Industry | 2010.03.07
Fighting decline
With the Corus steelworks – the economic and social heartbeat of the region – mothballed again, Teesside is facing a bleak future. But as Ruth Sunderland, our Business Editor, found on a journey back to her north-east roots, there is steel in the local character – and a powerful spirit of defiance and entrepreneurship
Seeing all the fellas come over the hill with their heads bowed, my heart just broke," says Rose Stainforth, whose husband Bob, a steelworker, is leaving the mothballed Corus plant in Redcar after almost 40 years in the industry.
The Corus works, which stretches for miles along the bleakly beautiful North Sea coastline, has been at the centre of the Stainforths\' life for generations and that of hundreds of other local families.
All that may now be coming to a bitter end, throwing 1,600 steelmen out of a job. Corus is putting the plant on hold after a consortium that had agreed to buy most of its output pulled out of a 10-year deal. The company, owned by Indian group Tata, claims it has "scoured the Earth" for a buyer, but none has been found.
The woes of Corus have cast a cloud over the Teesside region, already one of the most deprived in the country.
Almost 30 years on, the area still bears deep scars from the 1980s recession. The timing of the Corus shutdown is cruel: just as the region was beginning to show signs of recovery, the follies of bankers miles away led to a global recession.
This is the second time the Stainforth family has seen the Corus blast furnaces grow cold. In the 1980s Bob spent several years out of work, but he was re-hired and in total has spent 39 years at the Redcar works.
Rose says: "Me and Bob have been through this before. If they don\'t find anything else, this will devastate the community."
Teesside is less than a three-hour train ride from King\'s Cross, London, but it feels like a world apart. In the capital, shoppers are jostling in Oxford Street; there are full tables at restaurants charging more for a meal than the Corus workers will receive in a week\'s unemployment benefit. The bankers\' bonuses are flooding in once more.
The recession is all too real on Teesside, along the A66 from central Middlesbrough towards the Corus plant. The road snakes alongside the River Tees, past landmarks such as the Transporter bridge and the Victorian Dock Clock, with one of its faces kept blank to stop the stevedores from clock-watching.
The area is studded with what once were small ironworks, including the Clay Lane site where my maternal grandfather worked for 40 years, his service broken only to fight in the second world war. When he returned from France with a gunshot-shattered leg, they took him back on lighter duties. My father worked a few miles to the north at Head Wrightson, which built blast furnaces, until he was made redundant in the 1980s recession after more than 30 years in the iron trade.
Some of the tiny terrace houses that sprang up in a grid pattern around – and even inside – the perimeter of the works still stand today. The centre of the community was Cannon Street, much loved despite its grim houses and rough reputation, where my grandmother ran a fish and chip shop; the threepences she took from steelworkers paid for the family to move out of the backstreets and for my mother to take a prized place at teacher training college.
As Bob Stainforth says: "Round here steel is a family thing. My father and all his brothers worked here, my brother works here, too." At 59, Bob had only a year to go to retirement, but says: "It\'s a horrible way to finish my career. Redcar is on the bones of its arse as it is. Steelworkers are loud, they are dirty, they have a vicious sense of humour, every single one of them, but those lads have all got hearts as big as dustbin lids. The works are the glue that holds this community together."
The steelworks, which stretch for several miles along the coast from Redcar towards Middlesbrough, are so large they have their own railway station. They spawned a whole culture and language, including terms such as "tapping the salamander", used to describe the mothballing. The salamander is residual liquid from the bottom of the furnace which has to be drained away, so called because of the brightly coloured minerals it contains.
In the 70s, when my family went to Redcar for caravan holidays, the town was a bustling, if bracing, little resort. Today many businesses along the front are boarded up. Locals joke that the beach looked better when it was used a couple of years ago to stand in for Dunkirk in the film Atonement ; some of the mock French frontages are still there.
Clare Wilson, 53, a contract engineer who has worked for Corus for 20 years, echoes the concern about the impact on the area. "Redcar has been on the decline for a while but this won\'t help, and it won\'t help through the entire region."
Estimates of the potential knock-on effects vary but, according to Sandra Cartlidge, head of economic development, culture and communities at Middlesbrough borough council, the company spends about £60m with businesses in its supply chain. The council is ready for around 3,700 job losses connected to the closure; a harsh blow for a region that has only partly recovered from the ravages of the 1980s when, Cartlidge says, 23,000 jobs were lost and only 13,000 of those regained.
But there is a determination not to repeat the experience of the 1980s when unemployment became embedded in some parts of the community. Local enterprise bodies are pulling together to help and there is a rapid response task force for Corus. Cartlidge says: "Industries don\'t last for ever and steel has lasted longer than many. We want to move into the new low-carbon economy. There is a pipeline of potential projects that could create 4,000 new jobs."
Before the recession struck, Teesside was making progress at diversifying its economy away from heavy industry and at shedding its image as a cultural desert. Middlesbrough\'s mayor, Ray Mallon, is on a bold mission to reinvent the area as an artistic venue and digital hub. The Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, or Mima, built by acclaimed Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat, is an oasis of calm modernity in the town centre, though a few blocks away shops are shuttered and fast-food joints sell kebabs and "parmos", a local closing-time delicacy of chicken or pork covered in parmesan and breadcrumbs and fried.
There are also high hopes for the new BoHo zone, intended as the region\'s answer to the creative quarters of New York and London, located in the roughest part of old Middlesbrough, whose ominous nickname is "over the border".
Boro is not yet a Bilbao, which was transformed by the Guggenheim, but one concrete source of local pride is Teesside University. When I left the area in the late 1980s it was a lowly ranked polytechnic, but it is riding high after winning the 2009 University of the Year title from the Times Higher Education magazine. "We are part of the community, not an ivory tower," says vice-chancellor Professor Graham Henderson.
In an area where a lower than average percentage go on to higher education, the university reaches out to the community, going into primary schools, for instance, to connect with children whose families have no tradition of going to university. It is at the forefront of efforts to transform the area into a creative hub, with its Institute of Digital Innovation, an incubator for new businesses, appropriately housed in the Phoenix building.
Dr Jim TerKeurst, director of the institute, says he expects to launch the hundredth new enterprise this spring. "We have a very serious role to play in pulling the area out of recession," he says.
Big hopes rest on young entrepreneurs such as 26-year-old Jeremiah Alexander, one of the university\'s star protégés. Originally from London, Alexander came to Teesside to study computer games programming at the age of 18 and decided to stay on. His company Ideonic, a computer games studio that looks at new media solutions for creating social change, employs three full-time staff and some freelancers.
One concept, Mirror Me, which uses information about people\'s lifestyles to estimate how long they might live and to show the toll their habits might take, has been nominated for the MediaGuardian Innovation Awards.
Alexander says: "There is definitely a buzz in the north east. The environment is very supportive of ideas. I am still young and have loads of opportunities to run around the world, but this region has a lot going for it."
Whether there are enough Alexanders to reverse the exodus of young people from the area remains to be seen – and it will take an awful lot of small business creation to mop up the large-scale job losses from the steel works that traditionally took on school leavers. Even before this, Middlesbrough was listed in the Centre for Cities Report as one of the 10 cities with the highest unemployment rate in the country for 16- to 24-year-olds.
Paul McGee, 53, who has worked in the steel industry since 1974 and last month lost his job with Corus contractor Vesuvius, says: "I am encouraging my kids to leave. Even if it will separate my family, what is there for them?"
The mothballing of the Corus plant has tremendous symbolism, but the reality is that the area has known for years that it needs to diversify away from old heavy industry. Unfortunately, during the years of the New Labour boom, not enough progress has been made creating high-quality private-sector jobs. Research by Karel Williams and Sukhdev Johal of the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at Manchester University found that between 1998 and 2008 most of the job creation was from the public sector, which is now vulnerable to cuts because of the financial crisis.
Their figures show that almost 13,000 jobs were created in Middlesbrough, Redcar and nearby Stockton in public and state-related employment, while a net 168 jobs were lost in the private sector.
The university, which brings in £80m a year to the local economy, itself employs about 2,000. If it is hit by cutbacks, the consequences could be nasty.
Women, who picked up almost 8,000 public sector and linked jobs in the region, and who have in many families picked up the slack from the loss of a male breadwinner, are particularly vulnerable. And when the private sector does create jobs in the region, the worry is that these are lower paid, lower skilled positions than those being lost.
Bob Stainforth says: "I\'ll tell you that whenever a major steelworks shuts down, Consett, Ravenscraig, many that are laid off never work again. Even if you do find alternative work for these guys, it won\'t pay anywhere near the money they are getting now."
Inevitably, recriminations are flying around Teesside. Some blame Corus and its Indian owner; some blame the consortium for pulling out; some blame the credit crunch. Some blame the government, and there is plenty of cynicism at the last-minute grandstanding by Lord Mandelson and Gordon Brown, which so far has failed to provide a solution. There is a feeling that even ahead of an general election where every vote will count the area has been abandoned by the Labour party.
Some suggest the hierarchy is complacent about the local allegiance to the party and that Redcar MP Vera Baird, who is universally praised, has been left to fight for Corus on her own. However, for many a switch to the Tories would still be unthinkable.
Corus will tomorrow be accused by the North-East select committee of MPs of a catalogue of errors dating back nine years leaving the steelworks at Redcar unable to exploit booming demand for steel for new technologies, though their report is likely to conclude there is still hope of finding a buyer.
"We have to keep that hope alive," says Baird, a view echoed by Geoff Waterfield, chairman of the multi-union committee at Redcar. "We are not giving up," he says. "You don\'t take on Teessiders without knowing you\'ve been in a fight."
Baird argues that there is a series of new projects in the pipeline. She points to recruitment by Ensus, which runs one of the world\'s biggest cereal grain biorefineries at Wilton, to plans for two environmentally friendly power stations, to expansion at the port and to new Asda and Tesco warehouses.
The difficulty is that, unless a buyer emerges very quickly for Corus, the transition from the old industrial base to a new one will be much more difficult than hoped. "The problem is if there is a gap," Baird says. "If Corus goes, the real hard time is going to be bridging until these new industries replace the jobs. The difficulty will be holding on to the community morale and the economy while jobs are replaced".
Jon Bolton, 47, managing director of Teesside Cast Products, who has worked in steel since he was 17, says: "Sadness is my overwhelming emotion. The people here have had to continually pick themselves up off the floor and continue to perform. I\'m proud of these people, I\'m really proud of them."
There is little hope of rescue in the form of a government bailout, though the contrast between the rapid resumption of business as usual in the City and the abandonment of the steelworkers to their fate could not be more marked.
It leaves the people of Teesside at a difficult crossroads. The mood now is one of angry pride in the steel industry and its decline, and though great strides have been made to reinvent the region it is looking at an uncertain future.
The crowning irony is that, after more than a decade of Labour government, Teesside and other areas flattened by the Thatcher recession in the 1980s are suffering the most in this slump.
But the hope is that the people of the region will use the determination, the resilience and the skills that made our ironworks the best in the world to pull themselves up and create a prosperous new economy.
Whatever happens to Corus, Teesside has one great asset no one can take away: the steel in the local character.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/m[...]ide-corus-mothballing-teesside
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