JUST days after the towering figure of Lord Mandelson - arguably the second most influential man in government - told the UK chemical industry that it was at the heart of government policy, Teesside has taken him at his word.

Today, local chiefs revealed a 10-point action plan to ensure the future of the sector at Wilton and its sister sites, with leading industry figures appointed to personally power through the changes.

Central to the plan is a commitment from Mandelson to back them - not with hard cash, but with a level of private/public sector collaboration unparalleled by any regional cluster.
North East Science and Industry Council chairman Bob Coxon

The champions were hand-picked by North East Science and Industry Council chairman Bob Coxon who spent two months stitching together a safety belt for Wilton, which has crashed headlong into the economic downturn with the loss of more than 1,500 directly employed skilled staff and countless more in the supply chain.

Nationally, 10% of the chemical industry workforce has been shed with a prediction that it will be 2012 before it returns to pre-recession output levels.

The man with a plan was brought in following desperate calls for a strategy to prevent Teesside’s process sector losing momentum as first one then another foreign-owned firm pulled the plug.

Despite early hopes that new owners could be found for plants including Invista and Artenius, the Dow ethylene oxide and ethylene glycol plant, which is seen as central to much of the UK chemical industry, is the only one highlighted in the new strategy as deserving of direct government intervention.

There have been several false starts to negotiations over the plant, which has been the subject of a comprehensive engineering review by One North East in the hope of constructing a market-based rescue.

That may yet take several months to achieve, meanwhile, the strategy calls on government to ensure the Dow facility remains available to potential investors.

Elsewhere, the plan focuses on making a powerful case to government to locate one of its proposed carbon capture and storage (CCS) trial sites on Teesside.

Proposals already exist, drawn up by local firm Progressive Energy, but here they are described as being “vital to the future competitiveness of the process industry”, giving a compelling reason for Mandelson’s colleague at the Department of Energy and Climate Change to come down in favour of the North-east for several million pounds of investment.

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Gazettelive.co.uk