THE National Audit Office report on the winding up of the Teesside Development Corporation has highlighted issues relating to the way the body spent public money, particularly in the last period of its existence.

These issues must be resolved to ensure the people of the Teesside can enjoy the fruits of the corporation's work without the nagging feeling that somehow developments like Teesside Park, the Riverside Stadium and Stockton's Teesdale were created by dint of dodgy practices and financial irregularities.

Nobody has suggested that any individual has acted corruptly. Some may have had an inflated opinion of the corporation's intrinsic worth (witness the grotesque monuments erected in its memory at a cost of £150,000-plus) and some may have broken normal accounting rules in their efforts to make things happen.

But nobody should be in any doubt that the corporation served a very useful purpose in kick-starting regeneration in the area. At the time of its creation, Teesside and the other urban centres where these corporations were established were on their knees, battered by the recession of the early Eighties.

The £200m the corporation spent brought about developments quickly which changed the face of the area. It made a difference at a time when the community was in a downward spiral of plant closures, job losses and shattered confidence followed by more closures. The TDC helped stop that.

It may have been largely unaccountable to the local electorate and it may have played fast and lose with some of the money entrusted to it, but it got things done in a way the existing structure of local government could never have achieved. If that £200m had been given to the old Cleveland County Council, it would have disappeared into a pit of political nonsense and bureaucratic incompetence.

The Teesside Development Corporation was a far from perfect regeneration vehicle. But its legacy is something the area should still be proud of