ANY event which attracts 45,000 people to a town has a clear value and The Festival of Thrift has been an extremely welcome addition to Darlington’s cultural offering since it was first held at the Lingfield Point business park in 2013.

It is, therefore, an undeniable blow to Darlington that The Festival of Thrift, and its tens of thousands of visitors, will be heading east to Redcar later this year.

Darlington has struggled to make the most of its tourism potential over the years, especially its rich railway heritage, and the loss of the The Festival of Thrift – even for one year – has to be disappointing.

We accept that Darlington’s loss is Redcar’s gain and, having endured the loss of its steelworks and thousands of jobs, the Teesside community needs all the help it can get to stimulate the local economy.

We hope the festival is as big a success in Redcar as it has been in Darlington.

Darlington is, of course, having to cope with its own well-documented economic challenges and we are assured that the plan is to bring The Festival of Thrift back to the County Durham market town in 2017.

If that happens, more must be done to spread the benefit into the town centre, rather than it being confined to the periphery.

By next year, the exciting Feethams development, with its new cinema complex, will be up and running.

But will the town still have the Victorian covered market which helps give Darlington an a sense of identity?

In the face of ever-deepening austerity cuts, Darlington needs vision and ideas to make it different. The Festival of Thrift was not the whole solution – but it was certainly a step in the right direction.

We hope to see it return bigger and better than ever in 2017.