Episode 5: Middlesbrough's 15-project town centre prospectus, £600,000 left in the Tees Valley apprentice pot, and six assisted living homes for Stockton

Transcript

DARREN: Welcome to the Teesside Trade Podcast, the weekly show covering construction, trades and property across the Tees Valley. I'm Darren Turnbull.

TERRY: And I'm Terry Oakes. Three segments as always: the news, a local firm worth knowing, and one practical tip.

DARREN: We start in Middlesbrough, because the council has put out what it's calling the biggest changes to the town centre in a generation. It's a ten-year investment prospectus with fifteen projects in it, and it goes to the mayor and his executive on the second of September.

TERRY: Give us the headlines.

DARREN: Demolishing the Civic Centre and building a new theatre of around two thousand seats, able to take West End shows. A hotel in the derelict Gurney House next to the A66. Stripping out redundant retail floorspace and concentrating premium shops around the Hill Street Centre. Plus housing already in the pipeline — more than two thousand homes at Middlehaven, a thousand at Newham Hall near Coulby Newham, and a new community at Gresham. Then smaller pieces: a surgery centre of excellence at James Cook, bus super-stops, a taxi hub and an urban park. Mayor Chris Cooke says it would be the most significant investment for a generation.

TERRY: Here's the honest bit. This is a prospectus, not a funded programme — the council says national and regional grant funding will be vital, so most of it depends on money that hasn't landed. The one line with a firm date is Civic Centre demolition, starting in the new year.

DARREN: So demolition, enabling works, scaffolding, hoarding, traffic management first.

TERRY: That's the near-term work. The rest — theatre fit-out, hotel conversion, housing — you watch, you get in front of the likely main contractors now, and you don't restructure your business around it until the funding is confirmed.

DARREN: Second story, and this one's real money on the table today. The Tees Valley Apprenticeship Levy Matching Service has had nearly one point eight million pounds pledged, and around six hundred thousand is still unclaimed.

TERRY: Unclaimed how?

DARREN: It's run by Tees Valley Combined Authority. Large employers with unspent Apprenticeship Levy funds transfer them to smaller firms that don't pay the levy. Eleven donors have put money in, including the BBC, Amazon and bp, and it's helped twenty-six companies take on eighty-nine apprentices.

TERRY: Eighty-nine apprentices across the whole region is a small number, and there's six hundred grand still sitting there. Most small trade firms either don't know it exists or assume it's not for them. If you've ever said you'd take an apprentice on if the training was covered — this is that.

DARREN: Third, Stockton. Action4Care has applied for planning permission for six assisted living homes on Darlington Back Lane, next to its existing Springwood care home.

TERRY: Small scheme.

DARREN: Small, but the planning statement is interesting. It argues a net need of four hundred and forty-four units by twenty thirty-two against only a hundred and eighty-one existing placements in the borough. Six one-bedroom units for adults aged eighteen to sixty-five.

TERRY: The shortfall figure is the point, not the six houses. Housing-with-care is one of the few categories where demand is documented in the council's own evidence base. For a small builder or groundworker, supported housing is steady, repeatable work — and far fewer firms chase it than chase standard estates.

DARREN: Which brings us to segment two, this week's local firm: Tulway Fabrications, on Sotherby Road, Skippers Lane Industrial Estate in Middlesbrough.

TERRY: Tell us about them.

DARREN: They're the Teesside arm of Tulway Engineering, a family-run group founded in nineteen ninety-eight by managing director Kevin Tully. The Teesside operation does high-integrity pipework fabrication, welding and mechanical installation across energy, nuclear, gas transmission and process work.

TERRY: What's the scale of it?

DARREN: Two workshops on Teesside, eleven overhead cranes, and capacity for more than a thousand welds a week. They've delivered an off-site fabrication programme for Bilfinger with more than twenty-six thousand welds, and secured a contract with Highview supporting its liquid air energy storage project at Carrington.

TERRY: Second week running we've talked about a Teesside firm winning work on shop capacity and coded welders rather than site headcount. Off-site fabrication is where the main contractors are pushing risk and programme. If you've got a workshop and the quality paperwork, that's the door.

DARREN: Tip of the week, then.

TERRY: Get your accreditations in order before the tenders come out, not after. Every scheme we've talked about today gets procured through a main contractor supply chain, and the first filter is always a compliance check.

DARREN: What does that look like in practice?

TERRY: Three things. One, hold a current SSIP-recognised health and safety accreditation — CHAS, SafeContractor, Constructionline, whichever your customers ask for — and diary the renewal, because it lapses quietly. Two, keep one folder with your insurances, latest accounts, health and safety policy, environmental policy and training matrix, all in date. Three, keep card and ticket records current for every operative.

DARREN: And if you haven't got that ready?

TERRY: Then you're not slow, you're ineligible. The firms who win supply chain work aren't always cheaper — they're the ones who can answer the pre-qualification questionnaire in a day instead of a fortnight.

DARREN: Good place to stop. That's episode five. Everything's linked in the show notes, with the full transcript at teessidetradepodcast.co.uk.

TERRY: If you run a Teesside trade business and you'd like a mention on the show, get in touch through the site. See you next week.