Coastal Towns (Government Policy)

Brandon Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Westminster Hall

[Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)]

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds) on securing this important debate.

I shall focus primarily on inter-departmental working, which my hon. Friend mentioned, because it is so important that we have joined-up thinking on coastal towns. If hon. Members will indulge me, I will deal with this matter mainly with reference to my constituency of Great Yarmouth, as others can speak for their own.

Great Yarmouth highlights exactly why coastal towns are so important, how diverse they are and why it is vital to tie together essential improvements in infrastructure—both transport and communications—and recognition of the tourism industry and the niche industries that some of our constituencies deal with. Companies in my constituency supply the defence industry and have dealings with the oil and gas industries. Obviously, being so close to what was the largest offshore wind farm in Europe, some of them are involved with renewable energy, with new wind farms to come. My constituency also suffers from coastal erosion, as do other hon. Members’ constituencies.

To see real economic growth we need improvements in transport infrastructure—both road and rail—and in broadband, so that companies looking to take advantage of niche industries can communicate. Broadband is an important tool.

As has already been mentioned, tourism is often undervalued, yet it is one of the most cost-effective industries, through which employment can be increased in constituencies such as Great Yarmouth. More than 5,000 people in Great Yarmouth are employed in the tourism industry, which is worth about £500 million to the economy. Given that my constituency is the second largest seaside resort in the country, we feel that we play our part in the economy. We cover the whole remit: from straight tourism and seaside tourism, to the Norfolk broads and stately homes—something we share with my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous). We also cover bingo and gambling, including horse racing and dog track racing.

We have offshore oil and gas, and there are renewables to come, but we suffer, as I said, from a huge amount of coastal erosion. A clear, transparent policy on coastal erosion is needed. None of us here and none of the residents in our constituencies genuinely believe that we can protect every inch of coastline: neither the economy nor nature allows for that. There is certainly a need for transparency and clarity about what we can do, and a need to ensure that the money the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and other Departments can put into dealing with coastal erosion is spent on protecting the coastline. A rough estimate is that during the past four or five years, the previous Government’s pathfinder and other schemes spent almost £500,000 on reports on Great Yarmouth, which often led to other reports with not a single bit of work being done to protect the coastline.

Scratby, which my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness has seen, is a key area that needs work to protect its coastline. Most of the necessary coastal erosion protection could have been finished with the money that went into more and more reports. The previous Government spent £200,000 in areas such as Great Yarmouth just before the election, coincidentally—I am sure that it was not intended to be an election tool. At the same time, they were penalising such areas—Great Yarmouth has a new deep water outer-harbour that can service our country—with a port tax. We must get away from that mixed-up thinking. We must send a clear message and be honest about what we can do to protect out coastline from erosion.

I will not speak for long because I know that other hon. Members wish to contribute. I have highlighted why cross-departmental work is so important. The Department for Communities and Local Government is important in allowing local authorities to look after residents by removing the regional spatial strategy, and by allowing council tax and business rates sometimes to move back to local authorities to allow those authorities to move forward. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport covers tourism and gambling, which are important for areas such as Great Yarmouth. DEFRA is important in dealing with coastal erosion, as is the Department for Transport for transport links, and DCMS for broadband. The Department of Health is also important in the context of the cost to our health service and our economy as a whole of the levels of alcohol consumption often associated with visitors to such constituencies.

All those Departments have a vital part to play in constituencies such as Great Yarmouth and coastal constituencies throughout the country. The most important request that I can make to the Minister today is for cross-departmental work at official and ministerial level to ensure that our coastal towns, which can provide so much in moving our economy forward, developing new renewable energy industries and developing our tourism industry even further, can work together to achieve that growth for our own communities and the wider country.