The future looks bright at one of the UKs mostimportant manufacturing sites

Hundreds of millions of pounds of spend is either underway or has been announced in the last year at the Wilton International site.

The investments, by a range of site companies, will eventually create hundreds of direct new jobs and sustain thousands of others in key service and supply areas.

The most significant announcement of the year came in March when Ensus, a Yarm-based company with a strong management team with years of experience in manufacturing on Teesside, announced plans to build a £250m world-scale bioethanol plant at Wilton International. When completed in 2009, the plant will have an annual capacity of more than 400 million litres of the environmentally friendly fuel.

The product will be made from around a million tonnes of wheat a year using a process of distillation and fermentation.

David Miliband, the then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, paid a visit to the site in May to mark the beginning of construction.