The year in headlines from Ben Houchen lying to councillors owing council tax
The best of our exclusive investigative stories from 2025
Happy new year! I was back this week, and I’ll be honest, I struggled to remember all my passwords and login details. I hope you manage better than me!
This edition was supposed to look at the latest set of Teesworks Ltd accounts, but the deadline for timely submission to Companies House has passed, and they are now officially overdue. Instead, this edition will look back at the top stories of 2025 from The Teesside Lead.
There’s more work to be done, but sometimes as you climb a mountain it’s good to look back and see what you’ve scaled to this point. Hopefully it shows how important supporting The Teesside Lead is, whether that’s through subscribing for free, sharing articles, or even taking a paid sub if you’re able to.
Thanks for reading and for your support!
I’ll be back on Wednesday.
Leigh
⚽ Hartlepool United finally has a new owner, nearly three years after it was put up for sale by Raj Singh. American Landon Smith, of whom very little is known, now owns the Pools. He’s one of the founders of Tailwind Group, a property company specialising in student flats in the US. Property developers owning football clubs? Fear not, the club’s Victoria Road ground is of course owned by Hartlepool Borough Council.
Council tax investigation continues…
A big part of the early days of The Teesside Lead was my investigation into councillors who hadn’t paid their council tax.
In February I revealed a Hartlepool councillor paid their council tax arrears after I stuck my nose in and found out they were in arrears.. At the time of my FOI query, they owed the council £176 - the same as a month’s payment for a Band C property.
After battling to find out who it was and delays from the council, the councillor in question had cleared their backlog.
You can read the full story here.
The following week, I discovered a single councillor in Stockton owed the council nearly £6,000 in unpaid council tax. That’s over a year of arrears for the most expensive property band in the council area. The council refused to name the councillor in question, despite clear legal precedent, citing concerns over councillor safety.
More than 20,000 tonnes of hazardous waste dumped incorrectly
February was also the month I revealed over 20,000 tonnes of hazardous waste had been dumped into a non-hazardous landfill, just yards from a Site of Special Scientific Interest. It represented four years’ worth of waste from an incinerator at the Wilton site, and included concentrations of lead, copper, zinc and nickel.
Operator Sembcorp was forced to pay £290,000 to Tees Valley Wildlife Trust as penance. Read the story here.
BP cancel green hydrogen plant at Teesworks
In what was a huge scoop - probably my biggest of the year - I revealed that BP had dropped its plans for a green hydrogen plant on Teesside. It was the first of two major projects the oil giant backed out of on Teesside in 2025, and on its own represented 700 jobs for the area.
Ben Houchen urged to reveal purpose of £13,000 staff trip to Cannes
At the beginning of June I revealed Tees Valley Combined Authority spent £13,000 sending two staff members to the south of France to a conference in which they met with absolutely nobody.
During the same week five members of staff were sent to SXSW in Austin, Texas, at a cost of £19,000.
Collapsed fire brigade company owed taxpayers over £1.6m
A company owned by Cleveland Fire Authority (a statutory body made up of local councillors to which Cleveland Fire Brigade is accountable, collapsed in August with debts of more than £1.8m. By far the biggest creditor (and loser) was HMRC, which was owed £1.6m by the failed business.
These debt was much higher than councillors who make up Cleveland Fire Authority were told of when they decided to liquidate the company at an extraordinary meeting at the start of August.
Installation and removal of Linthorpe Road cycle lane cost taxpayers £4m
In another exclusive story, I revealed that the installation and removal of Linthorpe Road’s controversial cycle lane cost a total of £4m. The total cost of removing it, paid by TVCA, is £2.4m.
The grant which paid for its installation didn’t need to be repaid, although it lowers the chances of TVCA getting grant funding for similar active travel projects in the future.
Hopefully, this is the last time we ever have to hear about that cycle lane.
Read here (if you can stand it).
Ben Houchen lied about contact with Sabic over redundancies
In maybe the most satisfying bit of journalism I achieved in 2025 is this story.
When he appeared on his monthly BBC Radio Tees phone-in in August, Lord Houchen spoke to a worker being made redundant at Sabic as they closed their Olefins 6 cracker. He told the caller that TVCA had been “in direct contact with Sabic” over the redundancies.
This was a lie.
TVCA reached out to Sabic and made their first contact three hours after I submitted an FOI request to see what contact they had had.
This is the sort of direct holding to account of politicians I’m really proud of doing with The Teesside Lead, and it’s thanks to readers and supporters that I can do it.
BP drop plans for blue hydrogen plant at Teesworks
This was a story that was followed every step of the way throughout the year on The Teesside Lead, but in the event this still seemed to have come from out of nowhere.
BP dropped plans for their blue hydrogen plant next to Net Zero Teesside after a spat between government departments and change of strategy for Teesworks Ltd, who now want to use their land to create an AI data centre instead.
Read the story here.
Wes Streeting met Andy Burnham twice while ignoring Ben Houchen
In the last investigation of the year, I revealed that Wes Streeting held at least two meetings with Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham while ignoring 13 requests for a meeting from Ben Houchen.
It matters because Ben Houchen was re-elected on the promise of delivering a new hospital to replace the crumbling North Tees hospital. He said he’d use all the power he could to persuade the people who could make it happen, but it looks like his powers have yet to be deployed.
Solid year of accountability journalism. The hazardous waste story with lead concentrations near a protected site is the kind of environmental violation that often goes unreported until it's way too late. What I found most impresive was the Houcen-Sabic investigation, tracking down that the TVCA only contacted them after your FOI request exposed the lie. That's investigative work creating real-time accountability instead of just documenting failures after the fact. The council tax arrears follow-ups also show how persistent local journalism can actually move the needle on seemingly small issues that add up.