THE owner of the defunct Swan Hunter shipyard is meeting council chiefs tomorrow to discuss the future of the site.

Dutch millionaire Jaap Kroese will fly into the region to meet North Tyneside Council and look at the opportunities available to redevelop the Wallsend site.

Mr Kroese, who owns the yard, wants to see the land redeveloped for industry or business, rather than housing, therefore creating jobs to replace those lost at the yard.

He said: "We have a meeting with North Tyneside Council tomorrow afternoon about the future of the yard.

"We just want the council to tell us what they want to do with the land, we want this to move forward."

Mr Kroese is working with a multi-agency taskforce, involving One NorthEast, the Government Office North-East and North Tyneside and Newcastle City councils, looking at the possible uses of the yard.

Their report will form part of a larger study being carried out to determine the future of the whole north bank of the Tyne, from Walker to North Shields Fish Quay.

The businessman bought Swan Hunter in 1996, before which operations had been suspended for two years.

In the four years that followed, thousands of jobs were created with a series of orders converting ships to floating oil production vessels and other offshore work.

In 2000, Swan Hunter won a Ministry of Defence (MoD) contract to build two Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessels, the Lyme Bay and Largs Bay.

It was originally estimated that the two vessels would cost about £160m to build, but the costs spiralled to £309m and construction was hit by lengthy delays.

Last year, the MoD finally pulled the plug - resulting in about 800 redundancies - and the unfinished Lyme Bay was towed out of the Tyne and taken to the BAE Systems yard on the Clyde for completion.

All work stopped last summer. The yard was put on the market with a £2.5m price tag, but failed to attract a buyer.

Earlier this year, Swan Hunter landed some engineering design work on one of the world's biggest ships by global shipping company Excalibur.

Despite the work, Mr Kroese last night insisted that the yard will never be used for shipbuilding again.

"Nobody is going to do that, it would cost £40 or £50m just to buy the shipbuilding equipment," he said.