Coastal Towns

John Pugh Excerpts

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

I call John Pugh to speak on economic growth in coastal towns. After he has finished his speech, I will consider a limit of about four minutes per speaker. Ten Members have indicated that they wish to speak and, with interventions, that will probably eat up the time.

[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.

[Norman Baker (Lewes) (LD)]

As my hon. Friend is talking about Sussex, perhaps he will allow me to intervene on that point. The figure is probably even smaller for Newhaven. Does he also recognise that one of the strengths of coastal communities around the country these days is how they are taking advantage of the investment being made in renewable energy off the coast? There has been a particular renaissance in jobs in Newhaven, where hundreds of jobs have been created through the renewable energy industries. Does he share my disquiet at the knee-jerk reactions against renewable energy, which damage job prospects in our coastal communities?

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Before Mr Pugh responds to that, I ask that interventions be kept brief, particularly by those who wish to speak in the debate.

[John Pugh]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. He illustrates the point that people who work in coastal towns do not invariably work in the leisure sector. In other words, the vulnerability of resorts to changing leisure trends differs. It can be minimal in some cases and almost total in others, for example those resorts founded around caravan parks and the like. We must also bear in mind that many resorts, for example Bournemouth, are big conurbations in themselves. If we take Greater Bournemouth as an area, it has a population almost equivalent to that of Liverpool.

One thing surprised me in the Hallam research and I will say a little about it. What the research picked up was, in part, a north-south divide as far as resorts are concerned. Hallam says that at the moment the towns doing best off the back of tourism are largely, but not invariably, in the south, and those doing worst are largely in the north; I note that the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden) is here in Westminster Hall today and Blackpool is an example that Hallam cited as one of the resorts that has been most hit by change in leisure trends. So there appears to be some sort of north-south divide—not exclusively, because obviously some areas along the Essex coast have taken a hit too. However, there is probably a different story to be told about those areas and their branding.

It is the upmarket south-coast resorts that are probably faring the best at the moment, and that links back to other areas of Government policy. One of the best ambitions of the coalition is to rebalance the economy, but as far as the north is concerned that has largely been seen as a matter of city deals. There is a logic in that, as cities are obviously crucial, but it can mean that resorts are overlooked. That is because cities in the north, as they develop, can compete in new ways against resorts. We have certainly seen that in my area. Manchester and Liverpool are now very active in the conference sector; in a sense, they have stolen business from places such as Blackpool.

Similarly, Liverpool’s retail expansion has undoubtedly damaged Southport’s more bespoke offer. Hotels and restaurants have massively proliferated in city centres so that their tourism, marketing and hotel offer has become qualitatively different from what it once was. City centres are now sold not as hubs of industry but as leisure destinations in their own right, and cities are better connected, and will be still better connected in the future, than many other areas. That is sometimes to the detriment of resorts. For example, electrification around Manchester may deprive me of a train from Southport to south Manchester. That would be excellent for people who want to get across the country, but it would not be helpful if they want to come to Southport for whatever reason.

That development would not be so bad were it not for the fact that in many parts of the north the key local decision makers do not focus on the coast at all. They tend to be very city-bound. For example, the Merseyside local enterprise partnership is dominated by Peel Holdings, which is legitimately concerned with developing its logistics business out of the docks and is not necessarily tasking itself, night and day, with encouraging tourism further up the coast. Also, the new money—if there is new money at all—tends come in via the cities and not through other routes. Although there is the coastal communities fund, and we are glad to have it, the per capita spend of that fund is a drop in the ocean compared with city deals.

It does not help that traditional council budgets and funding have been—let me put it this way—severely stressed. Many a council has done fairly obtuse things under those circumstances and cut first the activities that bring more people into their area, in order to concentrate on what they regard as their core business, which is often social services and the like; resorts have appreciable expenditure commitments in that regard. Alternatively, councils put up parking charges and drive people away. I have a particular crisis in my own constituency at the moment because the local council has decided to cut back on the iconic botanic gardens in Southport that bring people into the town, as a cheese-paring saving that will further damage the tourist industry.

In addition it does not help that, in an age of retail retrenchment, when chain stores are considering what to do about their retail offer, they look first at those towns that have a 180^o catchment area and—whether or not they are populous—the chains use their models to decide that they will close branches in those towns first.

I am not here today just to complain, harass the Minister and ask for more and better things, although of course I will do all that. I accept that in an age of austerity coastal towns have to make their own weather; in Southport, we make our own weather and it is sunny all the time. However, we need to put Government coastal policy in the context of wider Government policy. We cannot ignore transport and the knock-on consequences of electrification, and think of coastal towns as a separate thing.

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

I take my hon. Friend’s point entirely. Surely, however, if anyone looks at the investment along the coastal line going through Dawlish, where we saw the tragedy of the line falling into the sea, they will see that that is exactly an example of where the Government have invested in a coastal community and committed to keeping a rail line going.

[John Pugh]

Yes—it probably took a disaster to engineer that level of investment, and we would not wish for that generally. However, I noticed that there is a good number of Members from northern resorts here in Westminster Hall and there is quite a clear issue at the moment with the Northern franchise and whether it will affect access to their resorts; I think that those Members will probably have something to say about that.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

It is not just a question of infrastructure for resorts; it is also a question of infrastructure for ports, for example. I have Sharpness port in my constituency and I am campaigning for a bridge from that port to the Forest of Dean, to improve connectivity. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is the right direction of travel?

[John Pugh]

My fundamental point is that we need to connect up the various bits of Government policy. The Minister has to know what is happening, for example, to the marketing budgets of councils, given the constraints on council expenditure. There is a Culture, Media and Sport Committee hearing—I think it is today—that is receiving evidence on this issue, and I am sure that the Minister will pick up on that as well. We cannot roll out city deals without recognising the fact that they lead to a concentration of power, to some extent, away from resorts.

As the Hallam report says, there are a lot of us on the coast. There is a lot of employment on the coast and, frankly, with four months to go before the election we need to bear in mind the fact that there are a lot of voters there; 3.2 million is the number given in the Hallam report. There are things that we can get right ourselves, but we are also a huge under-appreciated asset outside London. Personally, I would like the Minister to have more power: to fight our corner on transport; to oblige the local enterprise partnerships to take more notice of their coastal towns; to protect and support marketing strategies in a time of council cuts; and perhaps even to lobby the Treasury for VAT cuts for in-bound tourism, as happens in some competitor countries.

We are not looking for a bail-out exercise; coastal towns are genuinely resilient and sustainable. They are also places where people want to live; we do not all want to live in flats in Manchester. The narrative of constant decline just does not hold; the first charter flights to Spain from the UK left more than 50 years ago and, frankly, by now we have got round to dealing with that. We are not a basket case. All we really need is a fair deal that is bolted properly into Government policy in all Departments. We are necessarily on the margins of Britain, but we do not want to be a marginal afterthought when it comes to Government policy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Sawford (Corby) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh) on securing this important debate, which has generated a huge amount of interest throughout the country and the House. We have heard some interesting and diverse contributions about the range of issues facing our seaside towns and coastal communities.

I have heard that it is important for people to claim their area as the premier resort, whatever their part of the country, but I can tell everyone that the Boating lake at Corby is the premier resort in north Northamptonshire. We, however, are located at the centre of the country—not the centre of the British isles, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) told us, but the centre of the mainland UK. We are therefore a centre of logistics and have all sorts of advantages from our location, although we are one of the furthest places from the seaside—it is two hours to Skegness and a little further to Hunstanton. However, the roads to the east coast and further afield are well travelled by Northamptonshire folk, and we have just as much of a love of the seaside and our coastal communities as has been shown by hon. Members from all across the country today.

In fact, when thinking ahead to this debate I thought of my experience just a few weeks ago in Cornwall. I visited some of its beautiful fishing villages, such as Port Isaac, Boscastle—famous, of course, for the flood there, which shows the importance of flood defences—and the now famous Padstow, known to some as “Padstein”; the culinary offer developed there has helped to regenerate that community. That shows us that coastal towns need a vision that goes beyond the core ingredients of an area and is developed into a vision of how to bring much wider economic benefits. For example, in Padstow there is now a cookery school, a huge amount of hotel accommodation and so on, and the community has really begun to develop.

Coastal communities are at different stages. The hon. Member for Southport characterised the types as those experiencing prosperity; those on a journey towards prosperity, and that are developing and regenerating—a journey common to many of the stories we have heard today—and those that still feel that, for a range of reasons, they face decline and so are looking for a way forward to make the most of the opportunities for their communities.

I went to Hastings recently to meet representatives of the local authority there and hear about the great work that, like many other local authorities across the country, it is doing to regenerate its area. I saw the historic pier being rebuilt and tasted a beautiful pint of Pier beer at the White Rock hotel. I also saw the interesting role the local authority is taking with its Grotbusters strategy to improve the built environment and get private landowners to improve premises, particularly on the beautiful seafront, and bring them up to standard. Local authorities can play an important role.

Government must also play an important role. We know that people like me from the midlands are often drawn to coastal communities for tourism and so perhaps are drawn to the most beautiful and picturesque parts of those communities. But there is a more mixed and complicated past, present and future for those communities, with issues of physical isolation, higher than average deprivation levels, inward migration of older people, large numbers of people passing through without settling, outward migration of young people—that has been referred to—and higher than average unemployment.

[John Pugh]

The hon. Gentleman mentioned Hastings, which was one of the places visited some years ago by the Select Committee of which I am a member. The people we met specifically mentioned that they did not see the revival of Hastings as necessarily being the same thing as the revival of the seaside industry. They were also thinking about IT and improved transport links, and did not necessarily put all their money on the seaside brand.

[Andy Sawford]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point. The thumbnail sketch given by my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) of the range of industries in his constituency shows that we would be wrong to think of seaside towns and coastal communities as having a future only in tourism; although that sector may offer something important to many communities, we need a much more rounded picture of the types of jobs that can be created and the industries that can thrive in our coastal communities.

Tourism is Britain’s fifth largest industry. It accounts for 9% of jobs, supports nearly 250,000 businesses and generates huge revenue for the UK economy—£134 billion—so it must be part of our strategy. But coastal communities have distinctive geography. They are often on the periphery, and many hon. Members discussed some of the challenges that that can bring. They can also be jumping-off points or transit points, as other hon. Members mentioned. They balance new businesses and technologies while trying to retain their tourist market. Seaside towns experience a particularly high proportion of poor-quality housing. It is important that we support renters. We must take real action to tackle the issues that arise from houses in multiple occupation, and give renters greater security.

The hon. Member for Southport mentioned the sea change programme, which drove cultural and creative regeneration in many places. He will know that this Government abolished that programme. That is a symbol of the way in which the Government have let down our seaside and coastal communities. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden) was right to highlight the future jobs fund, which created nearly 4,000 jobs for young people in seaside towns. Its abolition was wrong and was particularly damaging at the time. The Government also abolished the coastal change pathfinder scheme to help coastal communities deal with the consequences of flooding.

I recognise that the Government have set up the coastal communities fund, which I am sure the Minister will refer to. The fund is welcome, but coastal communities need more than a grant of £50,000, welcome though that is. I agree absolutely with my right hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Mr Campbell) that they need long-term commitment to regeneration. The example of the Welsh Government, which we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane), is a powerful one. The commitment to a wide range of regeneration projects—the harbour, the natural environment, new housing, a new school, the railway station—is the kind of commitment that our coastal communities, including those across England, need from their Government.

In his introductory remarks the hon. Member for Southport said that we need to place the issues in a wider context, and he is right. He will know as well as any hon. Member the impact of the Government’s cuts on local authority funding and their unfair distribution across the country. The National Audit Office recently found that the Government will have reduced funding to local authorities by 37% in real terms between 2010-11 and 2015-16. It also found that those cuts have hit the most disadvantaged communities hardest.

That is a concern for coastal communities. Blackpool has faced a cut of 20.6%, as the hon. Gentleman will know. Plymouth faced a grant cut of 14.3%, and Hastings a cut of 10.7%. They will face even greater challenges in maintaining the kinds of services their communities need, but the spending power of councils such as Wokingham, Surrey Heath and Elmbridge, in the centre of our country, has been increased. People living in places such as Blackpool will not understand why the Government have made such unfair cuts to different parts of the country.