James Mills is a web developer in the North East of England and founder of Refresh Teesside »
Mike Hughes is the Head of Business for the Evening Gazette. He will be blogging on all matters of importance to Teesside businesses - and some that are just worth knowing »
Jez Davison, business writer at the Evening Gazette, is a regular blogger on all things business - particularly finance, entrepreneurship and the state of the Teesside economy » 
Karen McLauchlan is the Evening Gazette's deputy business and features editor - with special interest in all things industry, property and arts related » 
Jeremy Middleton is a venture capitalist and the co-founder of FTSE-200 company HomeServe » 
Deloitte, which has 23 offices across the UK including Newcastle, is among the country's leading professional services firms » 
ClimateNE & Climate Change Schools Project support the move to a low-carbon, resilient economy and help businesses avoid risk and realise commercial opportunities. Posts by Jen Atkinson, Krista McKinzey and Harriet Thew » October 2008 Archives
Rock now discourages new savers
Posted by on October 2, 2008 10:30 AM
Northern Rock has confirmed this morning that it is withdrawing a range of its saving products having been inundated with customers wanting to deposit cash over recent days.
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Welcome back Peter, what a surprise to see you
Posted by on October 3, 2008 1:48 PM
Not many of us saw that one coming - Peter Mandelson is making a return to the Cabinet.
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Defra slimmed.....to whom do rural communities look to?
Posted by Ian Brown on October 5, 2008 6:33 PM
It has been an interesting weekend .....starting with the Northumberland and Durham's National Farmers Union(NFU) centenary celebration dinner at The Hilton, Gateshead. The food was very good but there is a certain irony in the location but why not....the urban/rural interface is important.
It was a full spectrum of ages and money raised was for the RABI - the farming industry's own charity for those on hard times........speaking to many of my friends at this glittering event and you soon realise that farming still contains a wide range of economic situations.
Friday also saw a new Government department which will represent climate change and energy.....interestingly that amounts to about half my day to day activity. I'm pleased but worry for Defra which only had one policy....climate change! With that gone they need a reason for being!
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A momentous day
Posted by on October 8, 2008 10:06 AM
True, we've had a few momentous days over the past few months, but today surely will be the one that goes down in the history books after the government finally confirmed that it was part nationalising Britain's leading banks.
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Eco won't survive unless it is commercially viable
Posted by on October 13, 2008 11:38 AM
However worthy they are, renewable energy projects will survive or fail depending on their commercial viability, says JEZ DAVISON
THE year is 2050. Wind and biomass are Britain's main energy sources. Electric cars have replaced their petrol predecessors. And an entire community is powered by a single hydrogen fuel cell.
This could be Britain's future if Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has his way. His grand vision of an "energy independent Britain" - designed to end the UK's increasing dependence on foreign coal, gas and oil - would have received more column inches but for the implosion of financial systems across the world.
Amid the din of takeovers and crashing share prices, the green challenge masquerades on the horizon as both saviour and executioner.
The threat comes from proposed EU targets that will require member states, including the UK, to produce 20% of its overall energy from renewable sources by 2020.
Critics believe that Brussels is out of touch with reality and that, in the next 10-15 years, Britain will need to rely substantially on coal to power large factories and on imported gas until the Government's new-build nuclear programme has gathered momentum.
In contrast, others say green projects can turn into potential goldmines.
In Tees Valley, hydrogen fuel technologies, the proliferation of wind turbines, home-grown bio-fuels and the conversion of biomass to electricity are all promising to generate wealth, create jobs and reduce our carbon footprint, creating thousands of green collar jobs.
This early promise hasn't jolted consumers out of their natural buying trends. Will people really swap their petrol-run BMWs for an electric car that needs recharging every 50 miles? Will they really use bio-fuel as long as they see "Unleaded" and "Diesel" at the pumps? And will they be happy to pay ã1.30 a go for low-energy light bulbs when they could buy the more powerful version at half the price... and not wait half an hour before it lights up the room?
Ultimately, consumers will decide the commercial fate of these green projects, many of which have only just evolved from the R&D chamber. Working out how to lower production cost - and therefore the price to the consumer - is essential to ensure these projects get past first base.
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Whose game is it anyway?
Posted by on October 13, 2008 11:41 AM
IN flooding the beautiful game with their multi-billions, the super-rich may end up drowning it for good, says JEZ DAVISON
SEPTEMBER 1, 2008 marked the day when the face of football changed forever.
The Abu Dhabi United Group's ã210m purchase of Manchester City was the moment when the beautiful game became the preserve of the super-rich.
It seems no longer feasible for a multi-millionaire to run a football club that can challenge for the Premiership title or major European honours. The billionaire - or even trillionaire - is now the defining symbol of a sport that used to be synonymous with the humble working man.
My father spoke recently of his sadness at the game's descent into money madness. He used to stand on the terraces of Sunderland's former Roker Park - like his father before him - and as soon as the referee's whistle brought the game to a close, would start counting down the days until the next fixture. Now this devout football fanatic derives more pleasure from watching under-funded sports such as athletics, where winning is everything to the participants and the prize-money a bonus.
As well as killing the passion of the average football fan, the super-rich have also become a dangerous de-stabilising force on the modern-day business that is the beautiful game.
West Ham boss Alan Curbishley and Toon "messiah" Kevin Keegan both resigned because they felt they had no control over player transfers. Manchester City's former billionaire owner, Thaksin Shinawatra, was little more than one year into a grandiose 10-year plan before he sold out to the Abu Dhabi consortium, while Everton chairman Bill Kenwright is actively seeking a wealthy foreign investor to allow the club to compete on the pitch. Meanwhile, Circus Newcastle has become a headline-writer's dream, with even the players admitting the club is in turmoil.
Against this frenetic backdrop, Boro fans have reasons to be thankful. Led by a charismatic chairman, Steve Gibson, who has kept faith with his young manager, the club is building foundations on which an assault on the Premiership's top six is a realistic goal. Abu Dhabi's wealth may be helping the Premiership attract the cream of the world's footballing talent, but at what price?
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The quality of mercy is not strained
Posted by Adam Lopardo on October 13, 2008 3:24 PM
Last week, two things happened. One is more than covered here and across the media, the financial world came apart at it's core. The other was not entirely unconnected. I went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of The Merchant Of Venice at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle.
One of the central themes of the play is basically capitalism - investment, trade, lending and the consequences both of defaulting and being hard headed in your pursuit of debt.
I won't bombard you with quotes from the play. In fact I'm sure somewhere a proper journalist will have already made the comparisons line by line between Shylocks risk assessment of Antonio and Antonio's faith in his investments and the current financial strife. There is a view that Shakespeare wrote Merchant as a reaction to the growing capitalism of the day as a warning to others. I think we can safely say that however many children (and future Bank Chief Executives) have read this and other Shakespeare plays at school, that message has never really got through. Hopefully though at least one person in each class went away a little bit more engaged, a little bit more curious and a little bit more intrigued. I know I did.
It's one of the things I love about Shakespeare and many other artists and art forms. They hold a mirror up to our lives and actions and they entreat us to react. Much of the time they are dismissed as something you have to study in school, or are too complicated or 'too arty' but if you stop, just for a second and take it in you can really learn a lot from the arts. Some of it is practical ("neither a lender of a borrower be") but most of all, all of it is enjoyable to someone somewhere.
At the height of the problems last week The Times published an article under the headline "City gloom, arts boom: let's face the music and dance, sing and laugh". The point of the article was that whilst all around us the financial sector and the economy is heading towards bust, cultural life in the country is at an all time boom. So what are you waiting for? Take a moment and have a look at what's on at the fantastic wealth of cultural assets we have in the region and if only for a moment be transfixed and transported to somewhere else.
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Business in the bush
Posted by Andrew Mernin on October 17, 2008 12:27 PM
WHEN I first heard that Ray Mears would be talking to North East businesses about surviving the current economic climate, I initially pictured cheesy and tenuous links between life in the Amazon and corporate jungle.
Slogans such as "only the strongest survive" "eat or be eaten" and Alan Partridge-style affirmations like "I'm a tiger" immediately sprang to mind.
How wrong I was.
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Bruiser Peter's back with a splash
Posted by on October 22, 2008 11:21 AM
THE shockwaves surrounding Peter "The Monkey" Mandelson's return to Government continue to ripple around Westminster and beyond.
Hartlepool's adopted son - who represented the town for 12 years - is promising to shake up state support for industry and give employers across the country a strong voice at the cabinet table.
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Eco's commercial survival test
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Posted by on October 22, 2008 11:23 AM
THE year is 2050. Wind and biomass are Britain's main energy sources. Electric cars have replaced their petrol predecessors. And an entire community is powered by a single hydrogen fuel cell.
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All Plain Sailing for Hidden In Plain View?
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Posted by Danielle Pender on October 22, 2008 4:59 PM
After months of organising and planning it is hard to believe that our exhibition is coming to an end this weekend. Fitting in being co-curator around two other jobs has been hectic at times but definitely worth the late nights.
Hidden In Plain View was our response to Design Event's brief of exploring Northern European design. Using the concept of home - one that transfers easily across most cultures, generations and interests - we're hoping that we've been able to open up graphic design to a whole new audience as well as challenging design enthusiasts in the region.
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Patience...
Posted by Mark Lisgo on October 23, 2008 11:42 AM
If there is one lesson I have learned in my first six months in the Middle East, one piece of advice to pass on, it is this: patience is required by the boatload in all aspects of business and life!
The culture in the Middle East is very different to that in the West and the Far East. Things here generally move at a slower pace. It sounds odd to say that of a country like the UAE where skyscrapers seem to rise from the ground one after the other. However, it is true, and noticeably so.
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2 Degrees of Separation...
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Posted by Danielle Pender on October 23, 2008 12:47 PM
So as Hidden in Plain View draws to a close in Newcastle we're looking to tour the exhibition to other galleries in London, Paris and New York. As we've managed to secure big name designers and brilliant coverage on international design blogs we thought it would be pretty easy to attract the attention of design focused galleries. Turns out it wasn't!
Our e-mails went unanswered and our phonecalls went unreturned. Someone even told us because we were so far from London they weren't interested in dealing with us! We were about to start taking it very personally when we received an e-mail from a lovely lady called Yuta who owns a gallery in New York. We co-ordinated our time differences and chatted on the phone about babies (my colleague Beth has just given birth to a baby girl!), politics, the economic crisis, Sex & the City and finally design. Yuta loves the project and has agreed to show it in her gallery in December 2009. I explained the difficulty we'd had in dealing with other galleries and she offered to help as she used to work in London. Two phonecalls later and we've secured a London show and a possible Barcelona show in 2010!
So it comes back tot old saying "it's who you know, not what you know". Even more so if you're dealing with people in London who have a nose bleed every time they leave EC1.
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Take the rate off NE
Posted by Ross Smith on October 28, 2008 9:19 AM
The comments from North East Minister Nick Brown regarding possible changes to Empty Property Rates which were reported this morning are encouraging.
In short, while a wholesale reversal is unlikely, ministers are considering some reforms which would exempt particular areas where it is having a damaging impact, which would include some in the North East.
These comments tie in with what NECC has been told by MPs and Government sources, so it suggests there is a willingness in Government to look again at this punitive tax, which has been introduced at exactly the wrong time.
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