Five MPs on Teesside have called on the government to provide more help to local police and fire services after a week in which nine people have died in two incidents. The MPs said the communities they represented should get the “strongest possible backing from the government”. Police have said two fatal incidents may be linked to organised crime.
On Saturday, seven people including two police officers were killed in a head-on crash on the A66. On Wednesday, a 34-year-old woman and her seven-year-old niece were killed in a house fire that police believe was started deliberately. The house in Grangetown is less than a mile from the scene of the A66 crash.
Andy McDonald, the Labour MP for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East, said gangs and the drugs trade were “clearly featuring” in a series of incidents in the area. He said Cleveland police had been underfunded for many years. He told BBC Radio 4: “We do suffer those metropolitan levels of crime, and yet comparatively our funding looks much more like a rural area, and it simply cannot continue like that.
We’ve got to put resources where the demand is most high, and that is Cleveland, and that’s the message to ministers.” Alec Brown, the Labour leader of Redcar and Cleveland council, said people deserved to “feel safe in their own homes”. The prime minister, Andy Burnham, said the government would offer “all of the support that the authorities need” after the incidents. On a visit to south Wales, he told reporters it was “too early to jump to conclusions” about whether the Grangetown fire and the A66 crash were connected.
I’m sure there’s a whole community that is grieving.” Inquests were formally opened into the deaths of the seven people in the A66 crash. The two police officers who died were PC Matthew Blades, 37, and PC Tom Clough, 38. The Teesside area coroner, Paul Appleton, said that in the early hours of 22 August there was a collision on the A66 at South Bank between a police vehicle and a Volkswagen Passat.
He told the hearing: “All occupants of both vehicles were sadly pronounced dead at the scene.” Appleton said: “At this stage it is understood there had been a police pursuit of the Volkswagen Passat. It [the Passat] entered the A66 carriageway against the flow of traffic, at which stage the pursuit was aborted. A short time after … the Volkswagen Passat collided with a police vehicle which had not been directly involved in the prior pursuit.” He said the provisional cause of death for Blades was head and neck injuries and for Clough was neck injuries.
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