IF you borrowed heavily to buy your home at the height of the property boom you can empathise a bit with the current woes of Tata Steel Europe.

The scale may be different – Tata revealed an eye watering £1.2bn annual loss in its European steel operations this week – but the principle of buying shortly before a market crash is the same.

Tata’s £6.7bn debt-fuelled deal for Corus in 2007 might have looked like a solid investment.

It gave them what remained of the former British Steel, including the famous Redcar iron and steel works – which it later off-loaded to SSI – as well as plants in Port Talbot and Scunthorpe and mills in Teesside.

But the slump in demand across Europe, and the rapid rise of rival steelmakers in Asia, has left it with a huge burden.

India-based Tata Group, which owns everything from Jaguar Land Rover to the Tetley teabag factory in Eaglescliffe, is worth an estimated £60bn. But even a global behemoth is unable to sustain huge losses indefinitely.

Tata Steel admits it is looking to reduce costs and sell off some of its European assets, which could include a Teesside research and development division.

Let’s hope it sticks to its commitment to drive forward operations in our region, where it employs about 1,500 workers, and continues to invest in apprenticeships and facilities.

MINISTERS have been claiming for months that savage public spending cuts are being offset by the creation of jobs in the private sector.

It would appear that they are correct – but at what cost?

Most jobs created under the Coalition are in low-pay industries such as retail, table-waiting and residential care, a TUC report has shown. It said nearly 80 per cent of the 587,000 net new jobs since June 2010 have been in sectors where the average pay is £7.95 an hour or less.

A full-time worker in County Durham is earning, on average, £728 less per year in real terms than three years ago.

The TUC said many people were being forced to take these lower-paid jobs and put their careers on hold after being made redundant.

“One of the unreported struggles of recent years has been people being made redundant from middle-income jobs and having to take low-paid, low-skill jobs as it’s the only work available,” said Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary.

The Government is creating jobs but it is also swelling the ranks of the working poor. People don’t just need any job. They need a chance to develop skills that boost their earning potential and give them a chance to build a better life for themselves and their families.

THE region’s MPs were split in the wake of the latest failure of Durham Tees Valley to win cash from the Regional Growth Fund (RGF).

Most were furious that the Government had rejected it for the second time in less than a year. But Stockton South Conservative MP James Wharton reckoned it was always doomed to fail. “This was never the sort of project the RGF was going to back,”

he told me.

Perhaps the team led by Lord Heseltine should have said the same to airport owners Peel before they wasted time and money preparing a bold plan to regenerate the site.

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