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MORNING NEWS: Trouble over Teesworks

Good morning. Here is your AM bulletin with the lastest news and views from EG, and a few of the best bits from the morning papers.

The government has blocked the release of documents relating to the 4,500-acre Teesworks regeneration, as it names the hand-picked triumvirate that will investigate claims of corruption.

House prices have recorded a year-on-year fall for the first time since 2012, Halifax has said.

The doom and gloom in the housing market has had an impact on Crest Nicholson, which blamed the 22.4% fall in half year revenue on “the economic uncertainty and lower confidence in the housing market during the first half.”

And Schroder Real Estate Investment Trust has swung to a £55m loss as its net asset value falls by 20%.

There are still reasons to be cheerful, though, writes EG’s editor. Shoppers still want to shop, workers still want to work. They just want to do it differently. There will be casualties, but there will also be transformation. And that is where the magic happens.

But Savills’ impact measurement director Tom Hill writes that we have to get a grip of our environmental and social impacts. After all: “It’s hard to kick the can down the road when the road is underwater.”

Heartening, then, to see Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield declaring that the social value of its London shopping centres has grown by £4m to £22.7m.

Even though a de facto planning ban means it will take almost 4,700 years for England to build enough onshore windfarms.

Bubble tea chain Gong cha wants to expand to 500 UK stores by the end of the decade.

And, as The Telegraph puts itself up for sale, The Guardian takes a look at the curious lives of its current owner, Frederick Barclay, and his now deceased twin brother David – the former estate agents who became print and property moguls.

Energy secretary Grant Shapps, and science, innovation and technology secretary Chloe Smith have joined a stellar list of speakers at EG’s Creating a Scientific Superpower event.

And finally, mathematicians say they have cracked the formula to work out the true dividing line between the south of England and the north. And no, just saying the Midlands is apparently too easy. They did this by looking at the frequency of good, honest, northern-born Greggs pie shops, versus the frequency of the deeply southern, smashed avocado and decaf latte emporia known as Pret. For good measure they also looked at Morrisons and Waitrose. And the Greggs-Pret frontier line, would you believe, is pretty much the on the Watford Gap. Except for Cornwall and Devon, which are ruled to be “culturally northern” due to their lack of Prets – although the metric breaks down somewhat due to Cornwall’s reluctance to embrace anyone else’s version of a pasty.

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