Coastal Communities

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Westminster Hall

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I have the great pleasure of representing Wirral West, which forms the north-western part of the Wirral peninsula. The coastal towns and villages of Meols, Hoylake, West Kirby, Caldy and Thurstaston offer stunning views across the Dee estuary to Hilbre island and the Welsh hills in the distance, or out across Liverpool bay to Crosby, Formby and Southport. It is an area well known for the opportunities it provides for sport and leisure activities, both for local people and people from much farther afield.

Last Saturday, I visited the Royal National Lifeboat Institution station in Hoylake for the West Kirby and Hoylake RNLI meet and greet day. It was a fantastic event, and provided the opportunity for visitors to climb on board the lifeboat and the hovercraft, explore the lifeboat station and meet the staff and volunteers. I heard about the rescues they perform, and I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the immense courage, selflessness, skill and strength that they show in saving lives at sea. The RNLI is massively important to the local community, which supports it a great deal and is rightly proud of the work it does. Standing in the lifeboat station and looking out across the beach caused me to reflect on the wide range of water sports and activities that take place there, including walking dogs on the beach, riding horses, going out to Hilbre island to look at the seals, sailing, kayaking, paddleboarding and so forth.

The coast is a fantastic amenity for locals and visitors alike, and it is heavily reliant on one key ingredient: the sea. The quality of water matters, but it is at risk from sewage. I am concerned that it may now also be at risk from industrialisation, because this morning the Prime Minister announced that she will lift the moratorium on extracting shale gas. My constituents will be extremely concerned about that announcement.

The natural world is immensely important to the character of Wirral West. Back in 2013, under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government, a conditional licence was granted for underground coal gasification in the Dee estuary. Like fracking, it is a risky technology for extracting fossil fuel. I have led a campaign against UCG in the Dee since 2013, and public opposition to the industrialisation of the Dee off West Kirby and Hoylake is extremely strong. The estuary is a site of special scientific interest and a place of international importance for bird life. It is important that we protect the quality of the ecosystem, so my constituents will be alarmed by the Prime Minister’s announcement this morning. I call on the Government to think again, restore the ban on fracking and put in place an outright ban on UCG too.

Sewage is also of great concern. One of my constituents wrote to me about her experience of kayaking. She said that she

“noticed a horrible scum on the water”,

which entered her kayak. She added that

“the evidence of raw sewage was obvious”.

Given that the Prime Minister was responsible for cutting millions of pounds of funding earmarked for tackling water pollution during her time as Environment Secretary, people have every right to be concerned that the Government will not take this issue seriously.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Margaret Greenwood]

I do not have enough time, so I will carry on.

I ask the Minister to respond to that point. The Government recently published their storm overflows discharge reduction plan, but although it appears to provide for an increase in the monitoring of overflows, the question remains whether the Environment Agency and Ofwat will then use that data to take tough action. I call on the Minister to set out how the Government intend to address sewage on our beach, UCG and fracking.

--- Later in debate ---

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart) for her excellent speech and for bringing forward this debate. I reiterate her request for a coastal Minister, as the issues we experience around the coast are unifying. As we look to level up this great country under the new Administration, I very much hope that we can move away from the north-south divide and level up around the coast.

The hon. Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) did not take my intervention, but I also represent a very beautiful coastal constituency and I have been concerned about water quality this summer. It is very important that we recognise the difference between algal blooms and sewage discharge. My constituency has not had sewage discharge this summer, but we have had significant algal blooms due to the heat.

I do not want to focus on sewage today. I want to use the opportunity of having the levelling-up Minister here to talk about coastal communities and the issues that are particularly prevalent in the Devon and Cornwall peninsula following the pandemic, with the immense shortage of affordable housing that our local residents can move into and purchase.

Our beautiful area has seen a surge in short-term holiday lets and the second homes market. I very much hope that the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport consultation on holiday lets registration goes ahead. I also hope that there are opportunities in the Minister’s Department to impose planning restrictions to reduce the number of holiday lets that come to market. When new properties are built, a change of use should be required if they are to become a short-term holiday let. Communities such as mine need homes for people to live and work in. We love our tourists and we would never want to stop them coming, but our housing market has got completely out of balance.

In North Devon, we are not the most productive, unfortunately, and our wages are really very low. Full-time workers in North Devon currently earn £13.29 per hour, while the south-west average is £14.67 and the Great Britain average is £15.65. Our property prices have shot up by over 22%. We are the second fastest growing property price area in the country, but our house building rate has not grown that much and the vast majority of what is being sold is going in the form of second homes or holiday lets. If this continues, we will no longer have coastal communities; we will have winter ghost towns. We need urgent intervention through the levelling-up White Paper to tackle the issue.

Ilfracombe in my constituency is regularly defined, unfortunately, as being home to the poorest wards in the whole of Devon, and among the 5% poorest wards in the entire country. The issues in towns such as Ilfracombe have been documented for decades, yet we seem unable to grasp the fact that these things are happening all the way around our coast. Each coastal MP will have similar stories to mine. Life expectancy for people in Ilfracombe is 10 years less than that for those in the south of the county.

[Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Selaine Saxby]

Unfortunately, I must not—

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

Order. We are not taking interventions, and the time limit is about to vanish.

--- Later in debate ---

[Selaine Saxby]

I will end by saying again that I hope that, in addition to the establishment of a coastal Minister, we should reinstate the coastal communities fund, so that these fantastic places to live and work can continue to be just that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lia Nici]

Yes, I will write to the hon. Gentleman with those details. Thanks to the coastal communities fund, more than 7,000 jobs have been created, 2,000 existing jobs have been safeguarded, thousands of training places for local people have been produced and more than 3 million visitors were attracted to coastal areas. It is estimated that those visitors brought hundreds of millions of pounds of expenditure into our coastal communities, and that the funding supported almost 9,000 existing businesses, while helping to launch hundreds more.

[Selaine Saxby]

I agree entirely that the coastal communities fund was a truly excellent thing. Please can we have it back?

[Lia Nici]

I thank my hon. Friend for her question. I will certainly take it back to the Department, although I am not sure how long I will be in this position. I hope it will be for a little bit longer.

With regard to other funding streams and the success of the coastal communities fund, it is right that we now focus our regeneration efforts around coastal communities through our larger and more expansive programmes as part of a more joined-up approach to levelling up. As we have heard from many Members today, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is not the only Department touched by coastal communities. There are also the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport—the list goes on—but I will go back into the Department and make sure that we are talking across all Departments to ensure that we get those benefits that Members are looking for.

We also have a long-term ambition to reduce the alphabet soup of Government funding streams. Now that the coastal communities fund has closed, my Department has taken care to ensure that coastal communities of all sizes remain at the heart of our continuing regeneration programmes. For example, there are 22 coastal towns that are each recipients of towns deals worth up to £25 million, including places such as Whitby and Birkenhead. Overall, coastal areas will benefit from over £673 million-worth of investment via the towns fund alone. The towns fund is specifically targeted at places with high levels of deprivation, which makes it a good fit for some of our coastal towns, as we have heard today. Our towns deals unleash the potential of our local communities by regenerating towns and delivering long-term economic and productivity growth—productivity has been a theme throughout the debate. This is through investments in urban regeneration, digital and physical connectivity, skills, heritage and enterprise infrastructure.

Other coastal communities, such as Maryport and South Shields, are benefiting from future high streets fund grants to revitalise their high streets. We have also heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie) and for Dover (Mrs Elphicke), who have put in bids for other funds as well. We need to make sure that we continue to revitalise our high streets for our future generations. The future high streets fund is focused on renewing and refreshing high streets, by boosting footfall and reducing vacant shopfronts, for example. In total, coastal communities will benefit from £149.7 million-worth of funding via the future high streets fund. Every one of our programmes, from the community ownership fund to the levelling up fund, features multiple coastal communities on their list of successful bids.