Episode 6: 462 homes at Middlehaven, the Marton Interchange reopens after six months, and 394 houses go before Stockton councillors

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. Same three segments: the week's news, a local firm worth knowing, and one practical tip.

DARREN: We start at Middlehaven, because Capital&Centric has put numbers on phase one at last. Four hundred and sixty-two homes on brownfield land around the Old Town Hall in Middlesbrough.

TERRY: That's the first slice of a much bigger plan.

DARREN: It is — the wider site is earmarked for more than two thousand homes, and this phase is backed by three point six million pounds from Middlesbrough Council's Towns Fund allocation. Capital&Centric became the council's development partner last November and is working with architects MVRDV and shedkm. The mix is houses plus low-rise build-to-rent apartments, with shared gardens and play streets. There's a public drop-in consultation this Thursday the tenth, four until seven, at TigerIvy on Albert Road, then a possible planning application later this year.

TERRY: Worth going to, for commercial reasons rather than civic ones. Brownfield housing at that scale means remediation and groundworks first, then frames, roofs, envelope, first and second fix, and public realm at the end — nearly all of it subcontract packages once a main contractor is procured. The moment to be visible is before that appointment, not after.

DARREN: Second story, and this one's finished rather than starting. The A172 and A174 Marton Interchange in Middlesbrough has come back into full use after a six-month programme of repairs.

TERRY: That's the one that's been on contraflow since March.

DARREN: Since March, led by Middlesbrough Council with Esh Construction as main contractor. Concrete repairs beneath the bridge, new waterproofing and expansion joints, resurfacing, new kerbs and footways, and a new pedestrian parapet. The structure is fifty-four years old, and the road including the A174 slip roads reopened in the early hours of Saturday the fifth.

TERRY: Esh's divisional director Steven Garrigan said the job was about extending the lifespan of an important piece of Middlesbrough infrastructure. The point for our listeners is that the council calls this part of an ongoing bridges and structures maintenance programme. Traffic management, kerbing, footways, drainage, concrete repair, line marking — unglamorous, repetitive, and it doesn't stop when housebuilding slows. Worth chasing precisely because everyone else is chasing new-build.

DARREN: Third, Stockton. Avant Homes North East has three applications before the council's planning committee this Wednesday the ninth, at Dunedin House in Thornaby — three hundred and ninety-four houses in phases on a thirteen-hectare site off Harrowgate Lane at Bishopsgarth. Officers are recommending approval with conditions, saying it delivers homes in the West Stockton Sustainable Urban Extension.

TERRY: There are objections, but when officers recommend approval on a strategic housing site the odds are what they are. West Stockton is a long-term allocation of thousands of homes, so this is a decade of work for someone, not a single site.

DARREN: Which takes us to segment two, this week's local firm: Tees Components, in North Skelton, East Cleveland.

TERRY: Not a name every builder will know.

DARREN: No, but they've been at it since nineteen sixty-three, and the registered office is still North Skelton. Precision subcontract engineering, with CNC machining at the core — components from hand-held size up to seventy-two tonnes, which makes them one of the UK's biggest providers of large-scale machining.

TERRY: What's changed lately?

DARREN: Investment. Dynamic balancing added, a dedicated surface treatment building with shot blasting and industrial painting, and a second site developed for future demand. Last year they commissioned a Hartford horizontal boring and milling machine for energy, defence and marine work, creating two skilled jobs, and reported a record four-million-pound order book running into twenty twenty-seven. On-site renewable generation now covers about fifteen per cent of their electricity.

TERRY: That energy bit is the one I'd underline — they say themselves it cuts cost exposure as well as carbon. That's a small firm's argument for solar, not a corporate one.

DARREN: Tip of the week.

TERRY: Register properly for public-sector work, because the Marton job we just talked about came through a council, not a developer.

DARREN: What does registering properly mean?

TERRY: Three steps. One, get on Find a Tender and the North East Procurement Organisation portal, with email alerts set by category and value. Two, complete your supplier profile properly — insurances, accreditations, references, turnover bands — because incomplete profiles get filtered out before a human reads them. Three, target frameworks rather than one-off jobs: get on a multi-year framework and you're bidding against five firms instead of fifty.

DARREN: And if you're too small for a framework?

TERRY: Then go in as a subcontractor to a framework holder. Esh, Seymour, the big regional names all need local supply chains, and they'd rather use someone thirty minutes away than bring a squad from Leeds.

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

TERRY: And if you run a Teesside trade business and fancy a mention on the show, get in touch through the site. See you next week.