Teesside MPs call for more police help after Middlesbrough and A66 deaths

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 victims of the Grangetown house fire have been named as Natalie McDonald, 34, and her niece Valentina Foster, seven. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PAThe 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.“The important thing [is] it’s a terribly tragic event that’s happened, with the loss of a young woman and her seven-year-old niece,” he said. “Utterly devastating. 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.The police officers Tom Clough (left) and Matthew Blades died when a Volkswagen Passat going in the wrong direction hit their vehicle on the A66. Photograph: Cleveland Police/PALater, inquests were opened and adjourned into the deaths of the Passat occupants, named as Cole Worthy, 17, Theo Rae, 17, Makai Saddington, 18, and 23-year-olds Michael Robert Cahill and Jacob Matusiak.The victims of the house fire have been named as Natalie McDonald and her niece Valentina Foster.Local residents insisted their deaths had nothing to do with the A66 crash. McDonald’s brother Josh Kirton told reporters: “My sister was not involved with anything to do with gangs or the [crash on the] A66. That’s what makes this so senseless. There’s some terrible people in the world and now my sister and Valentina have gone.”Cleveland Police have arrested two men aged 23 and 31 on suspicion of murder in connection with the blaze. They remain in police custody.A vehicle crashed into a wall outside a house in South Bank early on Thursday morning, close to the locations of the A66 collision and the fire in Grangetown. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PAPolice also released details about two other crimes in the area but did not say if they could be linked. One was a report of a vehicle crashing into a wall at an empty property in South Bank in the early hours of Thursday. The other was an assault with a bladed weapon in Eston at midday on Thursday.The five Labour Teesside MPs – Andy McDonald, Chris McDonald (Stockton North), Luke Myer (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland), Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) and Anna Turley (Redcar) – said they had met the policing and crime minister, Sarah Jones, to discuss the pressures being felt locally.“These pressures did not emerge overnight,” they said. “They have built up over many years and were made significantly worse by the savage cuts during the austerity period.”