On 10 June 2026, Private Eye magazine reported on the ‘Deal of the Century’ at the controversial Teesworks site
Laughing all of the way to the bank
Private Eye reported on a deal for Teesworks Ltd to sell 222 acres of land to US AI giant Anthropic for £1mn per acre. The company, which is 90% owned by Chris Musgrave, Martin Corney, Chris Harrison and Ian Waller, has acquired this land for £1 per acre, as per an existing land option. Anthropic, developers of the AI Chatbot Claude, intends to build an AI data centre at the former Redcar steelworks. Anthropic will pay Teesworks Ltd a further £40mn for an electricity link. If Teesworks is able to supply Anthropic with 1,400MW of electricity by 31 December 2029, Teesworks Ltd will receive a further £166mn. Although this payment will be reduced to £88mn if the power isn’t received by this deadline.
Just Google it
The data centre deal will deliver at least £262mn for Teesworks Ltd, rising to £428mn if the electric grid connection is made on time. Teesworks had been negotiating terms with Google for a data centre on the same plot of land, but Google appears to have baulked at the terms suggested by Musgrave and Corney. Anthropic must have deeper pockets than even Google.
In February 2026, I reported on the difficulties in supplying sufficient electricity to the Redcar site. You can read that report here. 1,400MW of electricity is enough to power about 2 million homes. For comparison, there are only just over 300,000 homes in the entire Tees Valley. Even if the Anthropic data centre goes ahead, Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen has promised an additional 1,900 MW of data centre capacity at Redcar. Credulity is being stretched here.
Political reaction
The Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA) Overview and Scrutiny Committee held its quarterly meeting at Teesside Airport on 10 June 2026. The meeting included a Question and Answer session for Mayor Ben Houchen. Councillor Lynn Pallister asked the mayor to comment on the Private Eye story. Houchen, as always when it comes to Private Eye stories, was dismissive. “There’s little to no substance in it. There rarely is”. This simply isn’t the case. Private Eye has reported extensively on the TVCA and Teesworks Ltd over the last several years, and has never had to retract a single sentence that it has printed.
Business rates
Houchen was soon on to his favourite topic, the boom in business rates that is about to wash over the South Tees Development Corporation (STDC) and Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council (RCBC), who each receive a 50% split in business rates from the Teesworks project. Houchen stated that “We might sign the (data centre) deal, but we haven’t signed it yet. But, on what is actually contracted, the taxpayer is gonna receive £2bn. This is an order of magnitude larger than anything the private sector is gonna make” So, even without the AI data centre, everybody is already quids in. Let’s unpack that statement.
What’s actually on the table?
So, forgetting about the proposed data centre now, as Ben Houchen has quite rightly suggested, let’s concentrate on the actual contracted deals that will bring in this supposed £2bn in business rates. As at the time of writing this article, there are precisely TWO of these, as follows:
1 The SeAH Factory at South Bank. We’ve reported recently on the failings at SeAH Wind. The company has just lost its first contract, and approximately half of its second one. As reported here, the company has burned through £1.1bn in cash, and won’t start to generate revenue until the end of 2026. And even this revenue isn’t guaranteed. It isn’t prudent to forecast substantial business rate income from this project.
2 Net Zero Teesside. This is the power station and carbon capture project underway at the former Redcar steelworks. It won’t start generating business rates until 2029 at the earliest. That’s an optimistic assumption, though, and a more realistic date is probably 2031.
Rose tinted spectacles
Ben Houchen went on to tell Cllr Pallister “that £45mn a year goes directly to RCBC, right? So, in 2029, the taxpayer is gonna be making £90mn a year from that site for the next 20 years.” Given the two funding streams above, and keeping in mind that these are the only two revenue streams that are actually contracted, Houchen’s statement is completely detached from reality.
Paying down debt
Houchen then claimed that the STDC, which is in debt to the tune of £414mn, could pay this debt off “within the next five or six years”. He continued “But there’s an argument to say that we don’t want the STDC to pay back the money quickly. We want to pay the money back (to the TVCA) like a mortgage, over 20 years. Because it means that the TVCA earns a lot of interest out of the loan it’s given. A bit like your mortgage, right?”.
Get real
But these are two public sector bodies. What difference does it make who pays the interest? The taxpayer has to fund the entire deal anyway.
But the cash is already rolling in
According to the mayor “the council are now getting £10mn a year more than they were getting as of two months ago. “That’s 10mn quid, brand new, on your bottom line”. Ben Houchen appears to be talking about business rate income from the SeAH factory again. At a 30 March 2026 meeting of the STDC, the TVCA’s Interim Group Director of Finance and Resources, Jo Moore, informed the committee of a forecast increase in business rates of £9,557mn for the 2026/27 Finance Year. This increase was awaiting final valuation by the Valuation Office Agency (VOA). Ben Houchen now seems to be suggesting that, not only has the VOA agreed this final valuation with RCBC, but the RCBC has billed SeAH for the full amount, and SeAH has paid it.
More money than we can spend
Houchen then really warmed to his theme, “All of a sudden, you’ve got more than enough money not to ask the government to build a new flyover over on the A19, or a tunnel between. You know, all of those things become really, really achievable without having to ask anybody for money, when you’ve got those types of revenue streams.” So, TVCA Director of Infrastructure Jonathan Spruce will never have to submit a Local Transport Delivery Plan to the Department for Transport ever again. Just cash the Teesworks business rates cheque each April, and hand out bags of cash.
Jam tomorrow
Houchen went on to tell the committee “This isn’t ‘jam tomorrow’. We’re actually getting this money. So the whole nonsense about, ‘Oh, yeah. Well, you say it is Ben, but it doesn’t happen.’ This is real now. That’s the start bit”. This is fine, but Teessiders have been hearing ‘jam tomorrow’ statements from Ben Houchen since he was first elected Tees Valley Mayor in May 2017. You can read about more of this jam here; An electric arc furnace, small modular nuclear reactors, sustainable aviation fuel plants etc etc.
Best value?
It’s worth noting that, while Houchen fantasises about future business rates, the TVCA remains subject to an extended Best Value Notice from the government after failing to meet expected Value for Money standards. At the same time, the authority continues to struggle to recruit permanent appointments to several key statutory roles, including the Monitoring Officer, Finance Director and Head of Governance.
Social value?
But perhaps it’s all fine. When Cllr Pallister asked about the social value of Teesworks, Houchen pointed to the Teesworks Foundation, saying it supports community projects and “does a lot of support in Redcar and East Cleveland and Middlesbrough”. That’s jam today, isn’t it?
Teesworks benevolence
The Teesworks Benevolent Foundation was incorporated at Companies House in 2023 and has four directors:
- Jacqueline Corney – wife of Teesworks chief executive and shareholder Martin Corney
- Chris Harrison – Teesworks shareholder
- Ray Mallon – former Mayor of Middlesbrough
- Matthew Johnson – Wynyard Park developer and long-time associate of Teesworks shareholder Chris Musgrave
When the foundation was officially launched in January 2024, Ray Mallon said it was “yet to be formally set up as a charity” because trustees were waiting for a bank account to be established before applying to the Charity Commission. More than two years later, the foundation does not appear on the Charity Commission register and no charity registration number is displayed on its website.
Grants not guaranteed
While the foundation says it exists to support charitable and community causes across the Tees Valley, it does not appear to publish an annual grant register detailing how much funding has been awarded, who has received it, or how funding decisions are made. Its filed accounts also provide limited information about income and grant distributions.
There is no clear public evidence showing how much of the £200,000 per year reportedly pledged by Teesworks’ private shareholders has actually been paid into the foundation.
Good governance?
Questions may also be asked about governance and independence. The founding board includes individuals with close connections to Teesworks shareholders. Whether that is a strength or a weakness is a matter for readers to decide, but it is difficult to view the foundation as entirely separate from the Teesworks project itself.
None of this is evidence of wrongdoing. However, the absence of detailed public reporting makes it difficult to independently assess the scale of the foundation’s activities, the source of its funding, or the distribution of its grants.
It’s getting sticky
To a sceptic, it may look less like charity and more like reputation management. Even so, some good may come from the crumbs handed down by the multi-millionaire shareholders of Teesworks.
After all, as Ben Houchen told the scrutiny committee, this isn’t supposed to be “jam tomorrow” any more. Yet, the public funded the bakery, others appear to have taken the cake, and Teessiders are once again being invited to celebrate the crumbs while waiting for the jam to arrive.
