Coastal Towns

Debate between Ian Liddell-Grainger and John Pugh

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt) to this early opportunity to speak on her brief. She has made a most impressive start to her ministerial career, and I look forward to hearing what she has to say on the topic.

I have a long-standing interest in seaside resorts. Obviously, I represent Southport, which describes itself as a classic resort, but even before coming to the House I was involved, as a council leader, in the regeneration of the town. Developing by the sea is never an easy business. It is often controversial, because people have fixed ideas about what should happen, and it is often difficult. In my time, I have certainly experienced difficulties with developers, normally when they have gone bust halfway through schemes.

However, I am glad to say that for Southport, in the public realm, the process has been largely successful. We have had the benefit of objective 1 funding and Northwest Development Agency investment, and we had useful help from the Heritage Lottery Fund at various points. The pier was refurbished, the sea wall built and other developments made. We also had the advantage of an excellent chief executive at the time who provided good leadership.

When I came to this House, I naturally pressed for a spotlight to be put on the distinct problems of seaside resorts; now I do so on the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government. In the first instance, other Committee members resisted, thinking that the issue was not a high priority, but after a close vote on the forthcoming timetable I was supported by the then MP for Easington, John Cummings. Easington is not an obvious holiday destination—I think they dig more coal there than they do sand castles—but he supported my efforts. We had to call our report not “Seaside Towns”, which I would have preferred, but “Coastal Towns”.

We published that report during the last Parliament, and it was one of the most successful pieces of work done by that Select Committee. It was spoken about outside the House as well as inside. We had some difficulty persuading the Government of the time to take it seriously, but eventually they did, and they came up with the Sea Change fund to address specifically the issues of coastal towns.

The report started from the fair assumption that Britain has a lot of coast, and that it is economically important, but that many places have changed, and some have declined as leisure patterns have changed. We wanted to understand how individual resorts had responded. Our research at the time tended in many respects to work against the media stereotype of closed bed and breakfasts, hotels turned into benefit hostels, crumbling piers, high unemployment and the like. We found enormous variation in how coastal towns responded to their problems and challenges. Some clearly prospered; some declined; some were finding their way; some were marooned in time; some were happy to be marooned in time.

The key decider between successful and less successful resorts tended to be that those that were successful had a credible vision of their future and local leadership to deliver that vision. Those that were less successful kept with their problems. I was struck, for example, by the contrast between Margate, which at the time had different views about which way it should go, and Whitstable, which clearly wanted to make itself a gastronomic centre of Kent and was doing so successfully, offering a limited line but offering it very well.

None the less, there were some constant themes in most of our research. One was a lack of opportunity for young people; the exit of young people from tourist resorts is a common phenomenon. Another was poor connectivity: most resorts, necessarily, are at the end of a line or a road. There was an underfunding problem, and well-trained people were lacking in the leisure industry, which has often been a poor trainer. Changing expectations in the hotel and leisure industry did not help either. Also, wherever one went, many people wanted to retire to the coast, resulting in higher social services costs.

[Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that places such as Minehead, where Bourne Leisure runs Butlins, are absolutely seminal? He is right that many Victorian seaside towns have changed completely overnight. Does he therefore agree that places such as Butlins need the support of the local community to keep them there and should be getting more support than they do at the moment?

[John Pugh]

I am not necessarily in favour of public subsidy for Butlins, but I understand what the hon. Gentleman is driving at. As change sets in and resorts and what they offer need to be modified, there is clear scope for public as well as private investment.

Recently, Sheffield Hallam university, which helped a lot with the Committee’s original research, has revisited the issue. It has done a health check and published a useful report, “Seaside Towns in the Age of Austerity”, which I recommend to Members. It makes interesting reading. It is not always what one thinks it might be; in many respects it is counter-intuitive. Sheffield Hallam found that there is not a great deal to support the general picture of gloom and decline. We must dispel that lazy and far too simple narrative. It considered Office for National Statistics employment data, which presumably came via the Department for Work and Pensions, and concluded that in seaside towns, employment is stable and growing a bit, that coastal towns are still a huge economic driver and that more people work in what we might call the seaside industries, in the wider sense, than in telecoms, advertising, the motor industry, radio, TV, railways and farming. Given how much those particular businesses are debated in this place, we probably do not talk sufficiently about the economic contribution made by coastal towns.

According to that research, the tripper and overnight market accounts for about £8 billion of money churning through the system. It is also true to say, as I am sure hon. Members will in their contributions, that many places on the coast have a limited dependence on the tripper and tourist market. Historically, they have been much more diverse than we often imagine. Cars were made in Southport at one stage, albeit a very long time ago. According to current figures, only 9% of employment in Brighton comes from seaside-based industries in leisure; in Southport, it is 11%; in Hastings, which is slightly more isolated than Brighton, it is 6%. Many resorts rely more on small businessmen, the care sector, retirees, the Government, the NHS or, massively in the case of Brighton and Bournemouth, students.