The north-east of England: Britain's Detroit?

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/10/north-east-avoid-becoming-britains-detroit

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Until seven years ago, there was a secret room at Darlington station. Just off one of the platforms, between the standard-class waiting room and a cleaners' storeroom, and set back behind three successive doors, it was small and plain: a desk, a grimy extractor fan and two windows made opaque to passing travellers by reflective material.

Tony Blair used this room when he was prime minister. His constituency, Sedgefield in County Durham, was a short drive away. When he needed to get to London, 260 miles south, he and his entourage would often catch the fast Darlington train, which can take less than two and a half hours. More usefully still, many other key New Labour figures took the same line, among them Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn and David Miliband. Altogether, the north-east of England, which contains about a 25th of the UK population, was represented by "a third of Blair's first cabinet", noted the veteran anatomist of British power networks, Anthony Sampson, in 2004. (Sampson was himself born in County Durham.) Rarely before had our remotest and often poorest region been such a hub of political influence.

When Blair arrived early or his train arrived late, it was felt by Whitehall that the increasingly controversial premier could not just stand on a platform, waiting. Hence the secret room. Now, it is just the station manager's office. The building around it has gone back to being a market town station with flaking paint and a fragile roof, where isolated passenger footsteps echo in the long middle-of-the-day lull and trains for Scotland and the south of England rattle through without stopping. No current cabinet minister has a north-east seat – only two of its MPs are Tories. Labour's power base is now in London, Yorkshire and the north-west.

Since the Blair era, the area has slipped in other ways. Between 2007 and 2012, unemployment rose faster than in any other UK region, to more than 10%, the highest in the country. Throughout 2013, as joblessness receded in most of the UK, in the north-east it carried on rising. This year, it has begun to fall a little but remains the worst in the nation. Since 2007, the area's contribution to national economic growth, measured as gross value added, has shrunk from an already weak 3% in the Blair years to barely 2%. The Northern Rock building society, with roots in the region going back a century and a half, has suffered a humiliating meltdown. The north-east has been, and will probably continue to be, especially harshly treated by the coalition's spending cuts. According to the Special Interest Group of Municipal Authorities, a typical council in the region will lose £665 in government funding per inhabitant between 2010 and 2018, the biggest national fall. Meanwhile, public sector employment in the region – the highest in England at more than one job in five – has been falling since 2009, a year before the coalition took office.

At Newcastle United, one of the north-east's disproportionate number of fiercely followed, rarely successful football clubs, the recent sponsorship of the team shirt tells a similarly dispiriting story: Northern Rock from 2003-2011; Virgin Money, Northern Rock's current, Edinburgh-based owners, from 2012- 2013; this season, the payday loan company Wonga. Between 2011 and 2012, child poverty rates in Middlesbrough and Newcastle Central rose to 40% and 38% respectively. "For as long as anyone alive will remember, this has been a 'problem region': a special case, a sick man," wrote the Newcastle-born novelist Richard T Kelly in a 2011 essay, What's Left For The North-East?

In recent years, some rightwingers have begun to throw up their hands. "It is at least as hard to buck geography as it is to buck the market," said the influential Tory thinktank Policy Exchange in 2008. "It is time to stop pretending that there is a bright future for Sunderland." And last year the Tory peer Lord Howell suggested the region had "large uninhabited and desolate areas… where there's plenty of room for fracking". Weeks later, the Economist described Middlesbrough and Hartlepool as part of "Britain's rust belt"; "Despite dollops of public money and years of heroic effort… [these] former industrial heartlands are quietly decaying." The magazine concluded with an unlikely but ominous comparison: "The Cotswolds were the industrial engines of their day. One reason they are now so pretty is that, centuries ago, huge numbers of people fled them."

From Darlington, an old and scuzzy two-carriage train chugs east along a branch line towards Middlesbrough. Along the way, it stops at Thornaby-on-Tees, an ex-industrial town beside the river Tees. From the 1840s until the 1980s, the Head Wrightson ironworks here made everything from parts for bridges to parts for nuclear power stations; then foreign competition closed it. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher visited the site and took a much-photographed walk across a yellowing wasteland of weeds and factory remnants, wearing an inappropriate smart suit but looking unusually pensive. Shortly afterwards, her government, seeking to soften its reputation as the hammer of the north, created the Teesside Development Corporation, and the wasteland was turned into the Teesdale Business Park, a US-style landscape of corporate lawns, car parks and low office blocks.

The blocks are still there, neat and anonymous except for the corporate logos: Barclaycard, the NHS, the privatised services firm Serco. The car parks are full of mid-range vehicles. For three decades, the north-east has been a centre for modestly paid clerical work, such as call centres and the "back office" administrative processes of companies based elsewhere. But at the Teesdale Business Park, "To Let" is the most common logo; some are so old, they have rotted and snapped off.

As with Thornaby, Middlesbrough is a flat riverside town that once grew fast because of iron foundries: from only 25 inhabitants in 1801 to 165,000 in the 1960s. The Victorian centre was built to a grid pattern, like a US boom town, with docks just to the north for exporting iron and coal. But in 1980 the docks closed, the population began to fall, and a void opened between the town and the river. It is still there, starting a few yards from the town centre; a great windswept triangle of rubble and rust, boarded-up houses, Dickensian wall fragments and roads to nowhere. Derelict waterfront warehouses stand in the distance. A middle-aged security man in a peeling wood cabin guards them. "There's lots of steel cable in those sheds," he says. "And lots of people try to steal it." When asked how long it has been so run-down, he shrugs and says without emotion: "As long as I can remember."

The town's population is around 138,000. To a visitor, the long, straight streets of the town centre seem eerily empty of pedestrians. At the sizable railway station, the weekday rush hour sometimes barely exists: at 8.30 on a Friday morning, I counted fewer than a dozen other people on the platforms. The station cafe had not bothered to open.

"If things carry on as they are now," says Alex Niven, a leftwing writer from Northumberland, "in five years the situation will get somewhere like Detroit." Several other authorities in the north-east that I interviewed invoked the long-imploding American city, unprompted. He left the area 10 years ago, aged 18, and now lives in London. "Almost all my friends from school live in London now. When you go back to the north-east, the landscape's kind of crumbling. There is this sort of sadness. It feels like a people who've been weakened, who've just been cut loose."

Geography does not help. "The north-east is at the far corner of the country, but it is separated by more than just miles," writes Harry Pearson, born near Middlesbrough, in his 1994 book The Far Corner. "There is the wilderness of the Pennines to the west, the emptiness of the North York Moors to the south, and to the north, the Scottish border… Sometimes the north-east [seems] more like an island than a region." It is an island that the HS2 rail project is not currently intended to reach. Meanwhile, the prospect of Scottish independence and the near-certainty of more Scottish devolution threatens to marginalise the region further. "Scotland can already do more to attract inward investment than we can," says Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Central. "More power for Scotland, in that sense, would not be a benefit for us."

Pinned to a board in her constituency office is a list of Newcastle food banks. Outside, contrastingly, the grand city centre streets are much busier than in Middlesbrough, full of prosperously dressed people and big branches of the same upmarket chainstores as in richer places. "Newcastle is the economic capital of the north-east," she says, "but the centre, especially, is not representative of the region." A few minutes' walk farther out, cheap cafes offer soup of the day for a pound, and other scruffy businesses have long ceased to offer anything. "Every time I see a building boarded up," Onwurah says, "it strikes fear into my heart."

Onwurah grew up on a Newcastle council estate in the 60s and 70s. It was then a smoky, clattering centre for shipbuilding and other heavy industry, but these were in terminal decline. In 1984, she left to study electrical engineering, then worked away from Newcastle for a quarter of a century, until she was elected as MP in 2010. In the interim, the city reshaped its economy around tourism and nightlife, as an internationally hyped "party city"; around sport, with the 90s resurgence of Newcastle United; and around culture, with the opening in Gateshead of the Baltic art gallery in 2002 and the Sage music centre in 2004.

"It was a very heady time," says Niven, who supports Newcastle United and as a teenager often travelled into the city from rural Northumberland. "The north-east has a brash, confident side. There's also often a sense of slumbering potential, that one day a messiah or a revival will come."

In the 90s and noughties, optimism was most concrete along the river Tyne, which separates Gateshead and Newcastle. Decaying canyons of quayside buildings filled with flash new bars, expensive flats, high-end office space and public art. It was easy to visit Newcastle – which I often did then – and think it was becoming a swaggering, economically self-sufficient provincial city, such as those you find in less centralised countries: another Marseille or Hamburg.

The quaysides are slightly less uplifting now. On the Newcastle side, several bars have shut down. Bridge Court, an enormous, empty office block, has a plaque that reads, "The foundation stone was laid by Mr Eddie George, governor of the Bank of England, on 22 September 1994"; another sign says, "Demolition. Keep Out". Niven sees the north-east's revival under the Blair government as "largely superficial. In the long term, it didn't lead to better jobs and infrastructure. You can't base the revival of a region on nightlife and football." Onwurah, whose grandfather worked in the shipyards and whose mother grew up on the quayside, is less scathing: "Labour did a lot in the north-east, to stop the concentration of economic power elsewhere getting much worse, but we didn't overcome the underlying issue. We haven't got the previous sources of economic growth. And we haven't got enough skills and entrepreneurs." A successful region, she says, has a "critical mass" economically. "If you don't have critical mass, to attract people and investment, you go into decline. We're on the edge of that." She holds up her hands and makes a flat, wobbling gesture: "We're teetering."

In Middlesbrough, the riverside wasteland has been earmarked for regeneration – as a new area called Middlehaven – for almost 30 years. Recessions, anxious developers and the town's wider economic struggles have confined most construction to the area's fringe. Yet there is one exception: an incongruous silvery curve of a building in the centre of the emptiness. Middlesbrough College opened in 2008; it houses engineering workshops, training kitchens, hair and beauty salons, and other vocational course facilities for 16- to 18-year-olds. In 2011, it was rated "good with outstanding features" by Ofsted. Walking down the college's bright and warm internal street, seconds after being out in the dereliction, and seeing students at work in the glass-walled rooms or rushing back and forth, it seems absurd to think that Middlesbrough does not have a long-term future. But in the window of the in-house Jobs Shop, only half a dozen positions are offered. One is at a local seaside care home for the elderly: the successful applicant will earn £107.20 for a 40-hour week.

Further education is one of the north-east's few growth industries. "Without it, I dread to think what some of the cities would be doing," says Andy Pike, director of Newcastle University's Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies. "A lot of people want to come and study in the north-east" – academic standards are high, living costs low and the nightlife boisterous. But, Pike adds, "We have a problem with graduate retention: not as many stay as could do. It's a thin labour market. The people who stay typically will not end up in graduate jobs. And then local non-graduates will be bumped out of the labour market altogether." In the north-east, the increasingly de-skilled, low-paid labour market of Britain under the coalition is at its meanest. Full-time wages are the lowest of any UK region.

In 2007, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, or Mima, cheekily echoing New York's Moma gallery, opened on a redeveloped square in the town centre. It looks the part: slick, glassy exterior; high-ceilinged interior; dozens of attentive young staff in Mima T-shirts. It offers an ambitious programme of community events and exhibitions – currently, Art And Optimism In 1950s Britain. Yet a gallery cannot make a town centre vibrant by itself. On Thursday evenings, it opens late, but on the Thursday I visited I saw four other visitors in half an hour.

Since the 1930s, governments have tested regeneration projects in the region. Edward Twiddy is one of the latest reformers to be despatched from London. Since 2012, he has been head of the North-East Local Enterprise Partnership (Nelep), a typically optimistic coalition creation, which aims to get business and local councils – almost all Labour – to work together for the area's economic benefit.

Twiddy previously worked at the Treasury and for the Foreign Office in Iraq. He is slight and cerebral-looking, and speaks mostly in fluent Whitehall jargon. "The region's still going through some fairly big structural changes," he tells me. "The north-east was over-specialised – in coal, for example. Nowadays, people need to be able to approach life differently. You've got to be able to travel, to be competitive… Economic activity will move [away] if you cannot convince the market that yours is the right place to work." But even Twiddy is off: he is set to leave Nelep for Atom, a new digital bank to be based "in the north-east".

I ask how many staff Nelep has. Twiddy pauses: "The core is four. Then there are people doing discrete pieces of work for us, people loaned to us, people I've scrabbled around for, got a few pennies for… There are about 11 or 12 of us in all." Nelep replaced One North-East, a regional development agency created by the Blair government that had 400 staff.

Yet there is a more economically independent side to the region. A few miles east of the centre of Newcastle, a side road leads steeply downhill to a half-hidden stretch of the Tyne. In the early 1980s, the quays here were a rotting ladder of derelict docks and slipways. Then two local property developers, Freddy and Bruce Shepherd, began to buy the land, clean it up, reuse the old cranes and rent out the quaysides: first to companies involved in North Sea oil, then to others involved in undersea cable-laying and offshore wind power.

Shepherd Offshore now stretches along the Tyne for miles. In its riverside boardroom, with giant reels of cable as tall as tugboats looming outside the windows, Twiddy makes the introductions over coffee served in Versace mugs. The Shepherds are heavyset men with fierce handshakes and slightly loose tongues. "We are the raggy end of the couch up here in the north-east," Bruce says. Freddy interjects: "We get nothing easy. Not off the government. Without us, there would be nothing here but two abandoned shipyards." "Up and down the river, we're close knit," Bruce says. "There are more than 2,500 jobs. We're a manufacturing base. We train people. But we're forgotten down here."

How many jobs were there in the days of the shipyards? "Six and a half thousand," Freddy says. "I was an apprentice in the shipyard here. You're never going to get back to those numbers."

Bruce offers a tour of the quay in his spotless Range Rover. As we drive, he points out other cars parked nose to tail at the roadside: "There's never enough parking. The number of people working here keeps growing." We leave the road and enter a muddy construction site, scheduled to house a new national research centre for offshore and undersea technology, a collaboration between the Shepherds, Newcastle city council and Newcastle University. Bruce ploughs through puddles, his property developer's patter in full flow, then stops his spattered Range Rover at a fence that faces the famous old Swan Hunter shipyard. It is still a wasteland, but new developments are encroaching from all directions.

Another sign of entropy reversed would be to attract more southerners; not just to study but to work. Twiddy is one. Tony Trapp is another. Raised in London, he has been one of the area's handful of legendary entrepreneurs since the 70s. Then, he helped invent an undersea plough for laying seabed pipes and cables by driving a specially adapted tractor up and down a beach in Northumberland. Several companies and clever products later, he now runs Osbit Power, which makes self-stabilising gangways to connect offshore wind turbines to maintenance vessels.

The enterprise is based in a previously derelict hotel in sweeping Northumberland countryside. Behind its unkempt walls, purposeful-looking young employees cluster at desks or in front of whiteboards, while Trapp, a creased man of 68 with a murmuring voice but an intoxicating can-do aura, briefs them and holds court. "I've always based my businesses on clever graduates," he says later. "I've taken on hundreds, some from Newcastle University, from Northumbria University. For offshore engineering, the north-east is the best place in Europe."

But in other ways he sees the local economy as still underpowered. "Persuading clever people from the south to come here is quite hard. It's not just the image they have of the north-east – it does have the worst statistics, in health, in booze… If you look at many CEOs of big companies here, they don't live up here. They live in Surrey, London. It's insulting, in a way." For a second, he looks his age. "I don't have the solution to the north-east."

It is not Twiddy's job to voice such doubts. Instead, he takes me to the coast, not far from where Trapp tested his undersea plough. It is a brilliant blue day, and the often luminous north-east light is at its most seductive. We drive into the small town of Blyth, where there has been a port since the 12th century, which suggests the region has more staying power than the doom-mongers claim. We approach a cluster of shiny, towering blue-grey sheds, where the National Renewable Energy Centre tests blades for offshore wind farms. In December, the government increased its subsidy for this source of electricity, a rare gift from Whitehall to the north-east in the age of austerity. Twiddy sounds like a small boy for a moment: "The crane for lifting the blades is just amazing!"

We walk to one of the windowless sheds. Inside, spot-lit, suspended above an expanse of polished concrete floor, a single pale grey blade, with weights and cables attached to it, flexes slowly up and down, vast and stately as the tail of a whale. The only sound is the hum of the air-conditioning. In a space the size of a small cathedral, but clean and tidy as a science lab, only two employees are visible: distant, purposeful figures in dust coats.

Working here looks much better than working in a chilly shipyard, a call centre or a nightclub, or for most of the region's previous economic saviours. But Mill says the centre has a staff of 69. The north-east will need an awful lot more workplaces like it this if it is going to stop teetering.