TVCA Cabinet

Needs to Ask

Hard Questions

about Teesside

Airport

Investment/Bailout

Text: Scott Hunter

Research: Victoria McCandless

20 March 2025

Things are looking up. No sooner had Houchen posted his request for the cabinet to agree a £12.5 million ‘investment’ in Teesside Airport than Alec Brown, leader of Redcar and Cleveland Council responded in a Facebook post stating that he will be asking questions at the next TVCA cabinet meeting on, 28 March, about where the funding is going:

It is gratifying to see one of the five council leaders who are members of the TVCA cabinet pose Houchen some challenging questions. On the other hand, it would help if the other four did the same and let the public know that they will be doing so. Alec Brown has already neatly skewered Houchen by reminding him of his false claim that the airport turned a profit last year. But there are a number of other issues to consider.

Moreover, Houchen is not the only person in the cabinet whose activity requires scrutiny. In the room will also be Business Board chair and beneficiary of two TVCA contracts, Siobhan McArdle. It would be helpful if the remaining cabinet members took the opportunity to determine whether she delivered the TVCA value for money.

With regards to the airport, there is also the matter of whether it is delivering value for money, and whether its aviation business will ever become viable. Remember Houchen set out in 2019 with a ten-year turnaround plan by the end of which the airport was to be turning a profit with through a combination of aviation and estate development.



A joint venture company -Teesside International Airport Business Park – was set up to develop the Southside business park, but has been listed on Companies’ House as dormant ever since:

That business park now has a tenant on the only structure built there on the end of the road that cost £23.6 million to construct. The cabinet needs to know how much revenue that is bringing in. The reason they need to know is to ascertain whether the tenants of the two business parks on the site really do pay the going rate for the sites they occupy. When Fedex moved in last year, there was much publicity, but there were some (well informed) dissenting voices saying that the company had been made an offer they couldn’t refuse to entice them to move their base from Newcastle to Teesside.

And, in addition to the need to clarify whether or not certain tenants are paying below market value for their airport sites, there is the question of whether the TVCA, with its head office there, is paying above the market rate for its premises. Of the £12,5 million paid by the TVCA to the airport company last year, how much of that was for office rental and ancillary services? How does that compare to the cost of their previous office in Stockton?

Then there is the matter of directors’ remuneration. Kate Willard has just resigned from the board having relieved the company of consultancy fees every year since she was appointed. We think it appropriate that TVCA cabinet members ask for details of the consultancy services she provided and ascertain whether this was, in fact, simply what she should have been doing as a director in the first place.

However, Kate Willard is not the only person who consultancy fees the cabinet needs to call into question. In the room with them will be Business Board Chair, Siobhan McArdle, who has been selling the TVCA  specified and unspecified consultancy services.

In February, we reported (https://www.teesvalleymonitor.com/teesside-freeport-welcomes-its-first-freeloader) that McArdle had been awarded a 6-month £170,000 contract to provide consultancy services to Teesside Freeport. Once the TVCA released its Q3 expenditure, it was apparent that McArdle had, in fact, received considerably more than this from the Authority. We have now learned, through FOI, that the additional sum was paid in respect of ‘general consultancy’ undertaken by the Business Board chair.

Our earlier report showed how members of boards linked to the TVCA have benefited from contracts, especially at the airport. It would be in the public interest for TVCA cabinet members to demand details of precisely what Siobhan McArdle does over and above what is expected of her as unpaid chair of the Business Board to warrant these payments, and why the TVCA did not replace former freeport director, Nolan Gray, after his resignation but instead brought in a generic management consultant at considerably greater expense.

The contract for Freeport Support was later awarded to another consultancy, OCO Global. Having invoiced the Authority for the full value of the original contract by the beginning of October 2024, McArdle then billed them in late November for ‘handover’ a total of £87,074.40.  The TVCA expenditure account shows the payment as £72,562.  We have yet to ascertain which figure is correct (as 'mistakes' are known to creep into the expenditure account from time to time).

Many watchers of the TVCA have long since concluded that its committees are toothless and useless at holding the Authority to account. It would be a positive step if their detractors were now to be proven wrong in that assessment.