Motherwell: why this town is coming like a ghost town

Not far from the Ravenscraig site is Dalzell, one of two remaining steel works in the area along with Clydebridge in neighbouring Cambuslang.

Earlier this week their owners Tata, the Indian multi-national, announced 270 of the 400 staff would be made redundant and the two plants would be mothballed, effectively killing off the Scottish steel industry in one swoop. The crisis in the remnants of the Scottish steel industry is partly blamed on cheap Chinese steel.

Two days later North Lanarkshire council, whose headquarters are just minutes away from Dalzell, announced around 1100 full time posts may have to be cut to save £49 million, potentially devastating the local economy.

On the day of the council’s announcement, wind howled through the town's empty streets, the sky was grey and thick with cloud and the tower bearing the name of Dalzell loomed over the once-bustling local streets, that were no almost empty of all life.

At one point the Dalzell site would have been packed full of workers, but now inside the rusty brown gates there is no one to be seen. Leaves swirl around the grounds and inside a faint clatter of machinery echoes round the bare courtyards.

Opened in 1872, the site is now relying on the Scottish Government or a buyer to save it. On a visit to the site earlier this week, Nicola Sturgeon said she would not give up without a fight, and has not ruled out taking it in to public ownership.

TATA announced a funding pot of £1.5million to help the steel communities around Dalzell and Clydebridge with jobs, but this is unlikely to be enough to save the region from falling further into deprivation and poverty.

On the town’s Windmillhill street, minutes from Dalzell, a large ‘To Let’ sign hangs outside a family butcher, the shelves inside empty. A range of cafes and sandwich shops are also shut.

In neighbouring streets, shops lie completely empty. The only shop open is the Olympia Fryer chip shop, some beauticians and hairdressers, and two pubs.

In the New Century Bar, two men sit quietly mulling over their pints.

“Motherwell’s a ghost town now anyway,” says one man when asked about his thoughts on the job cuts.

“We’ve not recovered from Ravenscraig. It’s devastating for the families of course but what can you do?”

Local chip shop owner Mario Rossi says much the same: “A lot of the shops have closed down here because there’s no money. It will be worse with more redundancies.”

Peter Phillips, a 61-year-old former steel worker from Cambuslang explained: "There was steel running through our veins, our whole family was steel.”

Phillips was a works planner at the Cambuslang-based Clydebridge factory, but also acted as shop steward for the joint union between the Clydebridge and Dalzell.

“It was the sort of industry held down from father to son. My great grandparents came from North England to work in steel,” he said.

When Phillips began working at Clydebridge, around 2000 people were clocking in and out every day. He said Dalzell was also fully staffed, and the whole area around the two plants was “booming”.

“Pubs and clubs and social activities have gone completely now,” he explained.

“You had miners’ welfares, great places to meet people and talk, they were always stowed with steelworkers.

“Then when Ravenscraig shut and more people were laid off there was no money in the local economy and these places just disappeared.”

When Phillips left in 2010, 82 staff remained at the Cambuslang plant, and a few hundred at Dalzell. The workforce had fallen by 1900 in 35 years.

“We did our best to keep it as viable as we could,” he explained. “The indigenous workforce would have gave blood [to save it] but it was dire at the end. I’m definitely proud to have been part of it but you’re sorry you weren’t there to improve it, rather than see it decline.”

Ravenscraig and Dalzell employed tens of thousands of people over the last two centuries, and almost every family in Motherwell was associated with the steel industry in some way.

Workers were proud of their jobs, and fought hard to save them.

The steelmen had made Ravenscraig the most cost effective in the UK, but that didn’t matter to Margaret Thatcher, who hired Canadian Iain MacGregor to take over the British Steel Corporation.

When MacGregor cast his eye over Motherwell and singled Ravenscraig out for the chop, workers, residents and Scottish politicians from all parties were outraged.

They staged protests and marches, but their pleas fell on deaf ears and in July 1996, the plant was demolished.

The cooling towers came down in just six seconds, signalling the death of jobs, futures and a way of life for Motherwell.

John Pentland, MSP for Motherwell and Wishaw, has spent many of his life campaigning to save Scottish steel and even worked in the industry at Clyde Alloy until he was “directed towards the scrapheap” after 28 years.

The Labour MSP said his heart sank when he was told about Dalzell and Clydebridge, and the council job losses days later. He admitted the job losses would have a huge impact on his constituency.

He said: “Beyond the families and the other steel sector businesses that are directly affected, there are all the shops and services which will be hit hard by such a major blow to the local economy.

“The closure of Clyde Alloy, Ravenscraig and others was the culmination of a concerted attack on the steel industry.

"As with the miners, there was an ideological mission to crush an industry that harboured trade union strength.

“That axe shattered our communities, and in Motherwell and Wishaw we are still picking up the pieces, trying to rebuild and regenerate the local economy, jobs and communities.

“We still have a lot of social deprivation and unemployment. Ravenscraig is the biggest brownfield site in Europe and despite having secured status as a national project [for redevelopment], we are still to move beyond it having a college, a sports facility and a few houses.”

Pentland said the future is uncertain for the area, but the Scottish Government should not “meekly accept annihilation of the Scottish steel industry”.

He added: “We don’t want consolation measures such as retraining for other jobs that don’t exist – we want protection for the industry and its jobs. There are other options. We don’t have to bow and accept that closure is inevitable.”

Pentland is right about social deprivation. North Lanarkshire is high in the deprivation index, and falls within the worst 5% of areas in Scotland for crime and income deprivation, according to the latest Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation figures.

The region is also the most deprived in Scotland for education, with 16.6% of people in Motherwell and Wishaw having no qualifications compared to the Scottish average of 9.4%.

The unemployment figure is around 6.5%, already above Scottish average of 5.9%.

Thousands of residents are also struggling with food poverty, with almost 8,000 people referred to the five foodbanks covering North and South Lanarkshire between April 2014 and March this year – an increase on the previous year of a 225%. Of the 8,000 referrals, almost 2,000 were children.

Ewan Gurr, Scotland Network Manager at the Trussell Trust which runs many of Scotland’s food banks, said due to the latest job cuts both North and South Lanarkshire foodbanks will feel the strain.

He said: “The industrial implosion Scotland has experienced over the last five decades has left its mark on the economic landscape and most notably upon the lives of many of our men, women and children.

“If we see a similar scale of decline in North and South Lanarkshire I would fully expect, on the basis of previous experience, that our foodbanks in both local authorities will see a surge in demand in the months that follow where families struggle to survive on savings or where suitable employment fails to materialise.

“The painful truth is, many of us are only one pay cheque away from crisis.”