Let me introduce you to Jonathan Spruce, the new Director of Infrastructure at the Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA). Spruce finally started work at the TVCA on 7 April 2026, four months after his appointment was first announced.
The long wait
Despite the announcement by Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen on 12 December 2025, that Jonathan Spruce was about to take charge of infrastructure in the Tees Valley, he wasn’t about to start work at the TVCA. Spruce had to first work out an extended notice period with his previous employer. Here’s an excerpt from the 12 December TVCA Cabinet meeting papers, confirming Jonathan’s early Christmas present:
A cunning plan…
Despite not actually working for the TVCA, Jonathan Spruce has had to prepare for his crucial role in managing £978mn of infrastructure cash on behalf of the TVCA over the next five years. In order to do this, Spruce has devised the Local Transport Delivery Plan (LTDP). His current employers gave him a few hours leave on Friday 20 March 2026, so that Jonathan Spruce could present a draft version of the LTDP to the TVCA Cabinet meeting. The TVCA, and its five constituent local authorities, will refine the draft plan until a final version is agreed with the Department for Transport (DfT) in September 2026. The LTDP can be found in “Further Reading” at the end of this article. Spoiler alert: Neither Jonathan Spruce nor the TVCA have got £978mn in cash. It’s a notional sum of money, which will be doled out in small tranches by the DfT, as and when it sees fit.
…which fell apart immediately
Three days after Spruce presented his LTDP, it fell apart at the seams. Due to a funding crisis at the South Tees Development Corporation (STDC), the TVCA asked the Department for Transport (DfT) to divert £100mn in transport funding from the TVCA to the South Tees Development Corporation (STDC). As part of this process, the TVCA and the STDC started prioritising projects which didn’t meet the HM Government threshold for a business case, over ones that did. More on this later.
Oh, I know this one
Transport aficionados may detect an uncanny similarity between the £978mn in the LTDP, and the £1bn from the cancelled HS2 project. For those who haven’t been following this closely, these two funding pots are distantly related. On 15 January 2024, Ben Houchen launched his bid to be re-elected Tees Valley Mayor in May 2024 by announcing an enormous £1bn sum that had been handed to him by Rishi Sunak. You’ve probably memory-holed Sunak by now but, back in January 2024, he was actually Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Sunak just had nixed the northern leg of the HS2 rail project. He decided that he would use the magic money tree of the HS2 cancellation dividend to spread largesse throughout the UK, just in time for the election campaign that he was secretly planning for July 2024.
Fool’s gold
As soon as Ben Houchen won his election, and Rishi Sunak lost his, the £1bn HS2 pot of gold vanished in a puff of smoke, and all of Ben Houchen’s 15 January 2024 promises went with it. That £1bn was notional money, see? Try spending some in your local pub tonight. However, the key difference between 2024 and 2026 is that there’s been a change of government, and the notional money may become real. But there’ll be strings attached. Once the final version of the LTDP has been agreed, the TVCA will need to select individual projects from the plan, then present a business case for each project to the DfT for sign-off.
I’ve got a list
At this stage, it’s worthwhile comparing the promises that Ben Houchen made in 2024, with what’s available now. First of all, Houchen inflated Rishi Sunak’s notional £1bn cash into a staggering £4bn worth of empty promises, as reported here. The list of pledges included, among other things, the repair ot the Transporter Bridge, a tunnel under the river Tees, a new level crossing in Redcar, two new railway stations at Teesside Park and Teesside airport, a direct rail service between Hartlepool and Darlington, and a £40mn refurbishment of South Bank railway station. In two separate, ridiculous promises made days earlier, Ben Houchen had blithely promised Teessiders a brand new £1.5bn general hospital and a £1.25bn electric arc furnace.
This doesn’t look right
On 26 January 2024, Ben Houchen duly submitted his plans to the TVCA Cabinet. But there was something odd. The transport budget in the Medium Term Financial Plan wouldn’t be £1bn, as pledged only 11 days earlier, but a much reduced £507mn. The numbers were contained in the agenda papers for the Cabinet meeting, but it seems nobody ever bothers reading them:
How did we do?
So, the money wasn’t there. It’s worthwhile revisiting Houchen’s 26 transport promises from January 2024 to see how many were met. The answer is zero. We’ve done a granular analysis of both the 2024 and 2026 promises. This can be found in ‘Further Reading’ at the end of this article. Our analysis also shows that several unicorn projects from January 2026 have, quite rightly, vanished without trace this time. The remaining ones have been recycled into the 2026 LTDP. But, as Ben Houchen limbers up for another election bid in 2028, it’s important to reiterate that he broke ALL of his 2024 election promises.
Would the £978mn LTDP be an improvement on the £1bn HS2 cash?
It’s not a high bar. The 2026 LTDP could improve on the 2024 proposals by just delivering one scheme. But the funding calculations behind the LTDP don’t make sense. The plan claims to include a 25% allowance for ‘overprogramming’. This sounds sensible; The cost of construction tenders is expected to rise by 5% in 2026 alone, even without taking the Iran war into account. So, looking at this excerpt from the LTDP, the total cost of capital projects is £1,267,193,000. If we add 25% ‘overprogramming’, this brings the total to £1,583,991,250. The Total Funding to Allocate right now is £1,121,954,000. That’s a shortfall of £462,037,250. Jonathan Spruce needs to explain to the TVCA how a shortfall approaching £500mn is going to be met.
Unrealistic assumptions
Nine of the LTDP projects recycled from January 2024 haven’t been uplifted to account for inflation. These include the largest scheme in the plan, the Darlington Northern Link Road (DNLR). Repair of the Transporter Bridge is still budgeted at £30mn, whereas independent reports put the cost of this north of £70mn.
You do the maths
You can find Jonathan Spruce’s convoluted maths on Page 285 of the 20 January TVCA Cabinet papers. These can be found in “Further Reading” at the end of this article. But the situation is even worse than this. Of the 26 projects in the LTDP, only three are thought to be likely to meet the HM Government threshold for a business case proposal. Here they are, in this excerpt from our LTDP analysis:
Okay then, it’s only two…
The gauge clearance work on the Eaglescliffe to Northallerton railway line should be first out of the blocks, as the TVCA has been promising this since 2016. The inclusion of the Teesworks East Transport Hub must be a clerical error by Jonathan Spruce. This project, also known as the Redcar Park + Ride, was budgeted for three years ago, and the work is almost complete.
…and one of them is very expensive
If the DNLR project gets the go-ahead, it will swallow up almost half of the entire TVCA transport budget for the next four years, even without taking inflation into account. A reasonable inflation uplift would add £25mn to the cost of this project alone. But the DNLR is crucial to the controversial Skerningham Garden Village project, a scheme backed by Ben Houchen. An extract from the Medium Term Financial Plan (MTFP) can be seen below.
Something smells fishy
However, on 23 March 2020, only three days after the draft LTDP was approved by the TVCA Cabinet and forwarded to the DfT, the TVCA decided to tear its own plan to pieces. When the agenda papers for the 30 March 2026 STDC Board papers were published, an update from Jo Moore, the TVCA Interim Group Director of Finance and Resources caught the eye. Here is an excerpt from Jo’s update:
Words matter
This was a request for the DfT to allocate £100mn of transport funding, not to the TVCA, which is the authority for transport, but to the STDC, which most definitely isn’t. The final part of that paragraph is even more disturbing. The £100mn transfer from the TVCA “will lead to the STDC existing borrowing requirement reducing”. This left no doubt that a cash transfer was intended, not for transport, but to ease the STDC’s dire over-borrowing situation.
A mayor writes
To confuse matters even more, four days after the STDC Board papers were published, Ben Houchen leaked to the Local Democracy Service (LDRS) that a project to refurbish South Bank railway station was included in that cash transfer. So, would this be the first promise to be resuscitated from Houchen’s long list of broken promises from the 2024 mayoral election campaign? If so, it begs a couple of questions: The South Bank station refurbishment is also known as the Teesway West Transport Hub (TWTH). When first announced by Ben Houchen in January 2024, it was budgeted at £40mn. But construction cost increases seem to have since inflated this to £49.5mn. This would leave £50.5mn remaining out of that £100mn cash transfer. Which projects would the balance be spent on?
Teesworks / East A66 / A174 Growth Corridor
The TWTH forms part of the Teesworks Growth Corridor, so presumably the remaining £50.5mn would be allocated to another project in this corridor. However, the four projects in the corridor are budgeted at £120mn, not £100mn, as can be seen in another excerpt from our LTDP analysis below:
Make this make sense
But, apart from the maths not working (we’d expect that from the TVCA) there are several problems with this. First of all, Jonathan Spruce has categorised South Bank station (the TWTH) as NOT LIKELY to meet the government’s threshold for a business case. So why is Ben Houchen giving this unlikely project first priority? Surely, the Eaglescliffe to Northallerton rail project, which has a good business case, and has been waiting for ten years, should be given top billing? Next up could be the Teesworks Freight Transport Hub (TFTH). But that doesn’t have a business case either. How about the Teesworks East Transport Hub (TETH)? No, we’ve already established that this project was budgeted for three years ago, and shouldn’t even be in the LTDP. This leaves the ‘A66 Capacity Constraints’ as a possibility. But this only has a weak business case. And, even if added to the TWTH, the two projects don’t add up to £100mn.
Give us the details
During the 30 March STDC Board meeting, Alec Brown, the leader of Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council, said it might be “prudent” for STDC Board/TVCA to issue a list of the projects that had already been agreed, which would be delivered with the £100mn. STDC CEO John Barnes said that details were already contained within the papers for the 20 March TVCA Cabinet meeting. But we have established that they are not. A reminder that the papers for this cabinet meeting can be found in “Further Reading” at the end of this article.
So what really happened here?
On 30 March, Mr Barnes told the STDC Board that the papers for this meeting “could have been clearer”, which he recognised has allowed some of the “confusion to take hold”, adding there would be “greater clarity” in future reporting. The papers for this meeting can be found in “Further Reading” at the end of this article. Jo Moore confirmed “there are indications that a change control had been approved by DfT for certain projects – that would fall, potentially, within STDC’s remit, themselves to oversee.” She added that the understanding that a change control had been approved has now “proved to be incorrect”.
Never put it in writing
But there is no doubt that Jo Moore knew that this was a cash transfer, despite John Barnes’ denials. Because, as seen below, Jo Moore’s request included a virement of £100mn from the TVCA to the STDC. ‘Virement’ is public authority speak for ‘an authorized transfer of funds’.
So why does the STDC desperately need this cash?
Jo Moore made this clear in her update to the 20 March 2026 Cabinet meeting. A failure by the STDC to service the interest on the loans made to the corporation is the most significant risk that the TVCA faces. This risk would be mitigated by arranging a £100mn cash transfer from the DfT to the STDC:
Omnishambles
So, the LTDP disintegrated into an omnishambles when the ink was barely dry on it. On 3 April 2026, the TVCA hastily scheduled another Cabinet meeting for 24 April, two months earlier than the planned one, presumably to deal with the fallout from this debacle. Ben Houchen will need to explain why he has shown favourism to one set of projects, in one mayoral development corporation, at the expense of the other two corporations, and all five constituent Local Authorities of the TVCA. And why he has selected projects with no business case instead of ones that have. Now that Jonathan Spruce actually works at the TVCA, he needs to present a workable, realistically budgeted LTDP.
Tees Valley Review
Twenty seven months have elapsed since the publication of the Tees Valley Review (TVR) Report. In the report, 28 recommendations were made in an effort to improve governance. But this episode shows that the TVCA and the STDC have learned absolutely nothing regarding the 28 TVR recommendations. And finally, a friendly reminder that the Best Value Notice (BVN), issued by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to the TVCA on 3 April 2025, was due to expire on 3 April 2026. As of the publication date of this article, there hasn’t been any news about whether the BVN will be extended. This episode can’t have helped the TVCA in its efforts to get the BVN lifted.
The TVCA was approached for comment on this story but declined to do so.
Thanks to James Waterson for providing additional research for this article.
Further Reading
Local Transport Delivery Plan
Local Transport Delivery Plan analysis
Agenda papers for the 20 March 2026 TVCA Cabinet meeting
