Seaside Towns (Regeneration)

John Penrose Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport (John Penrose)]

It is a pleasure to have you as our Chairman today, Mr Crausby. I echo other hon. Members’ thanks and congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) on securing the debate and leading it so well. She demonstrates that she is sticking up for her constituents in an incredibly effective fashion. Her lead has been followed during the debate by a great many other Members from seaside towns all around the country.

I think it was the hon. Member for Southport (Dr Pugh) who pointed out that although the problems and issues faced by seaside towns have a common thread running through them, seaside towns are different in different parts of the country. However, on the basis of today, if one thing about every seaside town is clear, it is that they all have a pretty determined local Member wanting to stick up for them here in Westminster. To put it politely, we are all as biased as each other, and convinced that our seaside town is far better than anyone else’s. I suspect that I fall into the same category, because I am of course convinced that Weston-super-Mare is the best seaside town in the country—I am getting frowns from the rest of the room.

Important points have been made. I will not take them in any particular order, but will endeavour to respond to as many of the questions and points raised as possible in the limited time available. There has been a shared conviction throughout the debate that tourism is an incredibly important part of the regeneration opportunities available to any seaside town. Tourism provides a superb opportunity for rapid economic growth in a financially efficient fashion.

We are lucky in the coalition Government to have a Prime Minister who was willing to mark his enthusiasm for the sector and recognise its importance by making a speech about it in August. Older hands at DCMS tell me that they cannot in recent decades remember a Prime Minister making a speech about the visitor economy within the first 100 days of a new Administration, and making the point that the sector is so important to the British economy that he wants to put it front and centre of the Administration’s economic plans. We are lucky to have the prime ministerial wind in our sails; it is tremendously helpful to have that kind of support. That is because, as a number of Members have rightly pointed out, tourism cuts across a wide variety of different Departments in Whitehall, so it is up to me and anyone else interested in the visitor economy to make the case for tourism in the Department for Transport, in the Home Office and with the UK Border Agency, and in all the different Departments that tourism touches. It is essential to ensure that everybody knows that we have high-level patronage and a great degree of importance attached to the industry.

The most commonly mentioned concern and opportunity was marketing. It was raised by a series of Members—my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris), the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams), my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), the hon. Member for Southport, and my hon. Friends the Members for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), and for Hove (Mike Weatherley); apologies to anyone I have left out. Marketing is essential, because since the 1980s seaside towns have faced the difficulty of establishing a new USP, or unique selling proposition—a new position within the market to bring people to them in the wake of the relative decline of the UK seaside bucket-and-spade holiday, after everyone started going to Spain and other places on cheap charter flights.

Some places have managed that brilliantly. We can all think of examples round the country where seaside towns have done well: Bournemouth has done extremely well out of the conference trade; Rock in north Cornwall has done well out of food tourism; festivals have brought seaside towns to life; and funfairs are one of the major draws to Blackpool, even now. A lot of development capital is going into the Blackpool seafront as we speak. There are ways of re-positioning a seaside town, by establishing a new marketing position that creates a new draw and underlying raison d’être. However, it is up to that individual seaside town to come up with its specific local example and to put it out there, so that people know why they might want to come to Weston-super-Mare, Hastings or wherever.

It is essential that the Government help that process to happen. The Government cannot do that from the centre, and tell any one seaside town what its new USP ought to be. That has to come from the local economy and the local tourism industry, supported by the local authority. One of the coalition Government’s most important initiatives is to assist the birth of a new kind of destination management organisation—a new kind of local tourism board, whatever it is called. It will be led by the local tourism industry, which lives or dies by the success of its local destination. We all have examples in our constituencies of well-run, high-powered, large and small local tourism firms that know what is right for them, and for Weston-super-Mare, Hastings or South Thanet. It is up to them to tell us what to do, and for us to ensure that they can create a destination marketing organisation that will position the town and attract new visitors to it on a sustainable basis.

That means that we need to have an organisation that is primarily managed and led by the local industry, rather than by the public sector. The public sector needs to support, help and do what it can, but we want the local industry to take a hard-headed commercial look at what the town can offer to visitors, and then market the heck out of it in the most commercially savvy way.

That means that the new DMOs, or whatever we want to call them, will essentially be managed and led by the local tourism industry. It is essential that that takes place. Equally, it is worth remembering that the phrase “destination management organisation” is not the same as “destination marketing organisation”, though they share an acronym. It is vital that when we have created the local destination marketing organisation, it acts as the voice of the visitor in the local community. The local industry should say, “It is essential that, working in conjunction with the local authority, we are able to frame our local tourism industry and attractions, and organise the local public spaces, in a way that shows off our town and its attractions to the best advantage.” That means it must have a strong voice—a seat at the table—with the local authority, and act as the voice of the industry and the visitor in any decisions that the local authority may take, in order to ensure that each seaside town’s unique charms are shown off to their best.

That is how we need to reform marketing. There will be a new kind of partnership marketing, a partnership between the local tourism industry and the local authority—ideally with matched funding—so that we can maximise the money being spent in an effective, commercial way to promote each seaside town to the utmost.

A number of Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for Blackpool North and Cleveleys, and for South Thanet, mentioned social tourism. That is a particularly interesting idea that I discussed recently with Mr Tajani from the EU. There is an EU-wide programme called Calypso under way at the moment. It is an interesting notion that we need to explore carefully. Members will be aware that there is a very limited pot of public funding. Therefore, anything we do in this area has to be done in the way described by my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet; as she said, we do not have to spend additional public funding on it. I welcome that instinct; I think she is absolutely right to say that we need to come up with solutions that will not add to the burden on the taxpayer. If there are proposals coming out of the new all-party parliamentary group that is being set up, I will be interested to hear them. We are also engaging with the European effort via Mr Tajani.

The issue of daylight saving was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet. I will not add much to that, because the subject was debated fully on Friday. The tourism industry is very much behind the initiative. It is convinced, as are other industries such as retail, that it will greatly help the sector. However, it is not as simple as that, as I am sure my hon. Friend will realise, because grave concerns about the impact on quality of life have been expressed by our colleagues in the north of Scotland. It would be dangerous—and potentially divisive—for the rest of Britain, and certainly England, to impose a solution without the consent of Scotland. A point made strongly on Friday was that any progress needs to be made through consensus, having built up a democratic voice across the UK, rather than having one sector of the country trying to impose the change on another. We have the opportunity to build such a consensus, because the Bill is to go into Committee, and I welcome that.

There were a couple of comments about VAT and business rates. That is a tremendously important area, but I am conscious of time coming to an end, so I shall be brief. We dealt with business rates during an intervention, pointing out that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has already announced that there will be an opportunity in future for local authorities to keep some of the proceeds of growth from the additional business rates that are created by local economic growth, potentially generated by the tourism industry. That will provide local authorities with a powerful incentive for getting behind local tourism bodies that are trying to drive economic growth through tourism; they will have a strong financial incentive to take part and assist, which they did not in the past.

I have received representations from the tourism industry about VAT on a number of occasions. I have given the industry the following challenge on that issue. We all appreciate that we have a huge financial deficit—bequeathed by the previous Government—that needs to be closed. It would therefore be extremely difficult for any Chancellor of the Exchequer to hand out tax reductions in the short to medium term. The challenge the tourism industry needs to face up to is this: if it wants a better deal than any other sector of the economy, it needs to explain why it is more important than all the others, which will also be asking for a special deal on VAT or other taxes. That will include the miners, the banks, the IT sector and all other sectors of our economy. If that case can be made, I will be delighted to make representations to the Treasury—but not until then.