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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1023-ii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE
Tuesday 4 July 2006 PROFESSOR STEPHEN FOTHERGILL MR JAMES HASSETT and MR PETER HAMPSON MR STEFAN JANKOWSKI, MR NIGEL BELLAMY, MS JANET WAGHORN and MR PAUL TIPPLE Evidence heard in Public Questions 88 - 169
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Communities and Local Government Committee on Tuesday 4 July 2006 Members present Dr Phyllis Starkey, in the Chair Mr Clive Betts John Cummings Mr Greg Hands Anne Main Dr John Pugh Alison Seabeck ________________ Witnesses: Professor Stephen Fothergill, MA BPhil, Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research (CRESR), Sheffield Hallam University, gave evidence. Q88 Chair: Welcome to this session on coastal towns, Professor Fothergill. Can I start by asking you what prompted you to carry out your study on seaside towns, whether you think they have a future and, if so, what it is? Professor Fothergill: There are rather a lot of questions there. Let us take the origins of this particular study. I am an academic who has worked on British urban and economic development issues for many years in many different contexts, not least, for example, in the context of the coalfields, which one or two of your colleagues around the table know that I am fairly heavily engaged with, but this particular study was driven by pure old-fashioned academic curiosity in the sense that very little was really understood about the dynamics of Britain's seaside towns, the economy of the seaside towns, and, at least in theory, it seemed to me we might be looking at a serious problem in that many of the towns have quite high unemployment compared to neighbouring areas, and we all know that many people now do not go for their holidays in British seaside towns, they go abroad, and so I wanted to pick apart what was going on, and I think we have been able to get some way in terms of answering that question. Q89 Chair: Does that then lead you to think that there is a future for seaside towns and is there a future or a lot of futures? Professor Fothergill: I think what we thought we might find was that seaside towns had entered a spiral of decline rather similar to some old industrial areas and that that would be marked by loss of employment, particularly in the tourist sector, and that, in turn, would trigger further job losses in the local economy, out-migration of population, et cetera, et cetera. What we actually found was the opposite of that, which is that there is strong growth in employment and in population in seaside towns. That is not to say that they are all without problems, but this is a very different scenario to that which you find in some of the old industrial areas. Q90 Chair: Is the population growth (so the in-migration) true of all coastal towns? Professor Fothergill: The overwhelming majority, yes. We looked at data from the beginning of the seventies right through to the beginning of the present decade and there are one or two slow growers admittedly, I think there are probably a couple which have not shown growth, but the average growth across the 43 principal seaside towns in the working age population is in excess of 20 per cent over that 30-year period; so this not a situation like the old coal fields. Q91 Chair: Before I let my colleague in, can I ask you to say in what sense you think that seaside towns are problem areas? Professor Fothergill: As I said a moment ago, I think in theory we thought we were looking at a problem. In practice, the problem that we have found is that to keep balanced in the labour market of the seaside towns, the economy of the seaside towns has got to grow very quickly. The seaside towns are attracting large numbers of in-migrants from other parts of the country. To avoid that feeding through to whatever lies in unemployment, you have got to keep employment in the towns growing quickly, much quicker indeed than the national average, and, in fact, there are a number of seaside towns where the balance between the available supply of labour and the supply of jobs is still seriously out of kilter and there is quite a lot of employment, either in physical unemployment or hidden unemployment still. Q92 Anne Main: Can I ask you about the correlation between employment and the demographic needs of the people that are moving in. Are you finding they are a certain age group and fit the right skill-sets? Has the employment which is growing been matched by the people who are coming in or are they coming in for different reasons, such as to retire, or trade down, or whatever else you might suggest - quality of life issues? Professor Fothergill: There is undoubtedly an inflow of people over retirement age, but what we were documenting is that even people of working age there is a inflow from other areas, and it is an inflow particularly of people, let us say, in the second half of their working lives - from 35, 40 upwards - and amongst those that we did interview (and they were only a subset obviously), residential preference, the desire to be living in a seaside town, seems to be the driving factor rather than necessarily it all being driven by the fact, "Oh, there was a job there, therefore I moved to a seaside town." It is people wanting to live in these towns because they are attractive places to live. Q93 Anne Main: What is the employment that is growing then: servicing those people? Professor Fothergill: The employment growth in seaside towns has been surprisingly broad based. One of the things that we had expected to find was that those sectors most closely linked to tourism would be on the slide. In fact that is not the case, they are surprisingly robust, which tells us that the tourist industry is surprisingly robust, but even beyond that there is quite broad-based growth in large parts of the service sector particularly of seaside towns? Q94 John Cummings: Did you do any specific research in relation to the unique circumstances which prevail in the likes of Seaham in County Durham, Sunderland and South Shields. I mention more specifically that Seaham had three working collieries, Sunderland had one and South Shields had one. I thought you were looking at whole of the United Kingdom? Professor Fothergill: John, you will know in many other contexts I have done a lot of research on the former mining communities. The particular project I am dealing with, seaside towns, dealt just with what we call the 43 principal seaside resorts around the country, which actually in the north-east, I have to confess, did not include the places you have just mentioned. It did include Whitley Bay, it did include Whitby and Scarborough but I am afraid not Sunderland, Seaham or South Shields. Q95 John Cummings: Why, given your particular interest is in mining areas? Professor Fothergill: This was not an attempt to monitor the economic change around the whole coastline; this was a project that was trying to look at what had happened to seaside resorts, not all coastal areas. We were concentrating on the places where the tourist industry was or had been a dominant component of the overall economy. Q96 John Cummings: So there might be a further report in the future? Professor Fothergill: I can point you in the direction of plenty of work I have done on the coalfield economy. Q97 Chair: Would it be possible for you to say, given the amount of work you have done on coalfield communities, whether the coastal coalfield communities would share characteristics with the coastal resort towns that you have studied in that particular project? Professor Fothergill: I do not think I have ever disaggregated the coalfields to look specifically at coastal coalfield communities, so perhaps I had better not shoot from the hip on that one. Q98 John Cummings: The research is entitled "the seaside economy" not "seaside resorts", Stephen. Professor Fothergill: But if you look more carefully, that is the strapline, the seaside economy. If you look more carefully, it is clearly saying this is about seaside resorts. Chair: We understand that. Q99 Alison Seabeck: You talked about employment growth across a lot of seaside towns and areas, is it largely low-paid employment? I am talking about outside of the tourist industry specifically here. You have people moving into the care sector, for example, because you have a very large elderly population. Was that evidenced or were there places like Butlins where you can have some really quite high paid jobs and was there a reason for that? Professor Fothergill: I have got to say, if there is one weakness in the particular research we have done, it is that we have not looked enough at the quality of jobs. I could not comment on pay. What I can comment on is the full-time/part-time split. What we did observe is that there has been growth in both full-time and part-time employment in seaside towns and jobs for both men and women. On the other hand, what we also note is that the disproportionate share of the overall total of jobs in seaside towns are part-time, and that obviously raises worries about what the implications are for household incomes and so on. So, there clearly is an issue, which I think you are getting at, but beyond those simple statements on full-time/part-time I cannot really elaborate. Q100 Dr Pugh: I think you would accept though, would you not, that what your research establishes is something that runs contrary to the perceived wisdom about what is happening in seaside towns, and there may be other research that points in different directions; but in terms of the unemployment problem in coastal towns, is that just a problem caused by unemployed people moving into coastal towns? Professor Fothergill: No, it is a problem of the overall balance within the labour market. If you have got lots of people moving in, who may not be unemployed when they move in, and if you are not growing a stock of jobs fast enough, the imbalance in the labour market is going to come out somewhere or other. Over and above that there is some evidence of a very specific process going on whereby some benefit claimants are drawn into seaside towns because of the availability of a certain sort of small, private, rented accommodation, often flats in former boarding houses. So, there is an element of that attraction in, if you like, of the unemployed, but it is not the dominant process as best we can tell. The dominant process, as far as there is a balance, is simply one of overall flows in the labour market. Q101 Dr Pugh: Is it a kind of drive of the decline: the boarding house shuts down, the boarding house then becomes attractive to unemployed people, or maybe unemployable people in some cases, and a vortex of decline starts which every seaside town in some way or other needs to address? Professor Fothergill: I am trying to say there is an element of that, but in the overall jigsaw it is not a dominant factor in understanding joblessness in seaside towns. When we actually did the survey work, and we surveyed a thousand jobless people in seaside towns, we got a pretty good handle on who they are, and when you actually try to pick out how many of these people are in the category of, say, the young, benefit dependent, in-migrants from other areas living in private rented accommodation, it is actually quite a small part of the overall jigsaw. It is a part but it is not the dominant part. Q102 Dr Pugh: But there is another kind of structural pressure, is there not? What your research does show is that the age profile of people in seaside towns tends to skew towards the elderly, if I can put it like that, which means that whatever council is in charge has a very substantial services enterprise it needs to run in order to deal with all the problems that old people have and generate. In those circumstances, the actual cash, money available to invest in the infrastructure of the town, is limited; so you get social services using resources that could be used to some extent for regeneration. Is that not a common pattern? Professor Fothergill: You have to understand what we did in this research project, which was essentially about the labour market and the economy of the seaside towns. I hear the arguments that you are making, I have heard them made before and I think there is a lot of validity in them, but I do not think, from our research, I can really document or tell you anything about the scale of that problem other than the fact that, clearly, if you have a large tourist population or an ageing population, it is going to place demands on services which are unusual compared to long-term service. Q103 Mr Betts: I think you reject in your report the idea of a national coastal towns programme, a one-size-fits-all solution, but is not there some sense in which pulling the issues of seaside towns together on a common basis at least recognises there are some common issues between them and some common things that may well succeed. Is not a national programme approach rejected too easily by you in your report? Professor Fothergill: There are some things that unite seaside towns and there are other things on which they look very different. Taking the very different bits first, when you look at the labour market indicators, there is clearly a huge difference between, on the one hand, let us say, a Great Yarmouth or a Skegness or a Thanet area in Kent, where there is clear evidence of labour market difficulty, and, on the other hand, some of the smaller seaside towns along the south coast or, indeed, some of the big ones along the south coast, the Greater Worthings and the Bournemouth areas, where the evidence on the strength of the labour market and the balance of the economy would suggest these places are not doing too badly. That is why I think we said a one-size-fits-all approach is not necessarily appropriate. On the other hand, I would accept the argument that because in all of these towns the tourist economy is an important component of their overall economy and that that imposes unique demands on local authority services in the upkeep of a basic public relevant infrastructure - for example, parks, promenades, provision of lifeguards, et cetera - then there is something there which is very distinctive and where a claim could be made that something, in general, should be done to offset the additional costs of local authorities in seaside areas. Q104 Mr Betts: Is there a basis on which at regional level you at least identify those towns which have got particular problems in the demographics. There could be a programme established which would benefit a group of those towns and we should look towards helping them on that sort of basis? Professor Fothergill: Yes, to some extent some of that exists already through the various RDA funding mechanisms and through UK assisted area status, through European funding, et cetera. Certainly I would say that there is a subset of perhaps eight or ten seaside towns that, just like some former industrial towns, have a very strong case for regional assistance. Q105 Mr Betts: You refer to successful adaptation by some of the towns. Have you got particular examples, particular features where you think that we can learn lessons from certain of these towns getting it right? Professor Fothergill: Let me say, successful adaptation does not mean moving away from tourism. The British seaside tourist industry should not be regarded as something which is dead or dying and therefore adaptation equates to moving out of that business altogether, but when you look around the coast you can see that some towns are evolving into taking on different roles as well as tourism. Perhaps tourism may be smaller, it may be the same size as it was before, but there are some that are becoming essentially dominant settlements for neighbouring cities. There are some that are evolving into diverse economies in their own right. Take the example of Brighton, which is one that always comes to my mind. At the core there is clearly a seaside tourist industry in Brighton - the beaches were full last weekend - but Brighton is a town with a big commercial sector, with two universities, it is a community settlement for London, et cetera. That is an example of a large resort that I would regard certainly as having successfully adapted and moved on but without discarding the tourist element. Q106 Mr Betts: Could you identify whether in that success it has really been the Government at national level, RDAs, local government, or has it been the markets that have achieved this change and adaptation? Professor Fothergill: I think, if we are honest, it is the market. Some of the towns that appear to have the strongest economies are ones, some of them in the south-east of England, that have been able to piggyback their local economies on the wider growth of the south-east regional economy. Some of the towns that appear to have been successful are ones that have been very good at riding changing trends in the tourist industry itself. I think large parts of the south-west of England fall into that category, where they have managed to move into not quite an all-year round tourist trade but certainly something approaching that. The ones that have the biggest problems are those that were initially hooked into mass market tourism and where that was a dominant part of the overall economy, not just one component part alongside others. I am thinking of Great Yarmouth there or Skegness. Q107 Anne Main: You have mentioned piggybacking on the south-east or the south-west, does it at all become a north/south divide overall, relatively speaking, rather like the housing market? Professor Fothergill: Oddly, if anything, it is almost an east/west divide. The seaside resorts that in labour market terms seem to be showing the least resilience are those down the east coast. Those in the south-east and the south-west are doing okay as well. Those in north-west of England (Blackpool Southport, et cetera) perhaps are not as good as some of those further south, but the problem area as best we can see is broadly the east coast resorts. Q108 Anne Main: In which case, in your view, what can this Committee recommend that could help coastal towns, particularly in those areas that you have spoken about? Professor Fothergill: I have thought long and hard about this, and I think that the first thing I would say to you is that you should not write-off seaside tourism as some sort of dead duck. It is a big industry in Britain, it still supports a large chunk of the economy of many of these towns and I think it is an industry worth supporting. It does have a future. As we all get more affluent, we all spend more on leisure and holidays, we go abroad and we go on holiday in Britain. That is the first thing that I would say to you: do not write-off the industry. The other thing I would say is that there is most certainly a case for addressing the particular needs of funding the public realm, public infrastructure in seaside towns. A lot of that burden at the moment falls on local authorities. They do not get an obviously commercial return for what they spend and it is a non-statutory responsibility, and I think on that front there is a case for helping that sort of provision because it underpins so much else of the local economy. Q109 Anne Main: You mentioned that magic word "infrastructure", which comes up in all sorts of strands of life. Are you saying that particular Government departments could do more to aid seaside towns? In which case, which ones? Seaside coastal towns really? Professor Fothergill: It is perhaps not for me to pinpoint exactly which government department, but if we are talking about support for the seaside tourist industry and offsetting some of the costs that fall onto local authorities, or perhaps matching what local authorities put in, then we are probably talking DCLG, maybe DCMS, because that is the lead department on tourism, but also may be DTI. This is an industry in its own right, the tourist industry. Q110 Anne Main: Do you think it needs special recognition over and above other industries? Professor Fothergill: There is a case for looking in more detail at the case for having some special programme. I am not going to commit myself absolutely. It was the role of my research to document what has been happening, not necessarily to say in detail what should be done, but I think in principle there is a case for looking at that. Q111 Dr Pugh: Is not there a problem, because it is perfectly possible to run the argument that you have public realm infrastructure development and following that comes private investment - we have seen it in the cities - but the cities have a huge natural population, whereas the coastal resorts are different in many respects, they rely on people actually going to them on a day basis or a week basis, or whatever, and, therefore, the justification for big public realm investment to a government looks less transparent and less apparent? Professor Fothergill: If you ruled all the seaside towns together, they add up to a substantial population. This is not a marginal part of Britain. The 43 seaside towns we covered in our study have a combined population of 3.1 million. That is greater than the whole population of the north-east of England; it is greater than the whole population of Wales. This is a substantial part of Britain that has distinctive characteristics and may well justify distinctive interventions, but that is something, as I say, that needs very careful consideration. In principle it is worth looking at, but it will need detailed consideration. Chair: Thank-you very much, Professor Fothergill. Witnesses: Mr James Hassett, Chief Executive, Market and Coastal Towns Association (MCTA), and Mr Peter Hampson, Director, British Destinations and Resorts Association (BRADA), gave evidence. Q112 Chair: Can I ask you to introduce yourselves and the organisation you are from. Mr Hassett, of course, some of us have met already at Exmouth? Mr Hampson: My name is Peter Hampson. I am the Director of the British Resorts and Destinations Association, which was recently renamed. It was previously the British Resorts Association. I have been a Director of that association since 1993. Mr Hassett: I am James Hassett. I am the Chief Executive of the Market and Coastal Towns Association, which is an association that operates in the south-west of England. Q113 Alison Seabeck: We have heard and you have heard from Professor Fothergill that there is a case to be made for special treatment for coastal areas and costal towns. What, in your view, makes coastal towns unique? Mr Hampson: I think it would be difficult, having seen and read the evidence that has been produced to you, not to realise that there are some interesting issues revolving around coastal towns which would appear to be considerably different. I would make the case that seaside towns do have a future with a mixed economy but that there are special problems, which you have had outlined to you in numerous pieces of evidence, whether it be geographical, physical, economic or social, and that those need to be recognised in terms of public policy. The public policy that we see being put into place is adequate for most situations, but in certain circumstances, and mainly in coastal towns, they are acting as a barrier in some ways to the redevelopment of those towns. Mr Hassett: From my side it is interesting because I deal with market towns as well as coastal towns. Some of the issues that are raised certainly in the coastal towns of the size I deal with, and you will appreciate I deal with the very small towns with populations of between two and 25,000, are exacerbated by a coastal location rather than being necessarily overtly unique. There are issues, for instance, around the need for assistance because of the risk of flooding, particularly in coastal areas, but if we looked at the subset levels, in a low-level area you could find some analogy with that but it is definitely exacerbated by that coastal location. Q114 Alison Seabeck: Would you not accept that, having listened to both your responses on that, that this is like a piece of jelly. There are so many diverse reasons why coastal towns and villages have problems, and they vary so enormously from place to place and area to area that it is quite difficult to pick out a single defining issue. Can you pick out a single issue which is common across the piece that is not reflected anywhere else inland? Mr Hampson: I think in the written evidence that we submitted we put to one side the smaller towns. I think there is an issue about the scale and the economic impact, and, yes, my organisation represents a lot of the bigger coastal towns but it also represents a lot of the smaller coastal towns. I think that you need to be hard-faced to say that there is an issue of scale here and there are certain places where it is in the public interest to actually concentrate on the larger towns and, therefore, what tend to be the larger problems. Obviously my colleague is not going to necessarily agree with that, but I would tend to point to that as being perhaps a solution. There are some fundamentals. I do not want to hog it, but there are things around housing, access, recognition and the nature of how programmes are being put together which perhaps I can address in a later question. Mr Hassett: From my side the south-west is relatively unique from an English perspective in terms of the number of towns it has of this particular size. It obviously has a huge coastline and has a number of towns that would fall into the category that I would deal with, and when you aggregate those up, as we have already heard today, it does not represent a significant number of people. I think some of the issues that were raised earlier that have been raised by my colleague here in terms of the common threads are actually less prevalent in the small towns. There is a particular nuance around a particular town, for instance, that has had a particular history and there is a particular reason why it is that shape, that form, has that particular economic aspect, which we try as an association to listen to, but we have less of a one-size-fits-all response to that. Q115 Alison Seabeck: That said, are there any common threads which link together those towns which have successfully regenerated? Mr Hassett: I think a lot of them in my experience have almost decided on a unique selling point in terms of deciding what they have got. Q116 Alison Seabeck: Can you give us an example? Mr Hassett: Newquay really is the classic one. They have turned round and decided that they had a particular niche that they wanted to go for, which is lifestyle, surfing, those kinds of aspects. They have promoted that very heavily and have actually made themselves a destination for a particular activity in terms of a niche within the tourist industry. They have almost invented a USP for themselves. Lots of the towns in the south-west, certainly through our particular process, are looking for those USPs; they are trying to find out what makes them distinctive. Q117 Alison Seabeck: Could you explain what that is? Mr Hassett: Unique selling point. Q118 Alison Seabeck: No. What is Newquay, for those people here who may not be entirely aware of it? Mr Hassett: It is a reasonably sized coastal town in the south-west that has very much built a tourism industry based on surfing and adventure type holidays in the south-west. Q119 Mr Hands: How much of that is due to the airport in Newquay and how much to the niche attraction? Is Newquay's success actually down to the cheap and easy way of getting there? I saw some fascinating figures comparing holidays in English seaside towns and holidays in France and the expense of going to an English seaside down is largely because of the rail fare. How much of that is due to transport rather than a niche activity? Mr Hampson: I think the airport is a factor. It is a publicity factor more than it is a reality factor. The airline to Newquay does not carry enough people to make that much of a difference. The fact that there is an airline and people from London can fly to it gets an enormous amount of publicity about Newquay being the hip and up and coming destination. It is a factor, but it is a different issue. It is the difference between reality and perception. Can I answer perhaps the question that was put by the previous speaker? I think there is a unique feature in all those places that are successful, and it is called money. All of those places that are pulling themselves up have had access to some sort of funding in the last six, seven eight years. That is the key factor. Q120 Mr Hands: Private or public? Mr Hampson: No, from pump priming funding, i.e. Objective 1, Objective 2, ERDF, SLB. Without that kind of pump priming money, you do not see the kinds of activity, and that would bring me on to the point that I really would like to get over to the Committee. One area that needs to be addressed where there is activity taking place, publicly funded, we need to start looking at a "single pot" programme approach which would make the monies that are available go a lot further. At the moment, even places like Blackpool, where there are major schemes, it is single small schemes and it is not being sequenced properly, it is not getting the kind of flows that they need to maximise the benefits of public money that is being put into these places. Q121 Chair: Are you suggesting a single pot for coastal towns, or just a small pot full stop? Mr Hampson: I think that would a step too far. If you were to go down a single pot for coastal towns, the danger is it would end up with one or two across the country, because it would become competitive and there would be a whole host of losers. Where monies are available, I am talking about a programming and a phasing that allows it to be spent as a single pot. Q122 Anne Main: Can I take you back, because you are putting in a lot of information. Before I go back to the thing I was going to ask you about, you just said where the money has been spent, in which case surely you can put a grid overlay in areas and you could see if that was the case. So, I presume there are facts to back up that statement. If so, I would like the information. You threw in, and you said your colleague, Mr Hassett might not agree with you, that the larger towns, generally speaking, have the bigger problems. Again, is that backed up by facts and figures and information, because we heard from our previous speaker that some of the larger towns were piggybacking on the fact that they were bigger because, by diversifying, they could have language schools, they could have conferencing and all those things that smaller towns cannot have. Have you got information to back that assertion up? Mr Hampson: Yes, the scale of problems in somewhere like a Blackpool, because of the size of Blackpool, will be relatively bigger and often much, much bigger. Q123 Anne Main: Will they be less solvable though? Mr Hampson: No, if they are dealt with and if it is recognised that they have got issues and problems, they are imminently solvable. Chair: Can we move on. I am sure you can put in answers to the previous questions and, if you want to, to the ones that you get subsequently. Q124 Dr Pugh: A couple of weeks ago I got a letter from the Chief Executive of Blackpool Pleasure Beach. It was a copy of a letter he had written to the Prime Minister which said more or less that he had heard the Prime Minister speak about the importance of national tourism and all that kind of thing but he had not seen very much action as a result. It was a rather plaintiff, rather sad letter, and quite discouraging of the Government's intentions. Do you think the Government adequately understands the modern imbalance of the tourist industry, if I can put it like that? Mr Hampson: The modern imbalance? Q125 Dr Pugh: Not the tourism industry in general but the tourism industry around England? Mr Hampson: I think the situation has changed significantly in the last three to four years, and that is the problem because a lot of the people who have given you evidence, me as well, are talking about things that have happened over the last two and three years and we are talking about situations which are dynamic and changing. There has been a huge sea-change in the attitudes towards both domestic tourism and, indeed, coastal tourism as a particular issue. The fact that you as a committee are asking such pertinent questions, I think, shows that there is a changing attitude. Q126 Dr Pugh: Has that change swept through the RDAs as well? Mr Hampson: It is changing as we speak, rather than it has changed. I think that they are now, three or four years down the line, starting to realise that there are some issues. The problem with RDAs, of course, is that their funding is markedly different and their priorities are markedly different. In terms of coastal investment, some RDAs are able to put significant amounts of support into coastal towns, whereas others are not. The north-west is an example where there are significant amounts of money and effort going in. I think the north-west is probably, of the RDAs, the one that is the furthest developed. Q127 Dr Pugh: Taking advantage of this favourable wind, is there more that coastal towns can do help themselves? Mr Hampson: They can do a certain amount, but there is an interchange, a number of public policy areas. The first thing is the understanding in public policy terms that coastal towns do have some very specific problems. If this Committee could establish in the minds of government that whenever any public policy is being discussed there may be nuances which affect coastal towns, that would be a huge advantage. I have spoken about the single pot. There are some major issues about housing, and in particular the imbalance that has been created in a lot of coastal towns, driven largely by housing benefit, HMO type housing, which is increasing the relative price of low quality housing to a point where public policy now cannot intervene in a lot of coastal towns because the thresholds are set so low that when housing corporations, housing associations, look at housing projects in a lot of seaside towns the unit levels, the cost per unit, are too high and they simply cannot intervene. So, that is another area of public policy where--- Q128 Dr Pugh: Apart from the public realm, you have good a tourist industry that has sunk huge amounts of its own money into all these resorts. Do you think there is evidence of clear long-term planning? In other words, are the people of Newquay thinking not where they are now but where they will be in the next ten, 15 or 20 years? Mr Hassett: My entire association is set up to try and get the local people to think about a 20, 25-year timeframe for the redevelopment of their towns. I suppose the difference is that we are actually asking the residents what they want their town to look like rather than trying to make a strategic decision necessarily on which towns in particular should be supported or not. It is an interesting point, simply because I think what many of the people who are involved certainly in my association are concerned about is a trend. It is the long-term trend. It is not necessarily how they are at the moment, it is what they are worried the town might be like in 20 years' time. Some of the towns, once they have seen their service centres disappear, are concerned that they are going to become dormitory towns for larger cities and towns and so they are trying to second-guess what is happening in their town at a particular point in time and come up with a solution to that. Linking that point back to some of the points that are raised by the RDA, we are talking about the tourism industry and it is probably not appropriate for the RDA to be named in that particular aspect. We have to try and look at things from a sustainable communities perspective, which is actually looking at the environment and the community as well as the economy, and that for us throws up a whole different raft of challenges in terms of co-ordination of funding, for instance, and actually getting appropriate funding for the appropriate solution. In our particular region a lot of people have approached the RDA for projects that, to be honest with you, the RDA would not have ever funded because it does not think that they are a high enough priority. Q129 Dr Pugh: You let slip the word "resident" a few minutes ago. They have to own the vision as well, do they not--- Mr Hassett: Absolutely. Q130 Dr Pugh: ---more than RDAs and those planning bodies and partnerships, the vision for the town. Is there a time lag between the vision being brought out and put down on paper and being owned by the community represented by the town? Mr Hassett: I suppose the kind of process we promote is the reverse of that, because we try to get the communities to articulate their own vision. The lag that we find is the ability for the community to communicate to some of their likely funding agencies in a way that the current funding agencies can listen to. So, there is a translation issue between the general public who are trying to say, "These are the things we need", and the things that some of the public bodies can fund. So, it is not exactly there is a mismatch, it is just trying to put it in terms of understanding and timeframes that people understand. Q131 John Cummings: Can I turn your attention again to funding. Do you think that the coastal towns have stood between being deprived enough and, indeed, successful enough when it comes to securing funding? Mr Hampson: An interesting question. I think I understand where you may be coming from. The problem with a lot of the towns is that they do have quite reasonable economies. It was one of the issues that my organisation struggled with in the late nineties, explaining why we had a buoyant tourist economy in a lot of these tourism towns, indeed a buoyant mixed economy, yet there were pockets of very severe social deprivation. I think it was only when the work that was done by our previous speaker came up that we were able to explain why you should have this strange situation of very high deprivation but a fairly buoyant economy. So, the economy is running very fast, and should be, therefore, getting bigger and better, but what you are getting is this in-migration, often people who do not come for particular employment purposes but just come to live because it is better living in a seaside town than an inland equivalent very often. So, yes, in some ways, until probably three, four or five years ago, there was this issue that people just did not believe that you could have a nice seaside town and yet have these huge pockets of social deprivation, and in some cases they are enormous pockets of deprivation. You will have seen from the evidence we present, both written and oral, the sorts of scales where I see from my colleague in Blackpool a 60 per cent transit in primary schools. Q132 John Cummings: Hopefully after this inquiry people will be more aware of the specific problems that exist in relation to deprivation in seaside town areas, but would you not agree that perhaps there is a need now for a national coastal town funding strategy and, if so, how would you believe that would work? How would it be managed? Mr Hampson: If there was an endless pot of money and you could waive a magic wand, I would agree entirely that a major single national approach with a big pot of money that everybody could actually go to and which was big enough to deal with the core problems in all of the seaside resorts would be a great solution, but I cannot see how it could or would be practically managed. I think there are policies which encourage that but not necessarily funding schemes. I am not sure I have explained that particularly well. Q133 John Cummings: Have you any indication or any research to indicate to the Committee what sort of sums of money you are talking about for the generation of coastal towns? Mr Hampson: To be honest, we have never sat down and tried to calculate just because of the pure range and the scale of the issues. Q134 John Cummings: Recognising that Objective 2 is coming to an end, where do you think your future funding will come from? Mr Hassett: Certainly in the communities we are dealing with, initially most of the communities have looked towards the Regional Development Agencies for support. What we are trying to promote is an increased focus on the lottery for some of the social side aspects and, to be honest with, you some of the issues that are being raised in terms of flood defence, we are certainly looking broadly, again, to the Environment Agency. A lot of it is coming from the public sector in that respect and certainly in terms of getting the infrastructure right, it is a breadth, but you are trying to find the funding from a variety of sources, including trusts and charities, to be honest with you. That is what our groups are looking for. Q135 John Cummings: Looking at the levels of deprivation (and I would certainly cast my attention to Sunderland, Seaham and South Shields resorts) there is nothing sadder than seeing a run-down, paint peeling terrace of guest houses which you often encounter in these particular areas. Do you find much local enthusiasm for them to do anything about it themselves or is it always someone else's problem? Mr Hampson: No. I think there is an issue, and Professor Fothergill touched on this, this issue of public realm. The typical coastal town has got a huge range of issues - weather induced, sea induced, sand blown, the kind of economy - and these have all been highlighted to you in previous evidence, but there is an issue about coastal towns that their very attractiveness relies on this grand public space, its inherited grand public space. If you were redesigning the long seaside resort you would not build them on the sort of scale that the Victorians and Edwardians have done. You have got this space and it needs to be dealt with. What we do see is that, where money is spent on public infrastructure projects, it does have an amazing impact on private sector investment and the sort of properties that you are talking about, the run down and peeling. If the streetscape of that particular road was dealt with and there was a signal, some enthusiasm and some future for the town, it is almost certain that a lot of those properties would suddenly go from, "I cannot afford to invest in this", to, "I cannot afford not to invest in it." Q136 Mr Hands: I have got three different questions I am going to roll into one, so brief answers. First of al, do you think that attention to tourism actually ironically detracts from other problems that coastal towns face, secondly, can housing issues in coastal towns be addressed within the context of regional housing plans, and, thirdly do you think that the demographics of coastal towns creates huge obstacles to regeneration and is there much hope of changing the population structure of these towns? Mr Hassett: In terms of the demographics, that does present a huge challenge in terms of the long-term viability of the towns. The south-west is an in-migration area. The only age group that we are in deficit in terms of migration is the student, the 18 to about 24 year old category, and that presents us with a particular issue in terms of skewing our demography into an older group generally within the south-west, which is shown to be exacerbated in coastal towns. I am sorry; you are going to have to repeat the other questions. Q137 Mr Hands: The second is housing issues, regional housing planning, and, third, whether ironically there is too much attention on tourism? Mr Hassett: I think the tourism industry is so important to the coastal towns that I do not think I would feel comfortable saying that there is far too much attention, it is vitally important. What I would say is that it is not the only thing that we need to be focusing upon, but it is vitally important. I would not say that it has too much attention, just that maybe we need to give some of the other areas attention. From the housing side of things, particularly because of the size of towns that we deal with, because I am dealing with very small towns (and this is a personal sort of understanding about how things have gone), I do not see much impact currently on some the regional housing activity in towns of the size that I am dealing with. Q138 Mr Betts: Just on the demographics, presumably some of the people coming in to retire have reasonable incomes, but, on the other hand, we heard when we went down to Exmouth that there is a tendency for those people to say that they rather like the place the way that it is, that is why they moved there, and then become part of the resistance to any proposed change to bring in new ventures which would actually enliven the place. Mr Hampson: It is known as "last-settler syndrome". It is a common feature. The simple point about the demographics is that older people move into towns and it is still fresh blood, it is still money, but the problem is not with the people who are retiring, the people who might be my age and above (you are not talking about elderly people), the problem is that young people are leaving, people of an older generation are coming in and those people are then becoming elderly in large numbers. It is not the retired people, it is the elderly end, the people who need to be looked after by the social services that cause the difficulty; so that is the problem with the street demography. It is not about those who people who have retired there; it is the fact that they are creating, down the line, a much greater elderly population. That would not be a problem if it was recognised as an issue and it was properly funded, but local services, the NHS, in coastal towns are not funded to recognise the fact that they have got this greater increase of individuals, but also elderly individuals who are deliberately moving away. If we still have an ethos of family support, they are people who are moving away from their family and friends and end up, and are more likely to end up, in local authority social care because they have not got anybody else to look after them. I hope I have covered that area. Tourism detracts. Tourism does not detract. In coastal towns it is often the only solution. You are not going to make widgets in Skegness, you are not going to build cars in Torbay, I am afraid, and so tourism is important. The problem with tourism is it does detract if it is not understood. It is starting to be understood, and the inquiry that you are carrying out, I hope, will help people to understand the dynamics of it. In the written evidence that we have put forward, I talked about happy holiday memories. In the absence of facts people just make wild assumptions about the tourism industry. Q139 Anne Main: On the infrastructure, because we have moved away from it, do you think you can make a particular case for improving the infrastructure so that young people would want to come and live and work and spend time in the town and it becomes a more vibrant place to be? Mr Hampson: It will depend on the town. All the towns are different. If there is work for people, either in the town or there is work within commuting distance and the access issues, because in my view, and it is a broad statement (I tend to make broad statements) - the thing that is driving Brighton is the fact that it has got a fast rail link, the thing that will drive Folkestone is the fact that it is about to get a fast rail link to London - it is about issues of economy and access. Q140 Chair: We will leave the last word to Mr Hassett and then we will have to move on. Mr Hassett: We are working on the presumption that, if we put a load of infrastructure investment in, it will do something in terms of attracting more people in and those kinds of things. I think there is an argument that regeneration does do that. I think there is also an argument that the people who actually live in that town who are going to have to put up with the public realm debate in the town that they live in, which has maybe faded a bit because people do not have the money to keep it up, in some respects they deserve a certain amount of investment into the town for their own rights. It is not always about the new and the bigger and the better. In the south-west a significant number of our population just live in these towns, and in some respects we have almost got a duty of care to them to make sure that their towns are looked after and that they are attractive places for them to live in as opposed to just attracting people to come and see it. It is just a thought I had. Chair: Thank you both very much. Witnesses: Mr Stefan Jankowski, Manager, Mr Nigel Bellamy, Deputy Chairman, Southport Partnership, Ms Janet Waghorn, Executive Director, and Mr Paul Tipple, Chairman, East Kent Partnership, gave evidence. Q141 Chair: Good afternoon. Would you mind telling us who you are please? Ms Waghorn: I am Janet Waghorn. I am the Executive Director of East Kent Partnership. Mr Tipple: I am Paul Tipple, Chairman of the same body but also a private citizen. Mr Bellamy: I am Nigel Bellamy, the Vice Chair of Southport Partnership and I work in the voluntary sector. Mr Jankowski: Stefan Jankowski, the Partnership Manager and Deputy Chairman. Q142 John Cummings: I would like to address this question to both sets of witnesses. Would you tell the Committee whether you believe that you get adequate support from the regional development agencies? Mr Jankowski: Certainly in our case we work very closely with the regional development agency to develop a coherent and clear strategy for our town. Q143 John Cummings: But the question was, do you get adequate support from the regional development agency? Mr Jankowski: I would say yes, we do, but, of course, as we always say, more would be even better. They give us a fair crack of the whip. Mr Tipple: That is our view. SEEDA is the RDA but I would have to add that just as important is the Government Office in terms of policy functions that they exercise on behalf of central Government. That is just as valuable. Q144 John Cummings: So do you get adequate support from the Government Office? Mr Tipple: Considerable. Mr Jankowski: We certainly do. Q145 John Cummings: Do you believe that regional level is the most appropriate for co-ordination of action on coastal towns? Mr Tipple: It depends how you want to define it. If you do it on the basis of an RDA's coverage then no, it is not in the sense that from our perspective it is too big an organisation with far too great a geographic area to necessarily understand the particular sensibilities of somewhere like East Kent. Where the SEEDA RDA has scored is in the creation of what they call area investment frameworks, of which we are one, which works through the local communities building up, in our case, over three district authorities to articulate what the needs of those communities are and to put in place not simply the strategy but also the action plan over a period of ten to 15 years as to how that will be delivered, and that enables the RDA and all the other Government departments successfully to get behind that with funding. Q146 Dr Pugh: Is that a sub-regional strategy? Mr Tipple: Effectively. Mr Jankowski: We sit within the Merseyside City Region, which is a sub-regional strategy as well, which brings up another set of tensions and we have to fight our corner for that. Q147 John Cummings: Are you successfully fighting your corner? Mr Jankowski: It is too soon to say. The sub-regional strategies are still being written and the funding and the allocation of resources are subject to lively debate. Q148 Anne Main: Are coastal towns viewed too much within the context of tourism? Mr Jankowski: Southport was built for tourism, interestingly, in the 19th century. Its raison d'être is tourism. It is what the town understands best. It has decided that, although there are additional areas it could benefit from, tourism and regeneration through the enhanced tourism model is where its future lies. Mr Tipple: The traditional form of tourism, no. Tourism is an important component, yes, of the economies of the three districts I represent, but tourism is grossly overrated in terms of the way Government departments approach these areas and it is not really closely addressing the market. The other aspect I would add is that tourism can be a part of economic regeneration provided that the nature of the tourism offer itself has a quality product behind it, and more often than not in a lot of the coastal towns, as a result of dilapidation and lack of investment over the decades, the quality of that product is sadly lacking, which is why in the East Kent instance we are looking at tourism, culture and leisure, those three components coming together, and driving them forward in a way that improves significantly the tourism product that people are looking for in today's modern age. Q149 Anne Main: Can I tease that out a bit? Generally speaking the tourist sector is seasonal and often characterised, as you have said, by low skill, low paid jobs, a rather faded image, so how are you going to move away from that, if you are going to move away from it? Are you going to move away from tourism? Are you going to develop other economic activities or are you going to enhance the product, and if you are how are you going to do it? Mr Tipple: We do both. In the case of East Kent we conducted some important research that identified which sectors over the next 20 years we would successfully be able to attract, and in our case we are trying to exploit the coastline and the heritage we have in a way that will attract the marine and aviation industries, particularly at the hi-tech end, to be able to locate close to the key sea ports we have, and also we have an international airport in Kent which again can be home to high technology companies which need to be co-located to an operational airfield. We are also looking at inward investment from the mainland as well as from beyond the EU in the sense of, again, hi-tech industries coming from South Africa and Israel, to name but two countries, which are expressly looking for locations that are close to the continent of Europe, thus exploiting the gateway potential but, for a variety of reasons, have difficulty coping with the culture and temperament that is continental Europe. They feel more comfortable working in East Kent. Mr Jankowski: We have a classic resource strategy which is based on the principle of a pristine built, high-class environment, so a high quality physical structure within the town, but our regeneration is firmly directed to sustainability which is the bringing in of private sector investment. We believe that we now have significant levels of private investment that did not exist eight years ago. Q150 Anne Main: So both of you are drawing mostly on the private sector to drive this upgrade? Mr Tipple: Yes. Mr Jankowski: Yes. Mr Tipple: At the end of the day nothing will work unless we have sustainability but somebody will make some money. That is a very crude position to take but frankly if we are going to get the private sector they have got to see that they can make something from it. Q151 Mr Betts: What do you think are still perhaps the biggest barriers you are facing for successful regeneration and where you have been successful what have been the key elements to that? Mr Bellamy: The public realm is important. I think you have to look at the social and community side of it as well. I think that was touched on in the last bit of evidence. Whilst unemployment is relatively low in Southport we have to remember that these industries predominantly produce low paid, low skill jobs, and the other dominant industries I think are care industries, which are the same, and that inevitably means we lose a lot of young people who go off to look for careers, so there is a gap within the labour market that is fairly noticeable. In terms of those who are left, there is perceived to be a lack of opportunity because of that skills gap and that needs to be addressed. There is also the fact that, although we are doing our best to even out the tourism trade, the fact that there are peaks in the season does affect people's attitude to education and the college. People drop out as they are offered more hours, et cetera. You have got those social factors that need to be addressed hand in hand or otherwise you will not get a holistic approach that is owned by the community and the town as a whole. I think those have been recognised over the years as the three sectors that have worked closely together. Ms Waghorn: Building on that, we have also got to support the public realm. We have just had a study done in Margate about tourism and the biggest thing it came out with was, forget the tourism product unless you improve your public realm locally. Otherwise you can ask for people to come and visit and tell them it is a good place to be and you might as well forget the whole thing. The public realm is a real thing and I would support everything that has been said about that. I would also cite accessibility and infrastructure: to be able to get in and out of places in a reasonable time and to be able to visit. One of the things that is unique about some of the things we have done is that it is about the links we have with the higher education and further education sector and getting them to develop new courses and new products that can train local people in new skills. In that I am thinking around the cultural developments that we are trying to achieve and new industries that we are trying to set up locally. They have got some bespoke courses now that they are putting on in the local area for local people and we have now got an HE campus in the Thanet area to take that on and let people really take on the education element and that is working. Q152 Mr Betts: Would each of you like to say what is the biggest success story you have had so far which others might be able to learn from? Mr Bellamy: I think it is the fact that we started as a partnership with an SRB and we have kept that together despite the fact that the main tranche of money that came next was on the infrastructure side. While in the last three or four years things have been in separate pots we have managed to the partnership together and retain the fact that we still talk about issues like housing problems with tourism deliverers, et cetera. I think our greatest success is the fact that partnership has remained intact. Mr Tipple: From my perspective I would say it is the buy-in by all the stakeholders, be they public sector, private sector, community or the voluntary sector. They are all behind the strategy, they have all been involved in its conception, they have tracked it through at every stage and there is total transparency across the piste. Against that backdrop the most tangible form of progress has been in the cross-boundary order working, therefore, how communities work with communities which might be 20 miles away in order to promote the area as a whole and not necessarily their particular destination or location. That has proved an enormously helpful tool in mobilising people. There is a wealth of talent out there, as I am sure you will appreciate, particularly in the voluntary sector. If you can mobilise that, which I like to think we have been successful in doing, it really does make an impact. Q153 Mr Betts: Can I pick up on the point about housing? Would you want more affordable housing in your area? Would that enable you to retain some of the young people who would otherwise leave or is there a danger that if you provide it you end up attracting people from elsewhere, as one or two witnesses have said, who simply come because it is a nice place to live on their benefits? Mr Bellamy: The evidence we have is that in the main people who come can afford the houses that are there but we have seen a huge rise in house prices in the last three or four years. If you bear in mind that you have a lot of young people on minimum wage jobs who are earning £10,000 a year and the starter flats are £100,000, there is no hope for them to be able to see a start in living in that economy, so they are going to move away to get jobs in higher paid areas. We have done a lot of research which has shown that the unit cost for builders is wrong because it is done on a sector basis rather than on a Southport basis and equally the numbers we are allowed to build are just not keeping pace with the needs that we have within the town. One of the things that has been successful has been a lot of private retirement flats but they are very expensive. We meet a lot of young people who are moving away because they simply cannot get jobs that will enable them to get on the mortgage ladder and in the private rented sector there are issues about quality and safety. We have done a lot of work through the SRB but we continue to struggle with that. Mr Jankowski: There is additional pressure now which is probably an outcome of economic success with the influx of migrant workers who are tending to take some of the lower priced rental accommodation. Southport has a disproportionately high level of private rented accommodation. We are now seeing problems in the housing market that have been brought about through the influx of migrant worker labour. Mr Tipple: We want a balanced approach. If you look at the whole of East Kent it is characterised by fairly affluent Canterbury and its region and you look at the coastal areas, characterised by, again, quite affluent wards living cheek by jowl with seriously deprived areas, so it is a mix, I think, of affordable housing, particularly linked to key workers, and there are schemes now where certain companies have actively been promoting that with some success. It is looking at those properties that traditionally have been broken up into however many apartments and trying to restore them so that they become family units again; in other words, trying to reflect in your housing stock the need to stabilise the determinants in the local population. Q154 Mr Betts: If I can turn to Southport, is the evening economy a major player for you? Mr Jankowski: We have an evening economy strategy which we look at and try and drive forward. The evening economy is very difficult in our town. It is run by small businesses who perhaps compete on price in terms of the night time economy offer. We have issues about the cultural offer in terms of theatre and other things for a broader look at the demographic in our evening economy, but we are aware of the issues and are working on them. Q155 Alison Seabeck: Can I ask Southport, we have looked at the information in your Classic Resort strategy, and obviously you in turn have looked at how that relates to what is going on in some European areas. Earlier today we talked about issues around sustainability and growing private sector investment. Is that what has driven the European comparisons that you have looked at? Was that private sector investment in those European towns? Mr Jankowski: When we took our exemplars of successful European resorts, it was to try and identify what makes a classically good resort. Why do you get towns of similar scale to Southport with quite powerful visitor economies like some of the ones in Europe? We wanted to look outside the UK model of resort towns to see what was the best practice Europe-wide. Q156 Alison Seabeck: But did you pick up evidence to support your view that private sector investment is the most powerful driver as opposed to perhaps French resorts drawing in funding from local or central government? Mr Jankowski: Yes, there is that and the fact that in the European resorts the wage rates and the career progressions tend to be better than in the UK. Q157 Alison Seabeck: What would you put that down to? Mr Bellamy: It is the educational structure, I think. We have struggled quite a lot with the college to get them to re-gear their day-release programmes. It is very difficult. They do courses as if it is a school curriculum and people cannot just get a straight day off in the way they want to and that makes it difficult for both the students and the employers. The other thing is maintaining a progression that they can keep in-house. We need to do work with the private providers and make them not just give their time up but also pay them work-based training because part of the classic resort is also about having a high quality service offer. Q158 Alison Seabeck: And that is clearly evidenced from the European example? Mr Bellamy: Yes. Q159 Dr Pugh: What you are saying is that in Europe tourism is treated as an industry, as a career, something that needs developing, but in a lot of our seaside resorts people just regard tourism as a way of getting cheap labour to make a fast profit and get on kind of thing? Mr Jankowski: We still suffer from being seen as somewhere where people will retire and say, "I will open a boarding house in Southport. There can't be much to it", and you see them in Sainsbury's buying the food for their guests and you think, "Oh, dear me". That is part of the problem. Q160 Alison Seabeck: To East Kent, in terms of proximity you are closer than Southport to the rest of Europe. Are you picking up on the lessons from the north French coast and Holland as to how they are regenerating some of their areas? Mr Tipple: We look closely particularly at what French coastal towns are doing, working our way from Calais downwards, as it were, and this performance does vary. The key difference there is that when you look at the role responsibilities and funding availability in chambers of commerce they have a fair degree of autocracy but they seem to work. They can perform very quickly and they are therefore that much more responsive to market forces and that is why I think they score. Generally speaking what they have succeeded in doing is reflected in our strategy, which is all about being clearer about what the offer is in your coastal town and what the hinterland behind it - we should not forget that - is able to offer. If I come back to East Kent, you have got Canterbury surrounded by the coastal towns. In the middle is a rather large chunk of important rural land which promotes an important rural economy. Q161 Alison Seabeck: If we can talk about the governance issues around some of those Norman French towns where they are fairly self-governing with mayors, are you saying that that gives them more power to their elbow in a sense in terms of making quick focused decisions? Mr Tipple: Yes, particularly when you take into account the level of private sector investment which is channelled through chambers of commerce. Q162 Anne Main: Can I take you back to what you said about valuing tourism as a career? Is it partly to do with any push that we have got now to encourage everyone to go for degrees rather than taking up vocational training and valuing becoming skilled up in industry? I do not know if that is part of the problem. Mr Tipple: I think far too much emphasis is placed on the attainment of formal qualifications which do not necessarily reflect the requirements of the trade or industry that you are in. I also think that too much emphasis is placed on marketing by the public sector and significantly less on working with the industry. For example, the investment that is made in website development to try and market an area into mid-Europe is, I think, largely wasted. It should be directed into the travel agents who sell packages into the UK, be they based in Germany, France or the Netherlands, which tend to be the three dominant countries that people who are disposed to travel regularly travel to. It is those people you need to be able to sell the packages to and that is something that generally speaking the tourism industry in this country is not particularly strong at doing. Dr Pugh: Coming back to funding, you have spoken very respectfully of the Government Office North West and the development agency. I would expect you to do nothing less in the circumstances you are in, but it is a nightmare, is it not? You have to get various packages of money, whether it be SRB, Objective 2, Objective 1 or whatever, mix and match, and then get all the streams tied together and then try and accomplish something with occasional schemes falling because the funding simply is not there in one pot or another. Would you like to comment on whether there is a need for greater consistency of funding? In the old days the local authority would have the revenue and would simply provide a pier or whatever it was that was required. Q163 Chair: You can disagree if you like. Mr Bellamy: We have experienced several different funding streams and we have had quite a lot of discussions about it. Whilst I recognise that there were faults with single pots and there was the competition element, et cetera, our view is, having talked to other resorts, that there are significant issues but there are different quantities. Even when you get to local authority level you see certain structures getting further away as we speak, such as the strategic health authorities, et cetera, and I think having a pot of money that has allowed you to address particular areas of need that you have in the way that a local partnership can, albeit it is accountable to the local authority or whatever, is the best mechanism you can get because not everyone is the same and the more the subs come down in different bits it does not allow you to produce a holistic package. We would definitely favour that as an approach because there are issues that we seriously know would be good drivers for us but we cannot persuade people at regional level, like with the marine lake in Southport. Q164 Dr Pugh: Are you suggesting that if you have an effective partnership you can get more of the funders into the same tent and you are more likely to get mixes of funding at the right time in the right way? Ms Waghorn: Yes. Mr Tipple: Oh, certainly. We have got an illustration which I can talk to you outside about, but the key message we get back from central Government departments and other agencies is, "Oh, you have actually got a holistic strategy. Ah, we can now see where that particular project relates", be it in employment terms, housing, social community involvement. It hits a lot of Government department buttons suddenly, and suddenly the doors open. The emphasis is very much on the partnerships to be able to articulate that vision and the strategy and demonstrate the linkages, but suddenly it prompts the Whitehall civil servants to say, "Wow! We are with you on that one", and suddenly what was a very difficult array of potential pots of funding to be able to access, let alone know about, come together, so I am very much in favour of the partnership approach where, as I said at the beginning, you have got all the stakeholders, from the public authorities down to voluntary groups, working to that same agenda and the industry clear about what the deliverables and the outcomes are going to be. That way you get their buy-in. Mr Jankowski: I would absolutely reinforce that. Chair: Can I follow up that one and say do you have any positive examples of interdepartmental co-ordination within Government? Anne Main: Or not! Q165 Chair: If not, what would you like to see? Ms Waghorn: I think we could give a really good example of Margate as a town where a lot of different agencies and Government departments have now come together to try and have a holistic approach. Q166 Chair: Can you briefly list them? Ms Waghorn: The agencies? Q167 Chair: Yes. Ms Waghorn: We have got English Partnerships, the Government Office, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, we have got a lot of lottery funding, we have got all sorts of different funding - I am trying to think of it all off the top of my head. SEEDA are involved, the Arts Council are involved, the Environment Agency. There is a whole host of different agencies that are all involved in one plan that everybody has agreed on as to what needs to be done and it covers housing, infrastructure, brownfield development and new creative industries and new enterprise. It is a totality of development. Q168 Chair: Who drew up the plan? Ms Waghorn: It came out with support from our partnership, funnily enough. There was a need to drive it forward. Margate has had a host of funding over the years, SRBs, ESFs, you name it, it has had it, but it has had this one pot mentality. Then they realised and we facilitated bringing a team together. It is now chaired by the Chief Executive of SEEDA and it is given that much prominence and now has got everybody on board. We provided the grass roots base for that to get it going. Everybody has then come along and seen the importance of it and they are now driving it forward. What it means is that we have more money and we are getting more bite for our bark and that is what really has got to happen now. Mr Jankowski: On our side we have a similar cocktail of funding - NWDA, Objective 1 from the RDF, ESF, LTP, Sefton Council, HOF, lotteries, percolated across, in our case at the moment, nine capital projects. The problem comes when one of those partners decides that their priorities have changed or that their timescales have changed or, "Oh, we have over-committed somewhere else", and you find yourself permutating nine capital projects with 18 different funders all operating to different timescales and it is difficult. It is as much a black art as a science to get them all to the starting line and then all to the finishing line, and that is where the advantage is of a single pot and total commitment from all the agencies to your strategic plan. We would rather know that we were not getting any money from certain areas than be told, "Oh yes, there is a good chance". By the time you have built all the funding together it is so easy - one block gets pulled out and the whole thing collapses or it will take another three years to put back together again. Q169 Chair: Is that not what the Government Office should be doing, drawing all the things together? It is a line from Yes, Minister, "You might think so". Okay, fine. Finally, do you think the private sector has sufficient incentive to invest in coastal towns and, if not, what could give them greater incentive? Mr Jankowski: From our side the town has to believe that it has reached the point where it is improving. It is not just the private sector. The stakeholders tend to be people who know your town well. It is community, it is health, it is education, it is the youth, the way we work across all the different complexities and partnerships, but you do have to make them believe that you are investing in a town that has a future. Once people believe that the town has a future then you pump in your infrastructure, your public realm works, and we get immediate returns on our public realm works. There will be people knocking on our door. The private sector will want to invest because they have bought the vision. You do not have to hit them over the head with it. You let them learn and believe and that is the way forward. Mr Tipple: I would echo all of that. I would just add that if they see public authorities working closely together and knocking down the traditional barriers, particularly on planning, then you will have them eating out of your hand. We have experience of that and we have had to go down the road of getting local authority chief executives themselves to be party to the initial discussions where private investors are looking in and saying, "Is this an area where we want to come and locate to?". It is that senior level engagement and an open and honest commitment to say that planning is not difficult, is almost not going to be an issue: we are not going to put obstacles in your way. You also are able to demonstrate, as my colleague has just said, commitment on the part of the community as a whole to support what is going on and they will buy in. They see signs of a flexible, adaptable workforce that is prepared to be upskilled and they see the facilities that are there to enable that to happen and they are very happy. Chair: Thank you very much. |