Mr. Dave Anderson (Blaydon): Discussion about recession is not academic but real. We know what it was like 20 years ago. That recession, and the one 30 years ago when unemployment was deemed a price worth paying. It was a price that was paid by the people who live in this and other similar areas. We do not want to go back to that.
That is why despite the fact that the recession we are in at the moment is global and not of our own making. It is not all good news - quite clearly, it is not. In my own constituency, we lost jobs at Virgin Media. We had a major job impact at the dairy in Blaydon, and despite fantastic input from One NorthEast, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and from many trade unions, we lost 300 jobs - a real blow to the area. There has clearly been an impact in my constituency, on the financial sector and the supply chain around the motor industry, and on small businesses that have been desperately let down by the banks. But there is good news locally as well. The BAE factory in Birtley has secured a contract to supply ammunitions to the MOD for 15 years. It has been so successful that the factory will move from Birtley to the neighbouring constituency in Washington, but that is a positive move in terms of securing jobs and industry for this region. I have more good news, which will please my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South. Graphite, which is moving into the waste disposal industry, has built a state-of-the-art factory in the Tyne valley in Blaydon. It will deal with over 350,000 tonnes of waste a year - 100 per cent. goes in at one end, and only 20 per cent. will come out the other. At the moment - when it is up and running - 80 per cent. will be recycled. Discussions are going on with people in this part of the world about converting the remaining 20 per cent. into fuel - a win-win for everyone. It is a relatively small project in terms of what we are talking about for the wider south-of-Tyne disposal, which may well be placed in Gateshead, but it is clearly positive. It has created 50 new jobs, and for some of those jobs, the people who are running that factory have worked with the people who have lost their jobs at the dairy to try to get them redeployed. That is a good example of businesses working together in partnership with One NorthEast to try to support people.
Even more important going forward is the great stuff that has been happening at De La Rue plant in the Tyne valley. De La Rue has a long history in printing bank notes. In the past year, it has increased its work force by 80. Even better, it has won the contract for producing the new passports for this country for the foreseeable future: a £400 million contract that will create 80 new jobs, with very high-tech, high-skilled and highly paid work right in the heart of my constituency.
We should say to people who knock this area, the real moaning Minnies, "Go and have a look. Open your eyes. Have a walk down the quayside in Newcastle and in Gateshead and think what it was like 10 or 20 years ago. Go and have a look in places such as Murton and Seaham." Seaham is unrecognisable - the site that was Vane Tempest colliery now has some of the best quality housing anywhere in this country. We have the Seaham Hall hotel - it was beyond anyone's wildest dreams that something like that would ever be in our constituencies. Those are tremendous things, in addition to the reality of what we have to offer right across the region. The journalists and broadcasters should go out and have a look at what is going on in this area.
A year ago, a number of MPs met representatives of the association of councils about what we could do to try to bring forward training facilities for people working for Nissan. Working together with the Education Secretary of State responsible for higher education, we were able to convince Gateshead college and Nissan to work together with the Department and they brought forward training opportunities. Unfortunately, that did not change the fact that 1,200 people had to lose their jobs at Nissan, but we made a visit to Nissan at the beginning of the summer recess and were told that it has re-employed some of those people and the factory is working flat out - and that is before we get the electric vehicles. Its car production is at least one and a half times greater than it had envisaged before the recession hit. It reckons that if the recession had not hit, it would be producing three times more than had been estimated. That is a success story of which we should all be very proud.
I will touch on Corus. I hope that there is no need for my solution, because my solution would ultimately mean that more public money was needed for the nationalisation of the steel industry. I hope that Tata can deliver. I hope that it works together with the MPs, the work force and other people to ensure the security of the steel industry, because it is not just about this part of our region; it is about the whole of the region, particularly if we are to be successful at developing the technologies that will drive this place forward. If we are to build 7,000 offshore wind turbines, which has been committed to; if we are to start developing the offshore coal industry again, which is being piloted by Newcastle university; and if we are to develop CCS and have hundreds of miles of pipe coming out of the North sea, we will need a steel industry. Otherwise, we will end up having to ship our steel halfway around the world, which would defeat the purpose of having a CCS policy and a clean coal policy. We need to think seriously about that.
If the talks at Corus fail and the reality is that the plant has to shut, I would seriously say to the Minister that we want the Government to intervene - to continue intervening. People on the street will say, "Why shouldn't you? You intervened to save the banks." A lot of people say, "We don't know why you did that." I am quite clear that if we had not intervened, we would not have had a banking system in this country, but the banking system is still letting us down. If we ultimately have to intervene to save the steel industry, we should do that.
I am very much looking forward to conducting the inquiry into tourism in our area. We have a huge offer in terms of tourism, from Saltburn right up the coast to Berwick - all the fantastic castles and beaches - and inland, there are some of the best moors and dales anywhere in the country. The work being done by One NorthEast in its "Passionate People, Passionate Places" project has been tremendous. This is one of the few tourist areas in the country that has seen growth in the last year, but we could do better: we could learn lessons from people in Northern Ireland, with its very troubled history, where they have focused on maximising their offer in terms of tourism. I suggest that it would do us good to talk to people there and possibly consider the report that was done by our colleagues on the Northern Ireland Committee a couple of years ago about how they approached the work on tourism.
We have the chance in my constituency to build high-speed trains at Tyne yard and there is the possibility of tapping into more than 3 billion tonnes of coal off the North sea coast with the work of One NorthEast and Newcastle university, but we really, really need to keep the pressure on.
This is from Dave's speech to the Grand Committee in September
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