Seaside Towns (Regeneration)

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Crausby, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) on securing this important debate. Like a moth to a flame, as a Blackpool MP I find it hard to resist any debate on tourism and seaside towns. Today, however, I do not want to talk about Blackpool. Close observers of the annunciator will have noticed that I represent Blackpool North and Cleveleys. Cleveleys is also a seaside town with a tourism industry, although it does not receive as much attention as its big brother to the south.

Many people holiday in Cleveleys without going anywhere near Blackpool. It offers a wonderful expanse of coast and some of the finest promenade architecture that we have seen built in this country over the past 25 years. Bus trips come for the day from far and wide. During the general election, I had a street stall in Cleveleys. By half-past 10 in the morning I was spending more time convincing voters from constituencies such as Stoke-on-Trent Central to vote Conservative than I was convincing those from my constituency. Obviously, I did not do enough because we failed to win the seat in Stoke-on-Trent Central, but I did my bit.

Cleveleys has flat pavements. Hon. Members may wonder why I mention that, but flat pavements are unusual in seaside towns and they make the town accessible. A large number of coaches come to Cleveleys full of disabled tourists who know that it is an accessible resort that they can get around despite their mobility problems. Large numbers of pensioners also come to Cleveleys—again, because it is easy to get around.

Cleveleys has a good variety of shops and a large number of cafés for people to sit in should a shower pass over. One such place is the Carousel Café, which is run by the president of the chamber of trade, Martin Hunns. Although Cleveleys has some wonderful, positive aspects, it also has a few downsides. If one asked Martin about Cleveleys, as I am sure people do, he will say one thing:

“We have gone on for years about parking in Cleveleys. All this money has been spent on this beautiful promenade but people are being turned away because there is nowhere to park.”

The town is concerned about the sustainability of the range of shops on the main streets, and the future of its indoor markets. One such market is to close suddenly, although I gather that an improved version is on the way. A medium-sized seaside town such as Cleveleys has positive and negative aspects, but the main challenge it faces is that of marketing, branding and communication—something that other hon. Members have also mentioned. Who should do that marketing, and how?

I want to pay tribute to a lady called Jane Littlewood who runs a small business, Rabbit Design. She moved to Cleveleys from South Yorkshire, and saw the opportunity the moment she arrived. She now runs a website that promotes tourism in Cleveleys, which she does entirely on her own without any public funding. Unsurprisingly, the website is called visitcleveleys.co.uk, and I encourage hon. Members to do just what it says and visit Cleveleys. As Jane says,

“the coastal Wyre area hasn’t previously been strongly promoted as a tourism area, and Cleveleys has plodded along under its own steam…Promoting the website and promoting Cleveleys are inextricably linked, and a raft of publicity has gone out this year in north west publications, including Lancashire Life. Links are being developed with the local authority and tourism marketing agencies to develop the brand much further for the future.”

What Jane does is more than a voluntary initiative and a nice idea; I think that it is the future for destination marketing in this country. For too long, we have assumed that the responsibility for marketing our seaside towns should lie with some sort of public body, be it local government, VisitEngland, VisitBritain—or visit whoever—or even the Minister’s Department. Here, however, we have someone taking the initiative and doing something for the benefit of their community without a public body intervening. I hope that hon. Members will not groan when I say that that might just be an example of the big society in action.

If we look a little to the south of my constituency, although not as far as Southport, we see that South Ribble and West Lancashire have the Heart of Lancashire Tourist Association. It was recently spun off as a community interest company and is owned by the very businesses that it promotes. It is a true co-operative and does not need to be sustained by public funding. When we see the Minister’s domestic tourism strategy, I hope that VisitEngland will have become not a body that picks and chooses the places that it promotes, but a repository of understanding and knowledge about how best to promote tourism in the UK.

VisitBritain’s role is quite distinct: it is to encourage overseas visitors to come to the UK. I hope that it will work hard to encourage Chinese people to come and enjoy Blackpool pleasure beach, which will certainly be a cultural experience for them in many ways. VisitEngland, however, really has to focus on understanding how we promote domestic tourism. We all talk about the cliché of the “staycation”, which might well be a passing, transient phenomenon, but we need to understand that there is a wide variety of holidays that our citizens can take in this country.

I was delighted to hear my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet mention the concept of social tourism, which is close to my heart. I urge anybody who does not know what it is to come to the inaugural meeting of my all-party group on social tourism next week, where they can find out far more about the subject. They might even take part in the inquiry that the Family Holiday Association is organising for the start of next year on defining just what we mean by social tourism. We should try to find new ways of developing tourism and spreading its wider benefits to disadvantaged groups.

I wonder how many Members here have heard of the Family Fund, an organisation that spends almost £30 million of Government money on giving families with disabled children short breaks in the UK. Many people say that we do not do social tourism in the UK, but we do, and the Government already spend £30 million a year on it. We need to understand what goes on already and what could go on in the future, and my hon. Friend mentioned many examples. We need to understand what benefits that could bring us.

I am really looking forward to reading the Minister’s domestic tourism strategy, and I hope that it is a long read, because there is a lot that we need to deal with. When he presents it, however, we will have to address the fact that tourism does not stand in isolation. Tourism promotion, particularly in places such as Blackpool, can be hampered by some of the negative feelings that people have about seaside towns. Branding is not just about Blackpool town, the pleasure beach or the nice seaside; it can also be about some of the negative headlines on social problems that people read in our newspapers.

Before the debate, I asked the Library to put together a ranking of all Conservative-held constituencies by deprivation. I had a theory that there would be a concentration of very poor Conservative-held seats in seaside towns, and that is indeed the case. Of the top 10 Conservative-held constituencies by deprivation, six are seaside towns, and the list is topped, unfortunately, by the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd)—that is perhaps not a list that she would wish to top, but she does none the less. I come in at No. 4.

Clearly, the role of tourism in the economic regeneration of seaside towns is crucial, but we cannot see it in isolation, and we must tackle every other silo of Government activity. That is why I am so pleased that responsibility for this issue, in addition to being based in the DCMS, ranges across several Departments. That is crucial, because until we get the whole picture right, we cannot hope to get tourism right.