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Mike Dean recalls the day that business stood up and fought to save Milton Keynes Development Corporation and how, as managing director of Newport Pagnell Construction, he took on the national construction companies in the battle for labour by ploughing a different and controversial furrow.


THE EARL of Avon rose to his feet in the House of Lords on a cold January day. He was about to argue in favour of the New Towns and Development Corporations Bill that would withdraw public sector support for the new towns. It placed the future of Milton Keynes Development Corporation in jeopardy, raising fears that it would be wound up before its scheduled date of 1992. This is 1985. “The government do not believe that there is a


case for a continuing special public sector involvement in the new towns,” the Parliamentary Under- Secretary of State at the Department of Environment told the Upper House. “The special involvement of the public sector through the ownership of land and buildings has been an


important tool in promoting the growth of the new towns. But when that induced growth has been achieved and there is no need for further growth, the case for that special involvement ceases.” Lord Campbell of Eskan, the


development corporation’s original chairman, rose to respond.“Those development corporations which have not finished their work should be allowed - indeed, encouraged - to do so. Those who have invested their lives, their livelihood and their money in what was originally a paper plan, in the belief that the government would see it through, must simply not be let down.” Bill Benyon and George Walden, the MPs for Milton Keynes, began lobbying on behalf of their constituents, backed by the new town’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry. At the time, Mike Dean chaired the local joint consultative committee of the National Federation of Builders. “There was a real threat that Milton Keynes was going to be cancelled,” he says. “The MPs asked us to write to the Department of Environment to protest. They were concerned, we all were. I said we have to fight this, Milton Keynes has to go on.” His letter, sent as managing


director of Newport Pagnell Construction - which had built much of the new town’s initial


22 Business


Mike Dean and his successor Simon Haddy reflect on past projects in Milton Keynes carried out by NPC.


The battle to save new town from being cancelled


‘I said ‘We have to fight this’. It was vitally important that the development corporation carried on.


infrastructure - used NPC as an example of the benefits of Milton Keynes; a growing business, creating employment by going from six employees to 30. “It was vitally important that the development corporation carried on. We won that battle.” The history of NPC is as old as the imperial barge built for the Emperor Napoleon. Originally Wilford Brothers before changing its name in 1972, it endured many changing times but none as radical as when construction of Milton Keynes was in full swing. Mike, now chairman, is in his office on the top floor of the firm’s offices in Union Street, its home since being bought in 1888 at auction in the Swan Revived Hotel for a princely £265. Mike is old school; quietly spoken,


smart, professional and a man with great pride in the achievements both of his company and of Milton Keynes. Before him on his office table is a gallery of photographs taken as the new town rose from the ground. He arrived in Milton Keynes in 1969 as a quantity surveyor for Henry Cooper & Sons in Stony Stratford and worked on the first factory to be built in the new city: Compound Sections, on the corner of Bond Avenue and Dawson Road in Mount Farm. “It was demolished only last year, a shame it has missed


the 50th anniversary” he says. He joined Newport Pagnell Construction as it expanded to take the opportunities that Milton Keynes was providing. NPC won local authority work from Buckinghamshire County Council, building schools including Riverside First School in Newport Pagnell and Moorland First School in Beanhill. It built the information centre


erected between Silbury and Midsummer Boulevards on the site of the Church of Christ the Cornerstone, where visitors would be bussed from Bletchley station u


The information centre for visitors. The temporary dome was Mike’s idea. “I got the idea from a tennis club in London.”


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