A steadying hand on the tiller

Now together again in Middlesbrough, Brian Dinsdale tells Adrian Worsley why he couldn't resist the challenge of rescuing another struggling town.

"I HAVE the old audit around here somewhere - it's good to look back on it sometimes." Brian Dinsdale sounds like someone who received a dreadful school report years ago but dusted it off from time-to-time to show how far he'd come.

If it had described an errant pupil and not a failing council, the report would probably have condemned the poor wretch as under-achieving and appallingly turned-out. No doubt a failure to learn lessons and hold on to dinner money would also have graced this imagined report.

When he took over in 1988, Hartlepool Borough had just received the worst audit report imaginable. You name it, the council failed in it. It had financial deficits, low morale and some council officers well past their sell-by date.

Add to the general malaise a complete failure of the local steel and shipping industries and Dinsdale walked into a town going nowhere fast.

Now, fast forward 14 years and Hartlepool Borough Council has just received one of the best reports imaginable - and currently lies in fifth place in a Government league table of council excellence.

Admittedly last year's election of a hairy primate to the mayor's office probably didn't help Hartlepool image-wise, but all-in-all, Dinsdale could be satisfied he's leaving an authority in better shape than when he found it.

So, if Hartlepool's mini-renaissance is so satisfying, why should the 54-year-old trade it all in for another authority?

He explains: "Just five years ago Middlesbrough was in the same state as Hartlepool was when I took over. The outgoing chief executive John Foster had to make some tough decisions and shake things up - I'll be there to calm things down again, to consolidate."

When he picks up the baton across the River Tees in March next year, he will have to do exactly the opposite to what he had to do 14 years ago.

At Middlesbrough he will be the steadying hand. At Hartlepool he was the kick up the backside. He recalls the state of the place - both inside and outside the civic centre. Hartlepool was dying, there's no other word for it. There was massive dereliction everywhere, high unemployment and very low educational attainment. It seemed like the whole town had low morale.

'The council had just received this crippling district auditors' report that criticised virtually everything," he recalls. "There were massive closures in steel and shipbuilding and the whole place was in terminal decline. The council just wasn't up to the task."

Two years after taking over, the tide began to turn at Hartlepool. The town got lucky and the council rode that luck. It sold the town's shopping centre, now the Middleton Grange Shopping Centre, for £20m, and successfully bid for £37m of City Challenge money.

A partnership with the Teesside Development Corporation (TDC) followed, and after more resources had been poured into the town, the new marina, Historic Quay, a new road system and a revamped Church Street were born.

The transformation of Hartlepool's physical environment was matched with the kind of tourist-centred advertising that would have provoked gales of laughter just a few years before. New developments bred new confidence and with Ray Mallon's zero tolerance policing keeping the streets relatively clean, Hartlepool began to slowly lose its 'monkey hanging' reputation.

Then, like King Kong crashing through the trees, a media stampede threatened to engulf the town when H'Angus the Monkey became Hartlepool's first directly-elected mayor last year.

Did the news that his beloved town had once again become a national laughing stock not depress the council's top man? "Not at all," says Dinsdale. "There had been silly talk that Stuart Drummond's win would damage inward investment into the town. Obviously, it was a cause of considerable amusement in the short term but we knew that people would quickly move on.

"To adapt from being a call centre worker to a mayor in such a short space of time is fantastic. However, I remember when he was first elected and he sat in my office. I told him we had 4,000 employees and an annual budget of £100m and he wanted to know what a local authority was. That tells you how far he has come since then."

Clearly warming to the theme of self-improvement, Mr Dinsdale also reels off a bunch of statistics that reflect the dramatic change-around in the town's fortunes.

For instance, in 1996 only 25 per cent of pupils were getting five A-C grades and above at GCSE. Now that's at 42 per cent. Unemployment has halved to 6.5 per cent - "still far too high", he adds.

However, as the tenth most deprived authority in England, Hartlepool has often had a bigger slice of the government's pie than neighbouring councils. For example, this year Hartlepool will get an extra 7.5 per cent in government funding, whereas neighbouring Middlesbrough will get less than last year because of a fall in its population.

But if the impending cash problems of his new job seem daunting, Dinsdale's own financial status couldn't be healthier. He describes as 'significant' the hike in wages that will take him to £135,000-a-year in Middlesbrough. But he says it wasn't the money that tempted him south of the Tees. "If the truth be told, Hartlepool actually offered me more than that to stay. But I still decided to go.

"I've only been tempted to leave once in all my time here, and that was about three years ago when I was shortlisted to become North Yorkshire's chief executive. But that wasn't to be. I simply feel that my work is done in Hartlepool. The time has come to make a change.

"When they announced that John Foster was going to Wakefield Council I had discussions with Ray Mallon about moving to Middlesbrough, but of course, they had to go through the usual procedure. I always regarded Ray Mallon as a very effective officer when he was at Hartlepool and he contributed to some of the success of the town."

But he says there's still a lot to do in Hartlepool. "I mustn't paint a picture of complacency. Crime is still rife and public fear of crime is as high as ever. But Hartlepool has changed that's for sure. Who would have thought that tourists come from all over the country to visit Hartlepool? But they do."