£17,200 More for Houchen? Tees Valley Mayor’s Allowance Rise Goes Before Cabinet..
Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen Allowance Rise Proposed as Wider Payments Package To Cost £69,600 a Year...
6th November 2026
Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen could potentially be in line for a £17,200 allowance increase under proposals going before regional leaders this month, with the higher payments potentially backdated to June.
Papers published ahead of the Tees Valley Combined Authority’s Cabinet meeting on the 13th November recommend increasing the mayoral allowance from £65,000 to £82,200 a year, a move which would represent a rise of approximately 26.5 per cent, with a further recommendation that the allowance should increase annually in line with a specified local government staff pay awards...
The proposals come from an Independent Remuneration Panel chaired by Dr Declan Hall. Cabinet members will decide whether to accept, amend or reject its recommendations.
Alongside the increase itself, they must also decide whether the revised payments should be backdated.
The panel recommends that the changes covered by its first review take effect from the authority’s annual meeting on 26th June 2026. If that approach is approved, the increased allowance would apply retrospectively from that date.
The panel’s report sets out several reasons for recommending the higher payment, including comparisons with other elected mayors and the development of the Tees Valley Mayor’s role. It says the current £65,000 allowance has remained unchanged since 2021/22, while allowances elsewhere are commonly increased annually to reflect changes in the cost of living.
An earlier review in 2023 recommended increasing the mayoral allowance to £80,000, but that recommendation was not accepted.
The panel also argues that previous reviews had not sufficiently recognised the Mayor’s national and international work, or the influence exercised through relationships with government, businesses and other organisations.
The panel says the Mayor’s formal roles and responsibilities have changed only marginally since the 2023 review. Although further powers are expected, it did not treat the anticipated legislative changes as a major factor in reaching its recommendation.
Instead, the proposed £82,200 figure draws on comparisons with other public offices, with the panel using the Cleveland Police and Crime Commissioner’s salary of £76,379 and an average allowance of £88,069 for a selected group of other combined authority mayors. The panel then ultimately selected the midpoint between those figures and rounded the result down to £82,200.
The report also argues that the existing payment could discourage people from seeking the position, saying the current allowance “acted as a barrier for capable candidates who might seek to become the elected Mayor of TVCA.”
The mayoral increase forms part of a wider review of payments for people undertaking duties at the combined authority, with other recommendations including annual allowances of £1,680 for members of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee, specified Audit and Governance Committee members and independent audit members, alongside £5,880 allowances for the two committee chairs.
The Cabinet report puts the additional annual cost of the wider mayoral and committee-related package at £69,600, funded through the authority’s core funding. Variable payments for substitutes attending meetings would add to that figure.
If approved, the proposed annual indexing arrangements would also apply to several of these allowances.
Cabinet members when they meet can either accept the panel’s recommendations in full, adopt only some of them, or reject them entirely. The report says they cannot set allowances above the levels recommended by the independent panel.
The meeting takes place at 10.30am on Friday 13 November, at Teesside Airport Business Suite...
