Teesside International Airport has built a repeatable proposition for aviation businesses: freeport incentives, long ground leases and public investment in the infrastructure around them. It is aimed at companies prepared to spend heavily on fixed facilities and remain at the airport for decades.
Since March 2025, that proposition has supported expansions by Draken, Airbourne Colours and Willis Aviation Services, a subsidiary of Willis Lease Finance Corporation, followed by the arrival of Alfor Aviation. Alfor is the largest by announced jobs, with a 50-year agreement, a stated £50m investment and 250 roles promised by the end of 2027.
The length of that agreement is no outlier. Willis Aviation Services signed a 250-year lease over 50 acres of airport land in October 2025, allowing it to develop up to six further maintenance hangars. Together, the Willis and Alfor deals commit two aviation businesses to the airport on terms measured in generations.
Freeport status helps explain the attraction. Goods brought into the airport's customs sites can defer import duty and use simplified paperwork while they remain there, alongside tax reliefs on new buildings and equipment. The benefits are most valuable to businesses moving goods in and back out again, rather than selling them into the domestic market.
Alfor already has an Airbus A330 and is developing its own passenger-to-freighter conversion system, targeting European certification by the end of 2026. Its plan to import aircraft, convert them and export them again fits the freeport model particularly well.
Alfor chief executive Omer Mafa has said the freeport, the region's aerospace workforce and the airport's existing aviation tenants drew the company to Teesside over other UK sites. The airport is selling an industrial location and an aviation cluster as much as access to a runway.
Public investment supplies another part of the offer. A £12.52m UK Shared Prosperity Fund grant supported new hangars and infrastructure for the three 2025 tenant expansions, which were expected to bring £16m of private investment. The airport expects the resulting activity to generate rent and landing fees.
Long leases make that exchange possible. A conversion campus or maintenance hangar cannot be moved cheaply, so a long lease gives the tenant time to recover its investment. For the airport, it turns land into recurring commercial income and reduces its dependence on a passenger market that remains limited.
The strategy is being pursued by a public owner. Tees Valley Combined Authority bought the airport from Peel Holdings in 2019 and holds 75 per cent of its parent company, Goosepool 2019 Limited. Teesside Airport Foundation holds almost all of the remaining shares, with one share still held by Stobart Holdings.
The airport's most recent accounts, for the year to March 2025, show a return to a small profit, helped by government grant income. No equivalent public grant has been disclosed for the Alfor deal specifically.
Teesside is using freeport status to turn airport land into a long-term aviation estate, with public investment preparing sites and tenants financing specialised facilities. The Alfor and Willis agreements show that the proposition can secure unusually long commitments.
The commercial return is harder to judge. The rent, break clauses and delivery conditions in Alfor's 50-year agreement remain unpublished, while no planning application for the campus is yet visible. Those details will determine what the public owner receives from leasing the land for half a century.