AMAZING, I know, but Staffordshire has been in the national news all week for entirely good reasons.

Local treasure hunter strikes not just gold, but gold of the historical quality – say the experts – of the internationally renowned Lindisfarne Gospels.

I am absolutely delighted with the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard and am dying to see the medieval craftsmanship myself.

More important, for those of us with an interest in local government and the regeneration of the area, is what will happen to the treasure next.

My only frustration this week was to hear, continuously, of the fact that the artefacts were being cleaned and stored in Birmingham's museum.

Apparently, the experts from London are making rare forays out of the capital to work there because of the importance of the find. I am sure I was not alone in screaming at the radio all week "Why not Stoke-on-Trent's award-winning museum?"

Has Birmingham suddenly become a Staffordshire city?

Worse still is the complacency of the response from the city leaders. Apparently, we are the centre chosen for the holding of treasure found in Staffordshire.

This allows our leaders to express delight that we will receive the treasure. Indeed, so smug did they sound that I almost expected one of them to lay claim to the actual discovery.

However, what their celebratory remarks failed to note is that the treasure will not return here until it is cleaned, catalogued, purchased from Her Majesty and presumably well pawed by those who want to see it in one of London's national museums.

We will then, and only then, put some of it on display in The Potteries Museum.

My guess is that this process will take at least a year and it may be a couple of years before anything is on show here.

By then, the news will have moved on and the hugely interesting find will be another piece of archaeology to be pored over by experts and ignored by the rest of us.

School children will be ordered to show reverence for these 1,400-year-old treasures, but nobody will ever be inspired to feel the excitement of the bygone passions and battles that they represent.

I want to see the media interest which has surrounded the find used to promote the image of the Stoke-on-Trent city region.

We should aim to have these national treasures stored in a separate gallery linked to our museum.

There is nowhere better for this than the Bethesda Chapel, which is so desperately in need of a use and which links so well to the existing museum.

Our MPs should be fighting immediately for a special grant to make this happen. The Minister for the Midlands should be holding urgent talks with our council and regeneration leaders to take this message to the Government.

The actual cleaning and cataloguing should happen in Stoke-on-Trent while the new gallery is being created in the shell of the chapel.

Our museum is nationally recognised for its excellence and if it doesn't have some of the technical equipment to do this particular job, then this should be provided to it.

This process should be publicised as another example of the craft expertise available here, the centre of the ceramics world. This is the stuff on which a new city image is built.

I can hear the bureaucrats telling me that it can't be done. Government doesn't work like that, Mike.

Well, if my suggestion breaks all the rules and protocols, then so much the better. Stoke-on-Trent, in that case, becomes in the nation's eye the plucky underdog which has defied all the odds to get and keep a national treasure.

This is the type of city that would attract the attention of entrepreneurial investors. Our new treasure museum would attract thousands of visitors each year to the city centre. It would give us an image of quality, heritage, design and excellence.

Here is a challenge to our regeneration leaders – we don't want statements or policies or strategies or feasibility studies.

Give us some action. Create a new attraction. Give us some Potteries gold that will bring jobs and wealth to the city region.