Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen has announced a £200m major logistics and manufacturing park at Teesside International Airport.

Infrastructure work is now set to begin on the project, which will see the creation of 3.4m square feet of logistics, manufacturing and commercial space built on 270 acres of land at the southside of the airport. Once complete, the development has the potential to create 4,400 jobs and deliver £3m per year to reinvest into the airport.

The deal to buy Teesside International Airport included 817 acres of land and presented significant development opportunities to drive inward investment and the creation of new jobs. The Southside land, comprising 270 acres and running parallel to the runway, is the largest area for such a development, which will be carried out under a joint venture partnership.

The Tees Valley Mayor and Combined Authority previously committed to an investment of £23.6m for the development critical infrastructure, including connecting the site to the main utilities and provide access to the Southside of the airport from the A67.

Mayor Houchen said: “Hot on the heels announcing summer flights to Alicante for this summer, and the introduction of six new routes across UK and Ireland rolling out now, today I’ve broken ground on the next huge project to secure the future of Teesside Airport.

“Ever since bringing our airport back into public ownership, I have always said that for it to succeed, we need to be supporting our businesses as well as attracting flights to fantastic destinations for consumers. Today is the next step in achieving a sustainable, appropriate development around our airport, providing a high quality site for businesses, a huge number of which have already expressed an interest at being based here.

“Not only that, it will help create thousands of good-quality jobs for local people and make sure our airport will be here for years to come, with money from the site reinvested into our airport.”