The Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA) began a consultation on the Darlington Northern Link Road (DNLR) on 31 July 2026. The DNLR is meant to bypass the north of Darlington, taking heavy freight off residential streets. Or so the TVCA claims.
It’s got history
The DNLR has been a long time in the making. The Ministry of Transport, as it was then known, completed the A1(M), to the west of Darlington, in 1965. The A66(M) spur was built at the same time. The spur road links Junction 57 of the A1(M) to the southern outskirts of Darlington. The town had to wait another 20 years before the A66(M) was connected to the A66 on the other side of town. This was the Darlington South Bypass, completed in 1985, linking the A66(M) spur to the A66 dual carriageway at Little Burdon. This section connects to Teesside.
Northern bypass
There’s been talk of a northern bypass since the completion of the southern one. This would link the A66 at Little Burdon to the A1(M) at Junction 59. Proponents of the bypass say that it’s necessary to ensure that the heavy flow of traffic between Teesside and The North, particularly freight, is kept off the streets of Darlington. However, there’s already an existing route between these two destinations. Teesside-bound traffic can exit the A1(M) at Junction 60, then follow the A689 and A19 to reach Teesside. And vice versa, of course.
Is your journey really necessary?
But populist politicians love expensive road projects. So, after being elected as Tees Valley Mayor May 2017, Conservative Ben Houchen launched a consultation process on a DNLR. The Darlington public was consulted on two alternative routes for the road, as follows:
Route A
This route did what was asked of it. A bypass of Darlington, connecting the A66 at Little Burdon with Junction 59 of the A1(M), with no intervening junctions.
Route B
This route was far more complicated. This would have traversed a yet-to-be-constructed garden village at Skerningham, and an at-grade intersection with the A167 at Beaumont HIll, before reaching Junction 59 from the south. Both routes can be seen on the map below. Route B wouldn’t have performed the main function of the bypass, ie removing heavy traffic from the built-up area. The residents of Darlington quite sensibly plumped for Route A. But it was all in vain, because in reality there had never been any cash for either route. You just can’t trust politicians.
Election ahead
On 3 January 2024, Ben Houchen launched his bid for re-election as Tees Valley Mayor. Fortunately for Lord Houchen, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had just cancelled the northern leg of the insanely expensive High Speed 2 (HS2) railway project. Coinciding with Houchen’s election bid, Sunak suddenly declared a £1bn dividend for the Tees Valley Mayor’s combined authority (TVCA) using the HS2 cash. How jammy was that? I wrote here how Houchen immediately made election promises worth £4bn, four times the HS2 “dividend”. Three weeks later, on 24 January 2024, in addition to that £4bn magic money tree, Houchen persuaded the TVCA Cabinet to hand over another £250mn for the DNLR,
Who’d have thought it?
Enough people believed Ben Houchen’s ludicrous promises, and he won his May 2024 election. Time to get on with the DNLR, then? Maybe not. Three months after his election victory, Houchen’s TVCA paid London consultancy firm Jacobs £500,000 to produce an Options Assessment Report (OAR) on the DNLR. The OAR was to be completed by January 2025.
The DNLR gets spruced up
The TVCA hired a new Director of Infrastructure, Jonathan Spruce, in December 2025. Spruce’s first task, as directed by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) was to produce a Local Transport Delivery Plan (LTDP). Due to the terms of his existing employment, Spruce was unable to officially start work for the TVCA until April 2026. No problem: Jonathan Spruce was able to cobble the LTDP together by copying and pasting a load of “HS2 dividend” projects from Ben Houchen’s fictional January 2024 election manifesto.
That wasn’t going to end well
You can read about the predictable omnishambles of the LTDP here. The maths just didn’t stack up. In fact NOTHING stacked up. Eight days after writing my article about Spruce’s farcical LTDP, North East Bylines published the second in a series of five articles on the subject of Skerningham Garden Village. You can read this article here. It includes criticism of the TVCA for not publishing Jacobs’ £500,000 OAR for the DNLR, which was 15 months overdue by this stage. Also, in January 2024, Ben Houchen had promised the TVCA Cabinet that there would be spades in the ground on the DNLR within two years. Two years and three months later, there were no spades in the ground.
An amazing coincidence
Within hours of the publication of my article on 17 April 2026, the TVCA published Jacobs’ OAR. What are the chances?
Spoiled for choice
The OAR contained no less than eight options for the DNLR. However, when scored according to the EAST summary and decision-making tool, three of these routes weren’t considered viable on the grounds of cost.
The obvious route
But, importantly, the first two options, Routes 1 and IA, were the only ones that stayed true to the original intention of the DNLR: A direct connection between the A66 at Little Burdon, and Junction 59 of the A1(M). You can compare routes 1 and 1A on the map below with “Route A” from the 2017 consultation, shown near the top of this article.
Skerningham Garden Village
The remaining six routes from the OAR don’t do the job as originally intended. They are mainly variations on the rejected “Route B” from the 2017 consultation, intended more as a distributor road for the proposed Skerningham Garden Village.
The second consultation begins
And so to the latest consultation on the DNLR, which began on 31 July 2026. “Route A” from 2017, and its April 2026 variations, Routes 1 and 1A, have vanished completely. The newly available options can be seen on the consultation map below.
Do Minimum Option
So, right at the top of the consultation document, we find the “Do Minimum Option”. This alignment “would run to the south of the River Skerne and broadly follow the corridor identified for the proposed Skerningham Garden Village through-route”. You bet it would. The document continues “Along its length, the route would incorporate several new roundabouts to provide access and connectivity, with a total of five roundabouts proposed.” This isn’t how a bypass is supposed to work.
More ambitious
The “more ambitious” option avoids building three roundabouts, but it’s still effectively a distributor road for Skerningham Garden Village. All of the options link to the A167, way short of Junction 59 of the A1(M). Variant B also connects to Whessoe Road for some reason, and seems to have been added purely for comedy value.
Be more specific
And, frustratingly, the consultation maps lack detail. In response to criticism from several Darlington councillors and residents, the TVCA noted that “the route options being presented are concept designs and the maps are intended to only show broad corridors, with potential additional connections that are being considered. The feedback we receive will inform the next stage”. Fiendishly, the consultation maps don’t mention Skerningham Garden Village at all.
Gunning Principles
However, according to the Gunning Principles of consultation, the TVCA must give “sufficient reasons for any proposal to permit of intelligent consideration and response”. Consultees can’t rely on vague “broad corridors”; they need to know which properties will be affected. The TVCA is going to have to do better.
Thumb on the scales
But, well before the current consultation, Ben Houchen was putting his thumb on the scales regarding the DNLR. During a BBC Tees phone-in on 6 August 2025, Houchen told caller Leanne that “Darlington Council, a number of months ago, adopted and approved a masterplan which included many houses being built in north Darlington. The masterplan shows the DNLR going through that development. Darlington Council has already signed off on where the road is going to go.”
Predetermination
Ben Houchen was talking about Skerningham Garden Village distributor road, of course. But, why waste nearly two years, and £500,000, to commission Jacobs to produce an OAR? And why bother wasting even more time and money on a public consultation starting in July 2026? It would appear that the dice are already heavily loaded in favour of the “Do Minimum” option from the above map.
A bit louder for those at the back
In March 2026, Houchen weighed into the DNLR debate again. This time it was a mayoral question time at Mowden Park in Darlington. I reported on this for North East Bylines at the time. You can read my report here, but I’ll reiterate this passage: The Northern Echo’s Chris Lloyd asked Ben Houchen how the DNLR was progressing. His reply dismayed the people of Skerningham: “The advice that I’m getting from officials is that, because of what Darlington has done, it makes it very difficult to deliver what I think people originally intended” Houchen was referring to “Route A”, agreed way back in 2017. “Because of the Masterplan that the council had adopted, they have a road through the middle of their Masterplan, and so when I’m told by officials, they say, look, if we want to build this big road here, the Department for Transport (DfT) will say no.”
Lola McEvoy isn’t impressed
In August 2026, Darlington MP Lola McEvoy wrote to local residents to express her concerns about the ongoing consultation. McEvoy noted that the DNLR was intended to reduce through-traffic, and improve air quality, in the north of the town. In essence, “Route A” is the only one that would accomplish this. The others don’t cut it. And Route A isn’t on the menu anymore.
Calling the Mayor’s bluff
Lola McEvoy has also written to the DfT to ask for clarity on any guidance given by their officials or Ministers that stated that the “Route A” option should not be taken to full public consultation. McEvoy has also asked Ben Houchen for the full costing analysis provided by Jacobs’ OAR in April 2026. The TVCA decided not to publish this.
Jumping the gun
On 26 August, Darlington Council’s Economy and Resources Scrutiny Committee reviewed the Local Plan. The review noted that “the site will require the delivery of a new local distributor road between the A167 north of Beaumont Hill and the A1150 close to the Little Burdon roundabout. It is expected that the internal distributor road will need to be fully operational prior to the occupation of between the 900th and 1500th dwelling”. So, they’re talking about the “Do Minimum” option from the July consultation, also known as the Skerningham Garden Village distributor road.
Forward funding
The review continued “as such, it may be necessary for the Council, other agencies or bodies, or a combination of both, to forward-fund items of common infrastructure, as sufficient S106 (private sector) contributions for their delivery may not yet have been collected”.
Don’t do it
The report will go before a full council meeting on 8 September. Darlington Council would be wise not to splash any cash until the TVCA’s consultation process for the DNLR has been exhausted.
Friendly reminder
The private sector contribution for the distributor road is meant to be funded by the main partners in the Skerningham Garden Village project, Martin Corney and Chris Harrison. These men are two of the four joint venture partners in Ben Houchen’s signature Teesworks project. Here’s a reminder of the profits extracted by the Teesworks joint venture partners up until March 2025:
Have your say
So, is the DNLR consultation an actual consultation, or a fait accompli? Is a bypass a bypass if it doesn’t bypass the town it’s meant to bypass? Have your say here by 25 September 2026.
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