By Elisabeth O'Leary
RAVENSCRAIG, Scotland (Reuters) - In Craigneuk library in central Scotland, near a tract of land where Ravenscraig's mighty steel works once stood, posters offer help with debts, unemployment and relationships, or a comic who promises laughter as a cure.
Once the largest hot-strip steel mill in western Europe, Ravenscraig closed in 1992 after years of cuts had whittled the workforce down to 1,200 from over 7,000, as the government shifted many of Britain's industrial assets into private hands.
Nearly a quarter of a century later and despite long-standing regeneration plans, Craigneuk, a town of 3,600 at the gates of what was once Ravenscraig in Scotland's industrial heartland, is one of the most deprived areas of the country.
The town provides a shrill warning to Port Talbot in Wales, where Tata Steel (NS:TISC) has put Britain's biggest remaining steel plant up for sale: once the steel has gone, regeneration is long and hard. Those who recover move on. Others fail to recover at all.
"To those making decisions at Port Talbot I would say think carefully, because the cost – economic and social – to the local community after a closure may be greater than the economic cost of keeping the plant open," says Les Stevenson, a planning manager in North Lanarkshire Council who has helped oversee the Ravenscraig regeneration project for more than a decade.
The loss-making Port Talbot steel works which employs 4,300 people is just one of several British plants that Tata has put up for sale and Prime Minister David Cameron is scrambling to find investors to save jobs.
TOO LATE FOR US
In Ravenscraig, 12,000 jobs were promised after the steel mill shut but they have taken so long to materialise they have already bypassed a generation.
Clearing the 1,150 acre site, once a clanging, smoking hub with blast furnaces, gas and cooling towers and coke ovens, took six years alone and more work underground needs to be done before the land can be redeveloped.
"They're pulling all the stops out for Port Talbot. It's too late for us," said James McAuley, 80, a retired Ravenscraig engineer. He lives opposite the site, overlooking a "Secure Containment Facility", a green hill where toxic residue from the plant is sealed and monitored.
For the last four years, joblessness in Craigneuk has been stuck at roughly twice the rate of North Lanarkshire, hospital admissions for alcohol-related problems are twice the regional rate, while psychiatric admissions are more than double.
Amongst North Lanarkshire's population of about 300,000, the male unemployment rate is 10.6 percent, or twice the rate in the United Kingdom as a whole in the year to September 2015.
Where Ravenscraig once provided 20,000 direct and indirect jobs in the region, the biggest employer providing a fifth of all jobs in the area is now the public health service.
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DISASTER
The debate over how best to protect British jobs has implications for Cameron in his bid to keep the country in the European Union in a June referendum.
Some in the area believe belonging to the EU means Britain cannot shield itself from cheap competition, such as the glut of Chinese steel that has sparked a global steel industry crisis.
Many are still angry with Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative prime minister who battled with trade unions to push through the privatisations that led to the closure of Ravenscraig. With Port Talbot's fate in the balance, fellow Conservative Cameron will have to tread carefully so as not to feed sentiment to leave Europe.
Efforts to give Ravenscraig a fresh start with 200 million pounds ($284 million) of public money over more than two decades are clearly visible: a huge gleaming sports centre, a college, a friendly pub and some new houses.
But signs of business activity are almost entirely absent.
In between the new buildings are rolling expanses of yellow grass and scrub from where Dalzell, another plate rolling mill, is visible.
Ravenscraig's history explains why the devolved Scottish government - which has branded the 1992 closure "a social and economic disaster" - stepped in last month when Tata was looking to sell Dalzell and another plant in Clydebridge.
The government brokered a deal to take them off Tata's hands and sell them to metals group Liberty House for a nominal fee, with a view to preserving jobs.
Liberty has not, however, made any approach to Tata to buy its share of the Ravenscraig site, which it owns jointly with Scottish Enterprise and Wilson Bowden Development Agency, denting hopes it will be developed anytime soon.
A plan hatched at the turn of the century to build a huge retail park at Ravenscraig has been scuppered by years of legal wrangling with local property and retail companies, financial problems and Internet shopping. The plan is now being updated.
"There's been a lot of help around here. But nobody wants to invest without subsidies," said 65-year-old former steel worker Brian Murphy.
