ONE of the region’s leading business figures believes another much-maligned town offers Middlesbrough a blueprint for recovery.

Fiercely proud Glaswegian Alastair Thomson, who is the Institute of Directors’ North-East chairman and dean of Teesside University’s Business School, has become a passionate advocate of his adoptive home.

Mr Thomson holds a season ticket at Middlesbrough FC and defends Boro – both town and football club – with the passion of a man reared in Eston or South Bank, rather than Scotland’s industrial capital.

He bristles at accusations that the town is facing a bleak future, and reckons national surveys which present an unremittingly downbeat picture are misleading and ignore a community with a resilient workforce and innovative and forward-thinking business community.

“Virtually everybody that comes to the town and sees what we have: a world class university, some great businesses, things like Mima (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) and Digital City, are completely bowled over. But getting them come up here in the first place is a hell of a challenge,” admitted Mr Thomson who has lived in this region for ten years. “Middlesbrough reminds me a lot of Glasgow. Both are gritty, industrial areas, built on the wealth of steel, steel, shipbuilding, coal, exports, and both made things for the world. They share the same sort of unbreakable community spirit.

“Thirty years ago Glasgow went through similar economic times that Middlesbrough face now. But I have seen how Glasgow came through the other side and I am confident that can happen here. If you take the right sorts of decisions and attract the right investors then it’s amazing what you can do.

Glasgow is now recognised as a real urban regeneration success story. We can do the same thing in Middlesbrough, and we are moving towards that.”

Anyone facing redundancy or looking for work may find it hard to get too carried away by such an upbeat prognosis, and Mr Thomson accepts it would be misleading to suggest that public sector cuts won’t hit the town hard. His concern is that surveys overstate the impact on Middlesbrough and understate the fact that many people work in the town but live in the surrounding areas.

He continued: “National surveys find the big employers in a town, that bit is easy, but you need to go into another level of detail to see where the economic impact is going to be.

“James Cook may be the country’s largest NHS Foundation Trust hospital but I’d be prepared to bet, and you can see if you try to drive up Marton Road at rush hour, a lot of those people don’t live in Middlesbrough – they come from North Yorkshire, Redcar, Darlington.

“If you are a hospital consultant living in Richmond and lose your job then your main economic impact is in the North Yorkshire economy. The way Middlesbrough has been talked about in the national media misses an important point. We are a small region and its typical for people to live and work in different places because the distances aren’t that great. If you are sitting in Whitehall it’s a little dot on a map, but there are different economic drivers in each of the towns across the North-East.

“A couple of years ago there was that survey from the television programme Location, Location, Location which said Middlesbrough was the worst community in the country, but this is a great place to be. Everybody would admit that we have some specific challenges here, but it’s dangerous to label a town as a blackspot, because it can undermine confidence and deter investment.

“There is a real danger that you can talk yourself into a place where there is no point in bothering because no one is going to care anyway.

“From a business point of view we have a strong support network, strong business community and a skilled workforce.

“Anyone writing the town off doesn’t know what they are talking about.”