Coastal Communities: East Devon

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 8th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Richard Foord]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving me an opportunity to talk up the great work that goes on in our leisure facilities in east Devon. As he says, the Flamingo pool in Axminster is brilliant; I take my daughter swimming there, and the volunteers who work there are fantastic. Given that he not only knows the Flamingo pool but has LED Community Leisure facilities in his constituency, the hon. Gentleman will know that we must do everything we can to help local authorities to apply for any funding that is available.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for initiating the debate. Does he recognise the good work that levelling-up funding has done, and the fact that so many people and many councils can take advantage of it? Does he also endorse the view that whatever party may be in government in the future, it should be an integral part of the funding structure of every council in the United Kingdom?

[Richard Foord]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question. Of 500 bids for levelling-up funding, only 111 were successful, and I am mindful of the 389 that involved so much work on the part of council officers. The Minister may correct me if I have got the number slightly wrong, but that is my understanding. We should remember that councils are not well staffed; in fact, they have many vacancies, because they are constantly having to cut staff numbers.

When the Conservatives talked of levelling up in their 2019 manifesto, they were talking to communities that were crying out for just that, but many of the east Devon coastal communities that I represent have been disappointed. Let me draw an analogy with a cream tea. In Devon, if someone talks about adding toppings to a scone, we immediately think “cream first”, and when someone talks about levelling up, we immediately think “investment in our communities”. Little did we know that in both cases, what the Conservatives actually meant was “jam tomorrow”.

The Government’s approach of encouraging councils to use reserves and capital receipts to subsidise their revenue expenditure is unsustainable. Let us take, for example, the recent use by Devon County Council of £7.8 million of clawback money, which it had received from BT in connection with the provision of broadband internet. Rather than using that money as intended—to extend the provision of broadband to rural areas—the council used it to close its deficit. That got it through the 2023-24 financial year, but what will happen next March when there is no payout from BT, and what will happen to the thousands of my constituents who struggle to access the internet, which in the 21st century is an essential utility?

In the first round of levelling-up funding, the south-west region was ranked ninth out of 12 regions of the UK for the amount of funding received. It amounted to just £23 per person, which is less than the price of a single railway ticket from Honiton to Plymouth. We might as well buy a round of ice creams with the money, given how far levelling-up funding for east Devon will not stretch. The west country received less than 8% of all levelling-up funding from round 1. Even London received more than half that proportion, despite the fact that it was London’s levels of wealth and infrastructure to which other regions of the UK were supposed to be levelled up.

Given that we are talking about the coast, let me draw another analogy, this time with building sandcastles. If my eldest child had a bucketful of sand and my youngest child had half a bucket, I would expect levelling up to enable them both to have full buckets with which to make grand sandcastles. Instead, what we seem to have found under this Conservative Government is that levelling up has meant that children have to make sandcastles on east Devon’s beaches by half-filling their buckets, and anyone who lives locally will know that that will be with pebbles. If we are lucky, central Government will give us a flag to go on top, provided that we accept that the flag will have to have a blue tree on it.

East Devon District Council has submitted a bid in each round of the levelling-up fund since I have been the MP for Tiverton and Honiton. Had it been successful, the bid for the Axe valley would have supported £15 million-worth of projects. It would have transformed Seaton seafront and provided new opportunities for decent jobs. East Devon District Council was looking to provide three new employment sites: in Colyford Road and Harepath Road in Seaton, and at Cloakham Lawns in Axminster. Together, these could have provided around 3,000 square metres of employment space and created up to 140 decent jobs for local communities. However, rather than choosing this proposal or, indeed, the absolutely essential proposal for a town centre relief road in Cullompton, which was submitted by Mid Devon District Council, the Government chose to support Dinan Way in Exmouth. I do not doubt the merits of that proposal, but the costs of Dinan Way have ballooned.

Devon County Council’s cabinet met earlier today. It considered a successful bid to round 1 of the Government’s levelling-up fund, which awarded over £15.5 million for Destination Exmouth. East Devon District Council put in additional funding, as did other local councils, making a local contribution of £1.75 million. We learned today that the gateway project around the station in Exmouth will not go ahead, and that roughly £4.4 million that had been earmarked for schemes to help with active travel will be shelved. Instead, the more than £4 million will be rolled into the cost of the bypass in Dinan Way to offset the inflation that we have seen since the bid was submitted. If decisions around that investment had been made locally, we might have made different decisions, and we may have prioritised the funding and investment differently.

An increasing proportion of east Devon’s communities are older, which is particularly true of coastal towns and villages. An ageing population is increasing the complexity of the care required. In Sir Chris Whitty’s “Chief Medical Officer’s Annual Report: Health in an Ageing Society”, published last October, he wrote specifically about the tendency of older people to retire and move to coastal areas, such as east Devon. He said:

“We’ve really got to get serious about the areas of the country where ageing is happening very fast, and we’ve got to do it now. It’s possible to compress the period of time that people spend in ill health...because otherwise we will end up with large numbers of people leading much more dependent lives.”

His report says:

“Providing services and environments suitable for older adults in these areas is an absolute priority”.

Sir Chris Whitty says that, specifically, we need policies to reduce disease and disability, and to help people to exercise, eat well and stay fit.

A report written in February this year by Beccy Baird from the King’s Fund calls for a radical refocusing of health and care, with primary care and community services at its core. It says that

“progress has been hampered by an incorrect belief that moving care into the community will result in short-term cash savings. Other factors include a lack of data about primary and community services leading to a ‘cycle of invisibility’”.

Baird talks about

“urgent challenges such as A&E waiting times and planned care backlogs becoming the priority for politicians tempted by quick fixes instead of fundamental improvement.”

In the face of that, the proposed closure of one whole wing of Seaton Hospital makes absolutely no sense to me or the constituents I represent, as I have said to various Ministers in the Department of Health and Social Care, and to the Prime Minister himself at Prime Minister’s questions.

How can we expect this Conservative Government to level up in respect of complicated services, such as health and social care, if they cannot even level up potholes? The annual local authority road maintenance—or ALARM—report reveals that the average cost of filling in a pothole is £46, which rises to over £70 for a pothole that is filled on a reactive basis, rather than having been planned. On my summer tour, constituents told me that they see repair vans coming to respond to a request to patch up a single pothole, rather than dealing with the whole road. Round 1 of the levelling-up fund awarded the west country £23 per head. That is the equivalent of half of one pothole filled per person. It is no wonder that when we drive in and out of Devon’s craters, we sometimes think we are on the moon.

I contend that the levelling-up concept was designed to win over marginal seats in the midlands and the north of England in the run-up to the 2019 general election. Following that election, it has become apparent to the Conservatives that their 2019 electoral big tent has been shredded by the successive storms of partygate, the interregnum ruled over by the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) and the crumbling infrastructure of our coastal communities, including those in east Devon. It will take Liberal Democrat influence in the next Parliament to devolve and restore services to our communities in east Devon.