House of Cards:

 TVCA Cabinet

May Hold Crisis

Meeting in Secret

as Auditors Again

Reject Accounts

Scott Hunter

13 July 2026

Another day, another intrigue at the Tees Valley Combined Authority. On Friday it was reported to us, by sources with knowledge of the matter, that the mayor, Ben Houchen, had summoned members of the Authority cabinet, i.e. the leaders of the five local councils that make up the Combined Authority, to an ‘informal’ meeting. The meeting was to take place at some point in the next week and on the agenda were the external auditors, Ernst and Young, who, we have been told, have once again rejected the Authority’s accounts.

As a matter of course, we contacted all five council leaders to ask, among other things, whether the report of this scheduled meeting was correct. None replied. We also asked Rob Whiteman, chair of the Best Value Notice panel that has been assigned to scrutinize the Authority. He didn’t reply either. So much for transparency.

But something then changed.

We later learned that this meeting appears to have been quietly cancelled. However, the crisis that precipitated it has not gone away, and neither, presumably, have the emails with the agenda that cabinet members were sent out.

The auditors’ issue, we are told, concerns loans made by the Authority to Teesworks and to Teesside International Airport. Quite what their issue is with the substantial sums that have been handed over should have been the task of the TVCA’s beleaguered Acting Finance Director, Jo Moore, to explain to the assembled local authority leaders. But that has also now been thrown into doubt, as we hear from sources with knowledge of the issue that she has resigned with immediate effect. She attempted to resign earlier in the year but was persuaded to stay on until a replacement was found. That will no longer happen.

No explanation has been given of the reasons for her departure, but we have to question why a widely respected and highly competent director of finance should be unable to oversee the production of a set of accounts that the external auditors are satisfied with. What is it about those loans that makes them so difficult to deal with?

Trouble at Teesside Airport, Trouble at Teesworks

Both Teesworks and Teesside Airport are hemorrhaging money. At the airport there was once fanfare around the mayor’s ‘ten year turnaround plan’. That is no longer spoken about, as aviation routes are not increasing and the management’s attention has instead turned to growing revenue from the estate. However, the estate is not growing except where projects are funded with public money. The company Airborne Colours, for example, now has two hangars, both financed exclusively with public money. 

The Southside Business Park,  joint venture with developers, Martin Corney and Chris Musgrave, comprises an access road (100% publicly funded) and a single hangar currently in use as a car body repair workshop. Nothing else has been built on that site, and plots are being offered for sale as ‘build-you-own’. In 2023, it was announced that a solar farm was to built by SSE on part of that site. It has never materialized.

At Teesworks, where a 90% shareholding was gifted to the same joint venture partners, Martin Corney and Chris Musgrave, the SeAH wind factory continues to be the only enterprise actually up and running, and that founded on financial arrangements massively advantageous to Corney and Musgrave (as detailed in the Tees Valley Review). Ongoing remediation of contaminated land on the Teesworks site continues to be the responsibly of the South Tees Development Corporation and is therefore entirely publicly funded. Planning Permission has been granted for a massive datacentre on the site, which, once completed, may employ around fifty people. Other investors have melted away. Corney and Musgrave, meanwhile, have made millions from operations on the site.

Both projects have been financed by loans as well as grants from the Tees Valley Combined Authority (most notoriously a loan of £107 million from the UK Investment Bank for the construction of the South Bank Quay on the Teesworks site, where the loan was made not to the South Tees Development Corporation, but to the TVCA, which remains on the hook to repay the loan). And there have been reports previously that the auditors have been concerned about the repayment schedules in place for them. We have approached the members of cabinet for further information, but none responded to our email. Perhaps this was because we weren’t supposed to know about the forthcoming informal meeting. 

 Darkness at the TVCA

This rather shines a light on how the TVCA is now operating. Having been severely criticized in the Tees Valley Review for a lack of transparency and a culture of keeping certain stakeholders in the dark, the Authority now appears to suffer from a lack of transparency and a culture of keeping certain stakeholders in the dark. It’s just that the dial has shifted on the stakeholders in question. At one time, cabinet members were on the excluded list. That is no longer the case. Cabinet members are now firmly on the inside track. Still on the bad list, however, is the public.

As one activist recently observed to us, the setting up of an ‘informal’ cabinet meeting has happened before, so that, when the official meeting takes place, it only lasts about fifteen minutes and simply ratifies what has previously been discussed away from prying eyes – i.e. away from the public gaze. At least one former Monitoring Officer expended considerable effort in trying to curtail opportunities for members of the public to question the Authority’s actions. The rise of the ‘informal meeting’ is just the latest iteration of that. And, as for this meeting, the question remains as to what, precisely the mayor wanted to remain private.

One option stands out here: persuading the cabinet to write off the airport’s and STDC’s debts in an attempt to sidestep the outstanding issues with the auditors. It would be a reckless move, given the risk of contravening rules on state aid, but recklessness with the public finances has been the hallmark of Houchen’s time in office. In addition to which, as the  Tees Valley Review noted, has been his tendency to keep the TVCA cabinet in the dark about what he and his entourage are doing.

That strategy was effectively closed down following recommendations made in the Review. While that ensured that cabinet members were no longer starved of information and denied a role in decision making, it did not guarantee that they would meet the challenge and keep the mayor in check. The one area of weakness we find in the Tees Valley Review is that the authors do not appear to have asked why cabinet members they didn’t complain when they kept out of the loop, and with that the expectation, implicit in their recommendations, that council leaders would be more proactive if only they had the chance.

Recent events, however, indicate that they are still not involved in formulating policy, nor willing to effectively challenge the mayor’s actions. In 2025, when Houchen proposed giving the airport company a grant of £6.5 million, cabinet questioned the way in which it was presented, but passed it nonetheless. That was not the first time controversial proposals had been passed without significant objection. So, if the mayor now proposes to write off the debts of Teesside Airport and STDC, will the cabinet members stand up to him? On past experience indications are that they will not. Or at best, the collective challenge will be insufficient to deflect the mayor from his proposed course of action.

There are now, however, wider implications.

Custodians of the Bin Collections

Devolution has been in the news in recent weeks in light of the support given it by  PM-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, who wishes to extend its reach in English regions. Few voices on the issue have chosen to dwell on the thorny subject of how to deal with situations where it all goes pear shaped.

The Tees Valley is the most prominent example of combined authority failure, both in terms of reckless spending and the lack of progress in economic regeneration. For us at Tees Valley Monitor the issue is how to square our conviction that devolution should lead to such regeneration where the evidence on the ground here does not support it.

One issue to be acknowledged concerns what constitutes appropriate oversight by central government. Once power is devolved to a region, central government can not simply claw power back when a dysfunctional regime is voted in by a local electorate. The regime does not govern on licence from the government of the day.

One of the weaknesses of the devolution settlement as currently configured is that there is one elected position. All scrutiny of the elected one falls to local councils and councillors, regardless of their ability or motivation to do so. Much as we might lament the apparent unwillingness of local council leaders in this region to act as an official opposition to the mayor, the fact remains that, while the mayorly is a full-time post, cabinet members have this duty added to their responsibilities elsewhere. To acknowledge this does not, however, release them from their duty to the electorate to intervene when things run out of control.

In a system in which councillors and council leaders oversee the work of combined authorities, they need to step up and accept that their role is now expanded beyond being custodians of the bin collections. For this to succeed their hand needs to be strengthened such that they can demand information from the Authority as and when they require it, with a sufficiently robust right of veto to ensure that they can not simply be browbeaten into submission by an overbearing mayor, and some meaningful input into the formulation of policy (this was at one time enshrined in the TVCA constitution, until Houchen had it watered down).  In recent years councillors on TVCA committees have been threatened if they were seen to be too challenging (teesvalleymonitor.com/tvca-threatens-members-of-oversight-committees). For the extension of devolution to be effective it is not sufficient to devolve more responsibilities. Without seriously expanding accountability, the whole project risks falling into the same trap as has beset the Tees Valley.

As for central government, it has to be seen to learn the lessons of the Houchen debacle. Houchen was not working alone when he extracted vast sums of public money (more than comparable devolved authorities) from the government. Oversight was lax, possibly deliberately so. So, when Houchen gave the developers, Corney and Musgrave 90% of the shares in Teesworks, it was not thoroughly scrutinized by the treasury. When Andy McDonald MP claimed in the House of Commons that there was widespread corruption at Teesworks, Michael Gove ensured that the National Audit Office was not called in and that instead a panel (the Tees Valley Review panel) that had no powers to summon and cross examine witnesses was set up to investigate the matter. The legislation that forms the basis of any new devolution settlement must be sufficiently robust so as to preclude partisan machinations at Westminster that enable rogue actors to evade accountability.

For the time being, all that has been put in place is a Best Value Notice on the Authority. Fifteen months after that notice was served the evidence of the disappearing ‘informal’ meeting indicates that the mayor continues to have the ability to squander resources with no significant benefit to the community he notionally serves. It appears that, once again, the scrutiny put in place is too weak to deal with the problem.

There remains one issue: why would those (like us at Tees Valley Monitor) who have watched devolution fail continue to support the principle? Our view is that those of us who have been exposed to it at its weakest are in a position to judge what benefit properly established devolution might look like. Opposed to those of us who share this view are people like Times columnist, Matthew Parris (Why ‘Rewired Britain’ is a waste of energy, 6 July 2026) , who objects that all devolution succeeds in doing is redistributing wealth rather creating it:

“Only London and the southeast produce a (massive) surplus of tax revenues over public spending.”

And Matthew Parris objects to that wealth being redistributed elsewhere. With exquisite condescension he asks “aren’t you just multiplying the Treasury teats on to which regional piglets can suckle as they squeal for more[?]”

What Parris omits is any acknowledgement of what happens to a region that experiences economic decline. Those who can leave, leave, resulting in chronic depopulation. Those who leave contribute to the tax revenues of the places they move to. And many of the ambitious ones move to London and the South East. In that respect, areas in the North feed the economy of the South East. And, yes, devolution is principally about redistribution, but of talent, not tax revenues.