Seasonal Hospitality Businesses in Coastal Areas

Steve Darling Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. I congratulate the hon. Member for Isle of Wight East (Joe Robertson) on obtaining this important and illuminating debate. I look forward to the Minister’s comments. I was heartened that a number of Members said that transport was significant for our coastal communities. That is a massive pinch point for me and colleagues in Devon and Cornwall.

At least in Torbay, my part of Devon, our audience is mostly the west midlands and south Wales. The route down is sometimes a bit of a car park on the M5 in high season, so making sure that we enhance the offer of our railways is extremely important. We have an unfinished job at Dawlish—section 5 of the scheme is yet to be done. Significant upgrades to our railways across Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset are extremely important to enhance the offer of travelling by rail and get more people off the roads into more sustainable transport. At the moment, Lumo is looking at running additional trains via Bristol to Paddington from Paignton. If people could take advantage of those, it would provide an opportunity to get more vehicles off the roads.

Let me move on to what Torbay has to offer when people arrive. Rock Garden is one of my favourite pub restaurants. David, the manager, told me that his business rates are crippling him; it is a great pity that we saw only tinkering around the edges of business rates from the Government rather than the wholesale reform that we were promised. As a colleague has already mentioned, Liberal Democrats want to see a commercial landowner levy, which is a lot more sustainable and would encourage growth, rather than people being punished for investing in their businesses.

As for the cost of running a business, David is paying £3,000 a month for heating and running the kitchens. The Liberal Democrats called on the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate that last autumn, but sadly it chose not to. The Liberal Democrats ask the Minister to see what she can do to support small and medium-sized businesses with their rocketing energy bills, which they are often locked into. As colleagues have already mentioned, we have a plan to cut VAT by 5% for hospitality until next spring, which would drive positive change and footfall up and down our high streets, and not just in our coastal communities.

Beverley holiday park is an incredible, multi-award-winning family-run business, but it has been crippled by the double whammy of the national insurance hike, with the challenges around the number of people it can employ, and the lowering of the threshold to £5,000—particularly for seasonal workers. That is significant for the park. It has crippled its ability to offer the jobs it has traditionally been able to. The park also faces the challenge of taking on seasonal workers for the short peak of the season and training them up. That is a challenge for younger people, who are not in quite the same place as people may have been 40 years ago and need a bit more support, as the Alan Milburn report highlighted. There is progress to be made there.

Finally, I would like to reflect on something really special to a lot of our seaside resorts: the amusement arcade. Earlier this week, I was speaking to the people who run Golden Palms in Torquay. They have exactly the same challenges with national insurance hikes and energy costs. Before the general election, they were assured that there would be changes to regulations in that world, and it was lost in the wash-up. Minister, can we please look at that?