THE controversial Teesside Development Corporation came under renewed attack last night over the huge cost of its job creation programme.

Bosses of the now-defunct body, which piled up losses of up to £40m, have always trumpeted the jobs and investment it brought to the region.

But the true cost of each of the 12,226 jobs it created during its ten-year life has now been revealed.

Research by The Northern Echo, based on the corporation's £462.5m gross spending and number of jobs created, shows each job cost an average of almost £38,000 to establish.

This places the TDC way ahead of a number of other former urban development corporations such as Sheffield (£7,002) and Tyne and Wear (£14,252).

Last night, Ashok Kumar, MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland and one of the TDC's fiercest critics, said the figures proved that its claims of a legacy of success were wildly exaggerated.

"Whatever their successes," he said, "a very heavy price was paid for each job created.

"No one would deny that it was necessary at the time to do something about job creation. But if the local authorities in the area had been given the same amount of money, they would have created many more jobs than the TDC did."

Stockton South MP Dari Taylor, who is among a number of Teesside MPs calling for a criminal investigation into the affairs of the TDC, said: "The TDC floated projects where there was no end result.

"We are not being vindictive. There is just a determination to see some sort of justice for the tax payers of the region."

But former TDC chairman Sir Ron Norman dismissed the comparisons as simplistic.

"It is perfectly possible to make simplistic comparisons about this but I'm not going to," he said.

"To compare the difficulties of Tyneside, which has always been a more economically active area anyway, with Teesside, would be wrong."

"We did the best we could under very difficult circumstances."

Last week former TDC chief executive Duncan Hall said the TDC's losses were minor in comparison to the £1.1bn of private investment and thousands of jobs it created.

Mr Hall was grilled by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee in the wake of a damning National Audit Office report into its operations.

The TDC, which was wound up in 1998, was said for years to have broken and bent guidelines and ignored regulations controlling government agencies.

A number of deals in which land was sold below its market value without Government approval were questioned.

And vital files and dossiers were said to have been deliberately destroyed.

The TDC, whose land spanned about 12,000 acres between Cleveland and Hartlepool, was one of 12 set up by the last Conservative Government to regenerate run-down urban areas.

Jonathan Blackie, director of strategy at regional development agency One NorthEast, defended the TDC, saying it faced difficulties not encountered by other development corporations

"It was dealing with some fairly heavily contaminated areas that were landlocked," he said.

"So a lot of money had to be spent on reclamation and putting in the relevant infrastructure, so its spending on investment at least was always going to be very high."