A quiet Christmas

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Until TIAL decided to submit their accounts to Companies House. Yes you read that right: Teesside International Airport Limited chose to submit their 2023/2024 annual accounts on 24 December 2024. You can find the accounts in ‘Further Reading’ below. Now, why would TIAL choose to upload its accounts when people are least likely to pay attention? Well, Scott Hunter of Tees Valley Monitor was paying attention, and he reported it on Boxing Day. A good day to bury bad news? Well told. So what have we learned?

Jumping the gun

Ben Houchen tried to get ahead of the story in September 2024 by declaring that Teesside Airport hadn’t made an eye-watering annual loss in 2023/2024, but had in fact made a profit of £308,555. He did this by announcing the EBITDA figure, which is the surplus before deducting items such as debt interest. As debt interest is one of the largest items on the TIAL balance sheet, this could be seen as misrepresentation of company accounts. Houchen showed a banner exclaiming “First profit in a decade” especially for the photo op.

Kate is in the news again

No, not that one. ‘Consultant’ Kate Willard received £35,280 this time. In addition to being a corporate director of TIAL, she’s also a board member of its holding company Goosepool 2019 Limited, of which more later. Kate Willard was previously advisor to Stobart Aviation, where her key piece of advice to Stobart seems to have been to sell up their share in Teesside Airport.

The interventionist free marketeer

The accounts reveal that the new aircraft painting facility at Teesside Airport, Hangar 4, was entirely funded by Teesside public money at a cost of £6.5mn. It’s an expensive way of buying 20 jobs for a firm called Airbourne Colours. This is strange behaviour indeed from Ben Houchen, the doyen of Tufton Street think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs. Houchen’s posts on Conservative Home regularly extol the virtues of the free market.

Baron Houchen of High Leven

But, the Tees Valley mayor behaves very differently when he leaves Teesside for London. By train or private jet, I suppose, because there are no commercial flights between Teesside Airport and London. The new hangar can be seen in the photos below. In the second one it can be seen behind the degraded remains of the former Teesside Airport railway station. Until the station closed it was the least used one in the UK.

Teesside Airport station, photo by Ray Casey

Business Park South

Another money pit for hard-pressed Teessiders. The TVCA has used £32.6mn of our cash for this. I’ll start with Mynarski Way, the link road between the business park and the A67. In February 2024, TIAL boasted that this road had been completed, but on my recent visit, neither the road nor the pavement has been. However, TIAL has gone ‘green’ by installing a solar panel in the middle of the road.

The latest accounts reveal that only one business unit has been completed at the park itself. It’s possible that the International Fire Training Centre may relocate to this unit from the north side of the airport, but this hasn’t been confirmed.

So how did we get here?

We didn’t arrive by air, because there are hardly any flights. Ben Houchen’s chief 2017 election pledge was to bring the airport into ‘public ownership’. In January 2019, an emergency meeting of the TVCA agreed to spend £40mn to buy Peel Holdings’ 89% stake in the airport. Two months later, Stobart Aviation bought 25% of this stake and became the operator of the airport. The airport has been losing money hand over fist ever since, and as of 31 March 2024, it owed Teessiders £150mn via loans from the TVCA to its parent company Goosepool 2019 Limited, as can be seen from the following extract from the TVCA 2023/2024 accounts. The TVCA disclosed this in a response to this Freedom of Information request. You’ll notice, however that their accompanying letter refers to the Goosepool Group long term debt as £150,941. But the accounts linked in the letter show the correct amount, which is £150,941,000 as shown below:.

Teesside Airport debts, courtesy of TVCA

He does a lot of work for charity, and doesn’t like to talk about it

Airport fans will know that the ‘public ownership’ of Teesside Airport is something of a misnomer. Two years after the creation of Goosepool 2019 Limited, Stobart Aviation quit the airport. Houchen had anticipated this by setting up Goosepool 2021 Limited two months earlier. When Stobart left, the mayor transferred the shares of the Stobart Group into the ownership of Goosepool 2021, changed its name to the Teesside Airport Foundation (TAF), and declared it a charity. As per Tees Valley Monitor (TVM) “It is on account of the charity’s 25% shareholding that the holding company evades scrutiny via freedom of information, as the company is classed as not 100% in public ownership”.There are links to three TVM pieces below. They are highly recommended reading:

Teesside Airport: Bad Governance and Plan B – Part 1

Teesside Airport: Bad Governance and Plan B – Part 2

Teesside Airport Foundation: Houchen’s Bogus Charity

Fiona Bruce is a big Teesside Airport fan

Who else sits on the board of the TAF ‘charity’? What about Brian Robinson? You’ll remember him from such shows as BBC Question Time on 21 March 2024, sitting next to his equally famous wife, Dawn ‘Pink Scarf Lady’ Robinson. The Question TIme production company, It has been reported that Mentorn Media, had highlighted two people in the audience to allow ‘impartial’ journalist Fiona Bruce to choose them for questions. Pink Scarf Lady was duly selected, and delivered a cringe-inducing Conservative Party political broadcast for Tees Valley mayoral candidate Ben ‘man of our time’ Houchen, only weeks ahead of the election on 2 May.

Charity begins at a tinpot airport

Page 3 of the 2023/2024 accounts refer glowingly to the TAF, which is “continuing to develop the Foundation’s long-term strategy and designing its case for support and its charitable fundraising activities.” Unfortunately no examples of this stellar work are provided. You can apply for a grant from the TAF here. Good luck with that.

Passenger numbers on the up?

Don’t be silly. Despite nearly eight years of relentless cock-eyed optimism from Ben Houchen, including almost daily social media posts such as this:

Unusually, the most recent accounts don’t feature the airport’s passenger numbers, so I’ve compiled them using CAA data. Passenger numbers are actually going backwards. Statistics for all UK airports are provided in ‘Further Reading’ below, but the following table shows a comparison between October 2024 and the same month a year earlier, with overall numbers down by 6%. Note that there’s a slight discrepancy between the two sets of statistics due to a variation in methodology:

Teesside Airport passenger statistics Download

But air freight is booming, right?

Well, no. In October 2024, the last month for which statistics are available, the airport handled 68 tonnes of freight in the entire month. By comparison, you can fit 113 tonnes of freight in one Boeing 747 cargo plane. UK airport freight statistics are listed in ‘Further Reading’ below.

Your visit to Teesside Airport

Outside of the entrance, a handy list of the places that you can’t fly to from Teesside Airport.

Once inside you can experience some Hollywood magic. The departure lounge bears a striking resemblance to the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic ‘The Shining’.