A seemingly routine South Tees Development Corporation (STDC) Audit & Governance Committee (AGC) meeting at the Teesworks Skills Academy on 19 February 2026 turned out to be anything but that. The Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA)’s Interim Group Director of Finance and Resources, Jo Moore, announced that she’s leaving.
The clue is in the title
Jo Moore had only been appointed into her interim role on 1 August 2025, the same day as Interim Monitoring Officer Jodie Townsend. Both appointments were for a period of up to 12 months. Neither Jo nor Jodie has stayed the course. Townsend left his post on 30 January 2026, to be replaced by another interim appointee, Jeanette McGarry. However, the TVCA will retain Townsend as a ‘call-off consultant, with fees of upwards of £45,000. Moore’s stint as a temp is expected to end on 31 March 2026.
Golden triangle
Time for a reminder that, only last summer, the TVCA churned through the entire ‘golden triangle’ of statutory officers in less than a month. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman lists these three roles as CEO, finance chief and monitoring officer. Firstly, Tom Bryant was appointed CEO on 27 June 2025, after the long, drawn out exit of previous CEO Julie Gilhespie. Prior to her appointment as CEO, Gilhespie was Director of Finance at both the TVCA and the STDC. Less than three weeks after Bryant’s appointment, Finance Director Gary Macdonald and Monitoring Officer Emma Simson suddenly left the TVCA on 17 July 2025, A Freedom of Information request into the circumstances of the departure of Macdonald and Simson still hasn’t received a full response from the TVCA. This matter is still under consideration by the Information Commissioner’s Office.
A sense of urgency
The TVCA was forced to take swift action. Jo Moore and Jodie Townsend were appointed to the finance and monitoring officer roles respectively on 1 August 2025. But the abruptness of the exits of the previous officers meant that the TVCA didn’t have time to appoint permanent replacements. I recently reported on the damage caused by this churn here.
New Year’s Resolution
Anybody who was expecting the new year of 2026 to bring much-needed stability to the TVCA and STDC was about to be disappointed. The departure of Jo Moore is particularly problematic because of the severity of the finance issues at the STDC.
External Audit
So, back to that STDC AGC meeting on 19 February 2026. Jo Moore was to present an external audit update to the committee. She began by advising members that revised draft financial statements related to the 2024/25 finance year had not been sent to the external auditors in time to meet the statutory backstop date of 27 February 2026. Moore then stunned committee members by stating “I’m only interim, and will be setting off into the sunset in the near future”.
She’s leaving home
The TVCA will have hoped that Jo Moore would fill out the full 12 months of her interim contract. Judging by the revelations that were to come at this meeting, she’s probably seen enough. So, yet another backstop date has been missed. There were two outstanding material matters related to the accounts. She confirmed that consultants Grant Thornton had been brought onboard, and their work was expected to be completed by the end of March. But, astonishingly, Jo Moore revealed that problems with the STDC accounts had become apparent in only her second day into her new role, back in August 2025.
And those problems are many
The STDC is a public body, but it has to interface with the private sector, namely Teesworks, but also its private sector subsidiary companies, South Tees Developments Limited (STDL) and the South Tees Site Company (STSC). Public sector bodies are subject to strict rules when it comes to separating revenue and capital expenditure. These lines are more blurred in the private sector. The interface between the two sectors has been extremely problematic to manage. Moore noted that “The shared service between the TVCA and STDC has not been properly cliented”. If the core records had been kept well, it would have been much easier to fix the problems. So, Sherlock Holmes is on the case, then. Examples of the sloppy work has included unwritten loan agreements and “informal agreements”.
April Fools Day
Strange to think that the STDC has been in existence since 1 August 2017, and yet this appalling lack of governance has never been addressed by the TVCA, the STDC or their external auditors. Jo Moore told the committee that she has been working with STDC CEO John Barnes to split services between the TVCA and the STDC. This work should be done by 1 April. We’ll see about that, but the clue may be in that date.
Close ties
House-builder Barnes has business connections with Teesworks Joint Venture partners Chris Musgrave and Martin Corney, as reported here. Ben Houchen should have thought twice before appointing private sector businessman John Barnes to what is, effectively, a public sector role; particularly someone with such close business connections to his private sector counterparts.
Wait, what?
Jo Moore confirmed that, within weeks of starting her role, she’d informed Tom Bryant that she’d been given an impossible job. She was expected to manage both borrowing and lending between the STDC and the TVCA. In other words, she said, she was expected to be both “poacher” and “gamekeeper”, an irreconcilable conflict of interest. This may have been news to Tom Bryant and Jo Moore, but it hadn’t been to the Tees Valley Review panel, who highlighted such conflicts two years ago. Moore confirmed that this interim role was the most difficult task that she had ever attempted.
Mission: Impossible
Conservative Councillor Peter Grogan (Kirkleatham ward, Redcar), who was representing the TVCA Audit and Governance Committee, asked Jo Moore whether she was working on an impossible task. “I think so”, came the reply. So, more than six months after concluding that the task that she had been handed was impossible to complete, Jo Moore had concluded that the task that she had been handed was impossible to complete. The STDC balance sheets are supposed to be reconciled on a monthly basis. Has this been done? No, it hadn’t been possible.
Keep it Clean
Moore detailed some more of the issues. Along with her colleagues she had had to do “transformational” work on the accounts from 2023/24 and 2024/25. Sometimes items were missing from the ledger, and the data had to be “cleansed” before the financial information was of any use. Grogan asked whether the TVCA has the capacity to do the “transformational” work. Jo Moore was grateful to Tayo Lawal, the Deputy Section 73 Officer, who had done some excellent work in this regard. But, guess what, Tayo’s appointment is on an interim basis. From now on, anyone who lasts more than six months at the TVCA will be presented with a gold watch.
Play until the final whistle
Geoff Westmoreland, the committee chair, used a football analogy “Would it be fair to say that we are running the team with loan players, and we need to get to the end of the season?” Moore concurred, but she was confident that most of the major issues had been resolved. However, this would be contingent on the STDC not entering into any “new arrangements and complex matters” that would fudge the boundary between the split services of the STDC and the TVCA. Good luck with that.
Formal Briefing
Jo Moore told Peter Grogan that she will almost certainly need to do a formal briefing on the transformation plan. There were no specifics about such a briefing, but the timescales would now appear to be clear. Assuming that Moore is expected to leave her employment on 31 March, the briefing would need to be presented to the TVCA Cabinet meeting on 27 March. It would, therefore, be required to be published in the agenda papers for this meeting on 20 March. It’s possible that Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen could try to persuade Jo Moore to insist on a confidential briefing, for the eyes of AGC committee members only. But, in the interests of transparency and accountability, values which the mayor claims to uphold, this would be inadvisable.
Cheap as chips
The committee moved on to the next agenda item, the Draft Auditors Annual Report for 2024/25, presented by accountants Ernst & Young (EY). EY’s Mark Rutter said that the company would have to offer a disclaimed opinion on both the 2023/24 and 2024/25 TVCA accounts. There were still some queries related to the South Bank Quay project and another Teesworks site, thought to be the neighbouring SeAH Factory. At this stage, it’s helpful to recall that Teesworks paid the STDC £13.56 for South Bank Quay and £96.79 for the 90-acre SeAH Factory site. Rutter emphasized the problems caused by the informality of the arrangements between Teesworks and the STDC. Apparently, EY still hasn’t located the cigarette packets on which the deals were jotted.
This is from the top floor
Stephen Reid, who is responsible for leading EY’s assurance services to government and public sector, recognized that missing the statutory backstops for two separate finance years was a serious matter, which would need to be recorded in his next report to the committee. EY would probably offer a disclaimed opinion on the 2025/26 accounts. But Rutter was more optimistic going forward. The 2026/27 would probably be allocated a ‘qualified’ opinion. That’s one notch above ‘disclaimed’. Then, by 2027/28 we’ll be home free with an ‘unqualified’ opinion.
Valuation Office
Independent committee member Adam O’Neill asked whether the issue with the loan agreements was holding up the audit arrangements. Rutter said no, this was more of a governance issue. Peter Grogan asked Rutter about the timescale for the repayments of the STDC loans. Grogan confirmed that the Valuation Office still hadn’t completed its re-evaluation of the business rates related to the SeAH Factory. This had been expected to take place by the end of January 2026. Yet another deadline blown through. Meanwhile, the factory has just lost its first major customer, is in debt to the tune of more than £1bn, and isn’t expected to generate positive cash flow until the end of 2026.
Money’s too tight to mention
The SeAH factory is meant to be one of the chief business rate generators for the STDC/Teesworks project. How’s that going? And the SeAH Factory delay is having knock-on effects elsewhere. For example, Peter Grogan noted that South Bank Quay isn’t generating the revenue required to service its £107mn loan from the STDC. Jo Moore pointed out the risk inherent in loans backed by revenue instead of assets. Public sector loans are very rarely revenue backed. Welcome to Teesside, Jo, we do things differently here.
So, what’s the future for the STDC? Firstly, a recap of recent events:
- In April 2023, Middlesbrough MP Andy McDonald claimed in Parliament that there was ‘industrial-scale corruption’ at the Teesworks project. Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen refuted these claims and called for an investigation by the National Audit Office (NAO). This was possibly done safe in the knowledge that his close Conservative Party colleague, Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove, would never do this
- The following month, in May 2023, Gove predictably stopped short of a NAO probe, instead setting up an ‘independent review’ with a limited remit.
- The independent review, known as the Tees Valley Review, published its report in January 2024.
- In September 2024, the TVCA responded to the review report. The response included the setting up of an Action Plan.
- On 3 April 2025, the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) issued the TVCA with a non-statutory Best Value Notice (BVN) to set expectations for, and to monitor, the continued improvement of TVCA as the organisation carries out its work.
- In June 2025, the TVCA produced an Organisational Improvement Plan in response to the BVN. Hopefully, the Action Plan produced in September 2024, in response to the Tees Valley Review Report has been adequately recycled. An Independent Advisory Board (AIB), whose role is to support and challenge the TVCA on its improvement journey, was established. This would be led by Rob Whiteman, most latterly the Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA)
Everything is fine, nothing to see here
To date, Whiteman has been sunnily optimistic about the TVCA’s progress towards removal of the BVN. All going well, this will happen on 3 April 2026, 12 months after the BVN was issued. Given recent events at the TVCA, its external auditors, and on the ground at STDC/Teesworks projects such as South Bank Quay and the SeAH Factory, this optimism must surely be misplaced. The MHCLG retains the option to appoint commissioners to take over the TVCA. Prior to the 2024 General Election, senior Labour party figures had called for the appointment of the NAO to investigate the TVCA.
You changed your tune
Once in government, Prime Minister Keir Starmer ignored these promises, then waited 11 months before initiating a less far-reaching BVN. Starmer has been shown to be weak and ineffectual. Should he be replaced after the May 2026 Local elections, it is to be hoped that his successor will finally show the determination to deal thoroughly with the shambles at the TVCA and the STDC. At a minimum, commissioners should be sent in to manage the authority. And the option to abolish all of the three expensive, failing Tees Valley mayoral corporations must be kept on the table.
Thanks to James Waterson for providing additional research for this article.
