport: Your Questions Answered) the company lamented the loss of £2.1 million in the financial year 2015/6. Were the airport now to require £2.1 million a year to keep it afloat it might cease to be the source of controversy it is today.
Since its acquisition by the TVCA, however, its annual losses have been vast, last year being no exception.
A recent report in the Financial Times (“Auditors raise red flags at public body run by Ben Houchen”, 18 December 2025) stated that the TVCA has advanced the airport £128 million in loans since 2019. This figure does not include the amount we have uncovered in the TVCA expenditure files.
An excerpt from Peel’s 2016 report may serve to illustrate the true scale of Teesside’s losses:
Teesside’s losses exceed the combined losses of the airports listed here. Why its losses are so great remains a mystery. And while TVCA cabinet members appear to be relatively incurious about airport funding, the Oversight and Scrutiny Committee has been much more assertive. A response to their repeated questions about the airport’s finances is here:
In other words, the committee is not entitled to any information about the airport, despite its financial demand on the Authority. We conclude from this that, had members of TVCA Cabinet asked similar questions, they would have been stonewalled in the same way that their colleagues in Oversight and Scrutiny have been.
TIAL Performance
The airport’s annual statement presented to Cabinet on 28 March, contains the following observation about its achievement to date:
“When TIAL changed ownership in 2019, its annual rent roll was £526,000 … Extensive asset management has since been carried out to review the portfolio, increasing the annual rent roll to circa £1.35million at year end 23/24.”
Put in perspective, having accrued at least £128 mn of debt the airport’s management has succeeded in doubling the rent roll of its estate to £1.35 mn. Not really a triumph, some might say. In fact, the performance of the airport’s management is so abysmal, that many might now concur that the best thing that could happen to the airport now would be for the mayor to approach Peel Holdings and ask them to take it back.
Postscript
So, £10 million last year, and £12.5 million this year. And new routes and new carriers continue to be elusive. In response to this, the airport’s marketing is becoming ever more creative. Today, it is advertising holidays to Guernsey. Just out of curiosity, had a look at making a booking on the first such flight on 12 May. What we were offered, for £329 return, was an outward flight lasting a little over 29 hours involving stopovers first in Alicante and then in Bristol. The journey of a lifetime?
