ON February 19, a brass band played outside the gates of the mighty Teesside Cast Products plant in Redcar.

The band were there to herald a significant moment in the history of North East industry - the beginning of the end for the huge furnace which for decades has fired the steel industry of the region.

A month on, the rights and wrongs of the decision which led Indian-owned corporation Corus to mothball the plant are still the subject of intense - and often angry - debate. Arguments rage from Redcar to Westminster and beyond. While hope - albeit slim - remains that the site could yet be sold, at the same time the region is preparing for the worse.

With 1,600 workers set to lose their jobs, Redcar, Teesside, indeed the entire North East, is braced for the economic and social fallout from the closure of the plant.

It is not, however, the first time that the region has contemplated such a proposition. In a seven-page special report for North East Vision, Sue Scott examines the lessons to be learned from the past - and speaks to some people who are offering hope amidst the despair.

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Redcar can reinvent itself with investment

WHEN Corus confirmed that it was to mothball its slab steelmaking works at Redcar, it reawakened painful memories in the North East.

A dire prediction that the seaside town faced a “black hole” of joblessness leading to economic and social meltdown, wasn’t just an apocalyptic vision but painful past experience among local communities still struggling to crawl out from under the collapse of coal mining, shipbuilding and textiles, which saw tens of thousands put on the dole.

According to the report, A Mine of Opportunities, published last year by the Audit Commission, it’s taken 30 hard years for progress to be seen in many of the regions worst affected by restructuring in the UK’s basic industries and lessons need to be learned.

Much of the regeneration activity that took place around coalmining areas like Easington, County Durham – where deep seated unemployment still runs at around 16% – didn’t even start to happen until the establishment of a Coal Task Force under Tony Blair in the late 1990s, years after closure hit. If Redcar waits that long for action, it could be too late.

“The key thing is to catch people quick, before they become unemployable,” says Dave Anderson, MP, a miner for 25 years in the Durham coalfields.

After his pit at Hetton-le-Hole closed in 1986, he watched the slow disintegration of a community that revolved around the mine head. If Hetton-le-Hole’s experience of large-scale redundancies is anything to go by, generous payoffs in Redcar will be no compensation for the grinding poverty of hope that follows.

“For a short space they will feel relatively comfortable, but I have friends and neighbours who became institutionalised on invalidity benefit,” says Mr Anderson.

And yet it doesn’t have to be like this.

According to a group of MPs who conducted a select committee inquiry into the biggest jobs hit that Teesside has seen in recent years, if Corus and the Government wake up fast enough to the opportunities being presented by renewable energy in the North East, Corus’ decision won’t be the end, but just the beginning for Redcar. And new beginnings are something the town desperately needs.

Dari Taylor, who represents neighbouring Stockton, agrees that time isn’t on Redcar’s side.

She personally advocates temporary nationalisation of the plant, but as chairwoman of the select committee, she makes an economic case for Teesside Cast Products (TCP) to be retained in private ownership as part of a wider manufacturing base in the North East. Mrs Taylor makes the point that within a joined-up supply chain, TCP could help make some of the millions of tonnes of steel currently shipped in for renewables projects around the UK.

Such a change in emphasis for the plant – away from selling a relatively unsophisticated product on to world markets that Corus insists are already in oversupply, to producing added value steel for users on its own doorstep, and even, given sufficient investment, integrated into TCP – could not only help rebalance trade, but avoid the unintended consequences of regeneration.

The Audit Commission acknowledged that many of the “new” jobs created in former coalmining areas by the millions of pounds poured in for economy building, had not been filled by the casualties of closure, but by incomers.

The poverty gap between indigenous communities and the rest of the UK has widened, not narrowed, and their misery has deepened as not just those individuals who were made redundant, but their children and even their children’s children have become “de-motivated”.

The committee’s solution for Redcar, which it recommended to Government this month along with a call to keep the workforce on the payroll for as long as it takes, is an elegant way of addressing both the country’s trade imbalance and social disintegration.

This could be the moment that Redcar – without which Sydney Harbour would never have been bridged and the Wembley Arch would not have risen – reinvents itself. But whether it will be able to look back on 2010 as being a pivotal moment in the ongoing history of steelmaking on Teesside or the point where all hope was lost will largely depend on how well the case for investment can be made. And whether Government shares that vision.