Concerns about the financial sustainability of the Tees Valley Combined Authority have seen the Government order a statutory inquiry. It doesn’t sound like good news - but it’s something the authority says it welcomes.
On Tyneside there are plans for two more Tyne bridges as a draft Strategic Regeneration Framework (masterplan!) is announced for the area formerly known as NewcastleGateshead.
There’s a damning diagnosis for Berwick’s planned new hospital, the number of arrests following the A66 crash in Teesside which killed two police officers now stands at 50 and a balaclava ban in County Durham has moved a step closer.
Today is Restart A Heart Day and the ambulance service brings us a lovely story from a college where 200 students are going to be trained in CPR and receive inspiration from a lecturer whose life was saved after suffering a cardiac arrest at work earlier this year.
A council is having to divert manpower to clear dangerous waste that has been piled on a park in the middle of a housing estate, Dominic Cummings is coming to Newcastle to talk about what’s gone wrong in British politics, there’s a top European award for Kynren, and a Newcastle restaurant has been crowned Champion of Champions.
A lot going on - but you can read it all in two minutes or 22. It’s up to you.
Brian Aitken
Editor
Investigation escalation
Local government minister Jim McMahon said he had “material concerns” about the “long-term financial sustainability” of the Tees Valley Combined Authority and has ordered a statutory inquiry.
The move reflects concern in Whitehall about governance and value for money, according to the FT, and is an escalation of powers after the authority, led by Conservative mayor Ben Houchen, was issued with a Best Value Notice (BVN) in April 2025
TVCA said it welcomed the investigation which will be led by the former head of West Midlands Combined Authority Laura Shoaf. She will work with three assistant inspectors to look at TVCA’s compliance with the notice.
McMahon said he was worried about TVCA’s financial affairs due to its high levels of debt, increasing borrowing and interest costs, as well as its declining revenue reserves. The Teesside Lead has more on that here.
Private Eye took to social media yesterday to say: “Eye Told You So”. They also reminded people about their special report Stripped Tees which you can read in all its glory by clicking here.
More Tyne bridges
The wraps have been taken off a masterplan with the potential to see Tyneside become a “nationally recognised regeneration success story in the decades to come,” according to Newcastle council leader Colin Ferguson.
The draft Strategic Regeneration Framework (masterplan sounds better, don’t you think?) to revamp the centres of Newcastle and Gateshead is due to be debated over the coming weeks.
Proposals include two new footbridges across the Tyne, 16,000 new homes, and a range of transport improvements. This could involve the building of a Gateshead East train station near Gateshead College, upgrades to Gateshead Interchange and Manors Metro, potential river transport, and a Scotswood Line high-level linear park that could act as a pedestrian and cyclist route running west out of Newcastle city centre.
Damning diagnosis
The new Berwick Community Hospital will need to be stripped back to its structural steelwork after inspections found building work carried out so far was not up to standard.
Contractors Robertson, who came in after Merit went into administration, have been working with Northumbria Healthcare to determine what is needed for the scheme to progress. It has now been decided that much of the work done, including internal systems such as mechanical and electrical systems, pipework and internal walls as well as the external façade will need to be removed and replaced.
It is not known how much the extra work will cost and NHS bosses have told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that it is likely to impact on their wider capital funds and could require additional support from NHS England or the Department for Health.
Safety in numbers
North Durham MP Luke Akehurst hosted a parliamentary debate on police funding in the North East this week - Cleveland, Durham and Northumbria have 578 fewer officers than they did in 2010. This has led to public safety deteriorating, he said, with the North East having higher crime rates than other areas but lower police funding.
He highlighted a meeting he had with the Just For Women group in Stanley and pupils from St Bede’s School in Lanchester, which outlined how women did not feel safe in their own communities.
“In our discussion, the group highlighted their public safety concerns, recalling that they no longer feel safe walking home at night. They were clear that rather than simply catching perpetrators when awful crimes happen, our priority should be to prevent harm in the first place.”
50 arrests after crash
The wider police operation that began after two police officers and five young men died in a head-on-crash on the A66 in Teesside in August has resulted in 50 arrests so far. Shotguns, hand guns, machetes and ammunition have been seized, as well as £60,000 worth of class A and B drugs and more than £30,000 in cash.
Detective Chief Superintendent Helen Barker of Cleveland Police, said: “Over the last two months, we have identified 50 people who we believe are associated within criminal networks that seek to cause serious violence and harm within the community through the supply of drugs.”
She thanked the community for their support and patience. “I want to encourage you to keep on reporting behaviour that is related to drugs or organised crime - no matter how small - and be assured we will act.”
Balaclava ban takes step forward
Durham County Council’s Cabinet has approved a consultation on new measures to tackle anti-social behaviour including a ban on balaclavas. Councillor Stephen Bowron, chair of the Safer and Stronger Communities Overview and Scrutiny Committee, said that police and council staff were “inundated” with behaviour problems in town centres.
Danger tips removed
Waste, including gas canisters, paint and medical equipment, was piled on a playing field in the middle of a Birtley housing estate over the space of a week. Gateshead Council believes some of the waste had been dumped by criminals and a “minority of residents” ahead of Bonfire Night.
The council’s service director for environment Michael Lamb said: “This is not stuff you can just burn, we’ve got sofas, washing machines, gas bottles, aerosol canisters, you name it. From a public safety view, we cannot allow this to be burnt, the fumes, potential explosions, it needs to be removed and it will cost thousands.”
Blyth blow
Port of Tyne boss Martin Lawlor said he is disappointed in the Government’s decision not to fund the £55m Blyth Relief Road but said he would keep lobbying because of its importance in growing the town as a green energy hub.
Lifesaving skills
Today is Restart A Heart Day, an event that takes on added significance at Newcastle College where health lecturer Karen Pyle, 53, had her life saved earlier this year by friend and colleague Jessica Beni after suffering a cardiac arrest at work.
Karen will share her story today as more than 200 students will be equipped with the skills and confidence to deliver CPR and how to use a defibrillator by the North East Ambulance Service.
Karen said: “I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. It is scary to think about doing CPR and I don’t think you will ever be prepared for what happens. But being somewhere when it happens and not knowing what to do is scary too. The more people trained, the more lives that can be saved.”
Fringe benefits - and more
It seems rather fitting that this year’s Mercury Prize Fringe is getting underway just as the North East Mayor’s Events Fund opens for a second round of applications, with £6m available over the next two years to grow the region’s events calendar.
To the fringe first. It was a huge success last year and this year promises to be much bigger and better. Full details on the Generator website here.
Now to the events fund. Grants from £10,000 to £500,000 will be awarded to new or existing events with growth potential that showcase a distinctive North East identity, attract audiences, generate economic and community benefits, and support local participation.
Mayor Kim McGuinness said: “This fund is creating more chances for local artists and creators to grow, more opportunities for local people to take part and try something new, and more reasons to feel proud of this amazing region we all live in.
Expressions of interest can be submitted until November 26, with successful applicants supported to build a business case for funding.
Tax change pauses project
An £8.4m manufacturing project that could support more than 500 jobs has been paused over inheritance tax changes that are due to come into effect in April.
Trustee Paul Stiller, of Newton Aycliffe-based Stiller Warehousing & Distribution, said the Stiller Small Self-Administered Scheme (SSAS) had planned to invest in a 200,000 sq ft factory but halted the project over uncertainty about bringing unused pension funds, including SSAS assets, into inheritance tax.
“The new Chancellor needs to understand why this ill-advised tax change could have much wider consequences for investment, growth and jobs,” he said. “SSAS pensions have existed for more than 50 years and have become an important source of patient capital for Britain’s owner-managed businesses. They invest in factories, commercial property and growing companies. The prospect of losing 40% of the remaining value of these assets to inheritance tax is inevitably changing investment behaviour now.”
Four get share of £41m
A total of 74 heritage and faith buildings including churches, synagogues, town halls and castles will share £41m from the Places of Worship Renewal Fund and the Heritage at Risk Capital Fund. The North East recipients are Shildon Railway Institute, 8 & 9 Church Street, Hartlepool; St Nicholas Cathedral in Newcastle and the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady and St Columba in Wallsend.
A quick word
Middlesbrough was the only one of the 12 North East council areas to record a decline in population during the 12 months from mid-2024 to mid-2025. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show the number of residents fell by 1.2% to152,795. What’s gone wrong with British politics and what to do? is the title of a lecture to be given by Dominic Cummings at the Curtis Auditorium, Newcastle University, on Tuesday as part of the university’s INSIGHTS series. Tickets are free - but I think they’ve all been snapped up. A Cleveland police officer who featured in two series of Police Interceptors on Channel 5 is to face an accelerated misconduct hearing next week over various allegations including that he had sex with a female colleague in public, “knowing and intending that there be a risk of being caught”. Newcastle’s My Delhi has been named the Champion of Champions at the 2026 Asian Restaurant and Takeaway Awards. The restaurant, which has opened branches in Sunderland and Leicester and recently acquired Itihaas in Birmingham, had already been named North East Restaurant of the Year in the regional finals. North Tyneside Council’s school budget deficit is projected to hit £14m - with the recently-closed Monkseaton High School contributing around £8.6m to the figure. An auction of 96 Peter Rabbit sculptures, which formed a trail during the summer, raised £300,000 for St Oswalds Hospice. The figure beat the previous total raised by a Shaun The Sheep trail three years ago by £100,000. The players and staff at Gateshead FC have been paid their delayed wages for September after a takeover by US investment company Flacks Group. A 29-year-old man was arrested near Preston in connection with an illegal waste dump at Callerton near Newcastle Airport in a joint operation involving Lancashire Police and the Environment Agency. A little tern colony at Seaton Carew has experienced its toughest breeding season since establishing themselves at the site in 2019. The colony’s 83 nesting pairs produced just 17 fledglings, compared to 67 in 2025.
Plenty for 20
Twenty local creatives have been awarded a share of £78,000 to bring new arts and cultural projects to communities across County Durham. The funding is awarded through the 2026-27 Cultivate Commissions, a partnership between Into the Light and Northern Heartlands.
The commissions which span a variety of work from theatre and ceramics to music, dance and visual arts and are worth almost £4,000 each. You can see the full list of recipients here.
Top of the world
Ingleby Barwick teenager Harison Skelton, who balanced studies at Middlesbrough College with international competition, has been crowned motorcycle trials world champion. Harison, 18, has travelled across Europe to represent Great Britain in competitive races and secured the 2026 Trial3 World Championship in Zelhem at the TrialGP of the Netherlands.
He successfully completed his BTEC in electrical engineering last year and has since been working alongside his cousin renovating homes and buildings across the region.
Kynren’s top award
Kynren – The Storied Lands, which opened in Bishop Auckland in July this year, was named Top New Attraction at the 25th annual Parksmania Awards ceremony at Movieland Park near Verona, placing it alongside some of Europe’s most celebrated visitor attractions. Previous recipients include Disneyland Paris, Europa Park and Parc Astérix.
Business bites
The North East Chamber of Commerce has launched a new best practice guide aimed at helping employers deliver greater social and economic benefits through procurement, employment and community engagement. The chamber convened four stakeholder workshops which led to the establishment of its Social Value Working Group, co-chaired by public affairs manager Chris Kelsey and Esh Group director of corporate affairs and social value Darush Dodds. Newcastle business services and technology company Everything Managed Group, which has experienced massive growth since launching five years ago, is looking to create 120 jobs over the next three years. East Durham College has been named an approved skills delivery partner in the £250m regional skills programme which helps adults retrain, change careers and access new employment opportunities. Aykley Developments has announced a £50m plan to redevelop the AA’s former regional HQ on Newcastle Business Park. The proposal involves 151 one and two-bed homes, hospitality, social, retail and co-working space. A swimming pool, spa, gym, meeting rooms, podcast and art studios, cinema room, golf simulator and padel courts are also planned. NEPO, one of the UK’s leading public sector procurement organisations, has been named the region’s SME Apprenticeship Employer of the Year 2026 at the National Apprenticeship Awards. Eurowings is bringing back its twice-weekly service between Newcastle International Airport and Berlin from April to October 2027. The flights will be every Monday and Friday with one-way fares starting at £79.99. The Tees Valley Mayoral Authority has agreed plans for a Digital and Creative Enterprise and Innovation Hub in Middlesbrough and a Creative Production Hub in Hartlepool as part of the £160m Investment Zone capital programme. Hebburn-based Cottam Brush has been shortlisted in the Innovation of the Year category at the Made in Britain Impact Awards 2026 for its patent-pending SPLITGRIP roller brush system. Tioxide Materials has committed to adding dozens of staff to its Greatham site near Hartlepool. The workforce will increase to nearly 270 in the coming weeks and to more than 300 by 2027. The company restarted production in August after taking over the factory previously operated by Venator Materials UK.
2003 ad break
There are now so many new readers of The Source that I forget many of you won’t have seen some of the classic TV ads I have featured in previous Friday editions. Well, the good thing about nostalgia is that it can’t go out of date.
Here is a repeat of the ad that has attracted more views than any I have featured so far. It’s the full-length two-minute chain reaction built entirely from Honda Accord parts - a high-tech version of watching dominoes topple over. A transmission bearing starts it rolling, and it ends with a complete Accord rolling off a trailer. “Isn’t it nice when things just work”? says the voiceover.
It is called Cog and was first broadcast on April 6 2003, during ITV’s coverage of the Brazilian Grand Prix. In the next 24 hours Honda’s UK website had more traffic than all but one UK car brand’s site got in the whole month.
THE WIDER VIEW
Making it pay
Two years after Jim Waterson took redundancy from The Guardian to try his hand at reinventing local journalism, things are going rather well. He told Press Gazette his Substack-based title London Centric now has 5,500 paying subscribers and has an editorial team of three focused on publishing two or three really good stories per week.
“It turns out that if you delight people with big investigations and scoops that tell them something they didn’t know about the city they live in, they’re willing to pay, and they’re not willing to pay for generic empty coverage where they can feel that effort wasn’t put into it,” he said.
Source of inspiration
I confess there was an ulterior motive in bringing you news of the success of London Centric. Along with the growth of the Mill Media titles - who recently received £100,000 from the Postcode Lottery to fund subscriptions for under-25s - it shows the opportunity that exists in the North East for The Source.
Steph McGovern, Simon Rushworth and I hosted a successful launch event at the Helix in Newcastle a few weeks ago. Steph announced she would be investing in The Source - but we now need more support to emulate what is happening in London, Manchester and in other cities such as Sheffield, Liverpool and Glasgow.
There are many ways to demonstrate that support. It could be through SEIS investment, sponsorship, advertising, partnership, donating to our Crowdfunder to hire a reporter specialising in public-benefit journalism, or upgrading your subscription to paid. It all helps - and there’s more detail in the ‘We’ve started: what now?’ link below.
Trust your Sources
Without wishing to labour a point, The Source is independent, politically neutral but North East biased - and a trusted source (!) of news and information.
Trusted. That is becoming a rarity in this age of social media misinformation, bots, fake news, clickbait, and the spin and lack of journalistic rigour behind so many national media stories.
Take this story. How do you turn data showing Brits hold 80% of jobs into ‘Foreigners took 4 out of 5 new jobs’? Well, you pass the data through a right-wing think tank and spit it out in right-wing media headlines, says Emma Monks in her Substack column Monks Debunks.
I’m not going to go into the detail here. Monks does a very good job in her column which highlights that the Mail headline above is a close relation to a story published by the Express in May which said ‘27 young foreign workers hired for every one Brit as immigration fuels employment crisis’.
Both articles follow research from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a centre-right think tank founded by Iain Duncan Smith and Tim Montgomerie in 2004. “In fact, they tortured the same data set to get the same sort of misleading research headline,” said Monks.
Hard-to-spot clarifications and corrections can follow but the damage is already done by headlines based on what Monk describes as “fundamentally flawed assumptions”.
In this instance you had:
Migrants taking four in five new jobs in UK, says Centre for Social Justice (Telegraph)
‘Four out of five new jobs went to foreigners in the past decade,’ report finds (LBC)
Four in five new jobs in Britain taken by migrants, damning report finds (GB News)
Foreigners take 80% of all new UK jobs – Britons ‘written off’ (Express)
Good to see St Nicholas Cathedral resurrected instead of it's anodyne rebranding as Newcastle Cathedral. Let's keep the old name going! John North