UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1023-iii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE

 

 

COASTAL TOWNS

 

 

Tuesday 11 July 2006

MR COLIN DAWSON, MR PHILIP MILLER, MR MICHAEL BEDINGFIELD

and MR STUART BARROW

MS JUDITH CLIGMAN, MS KATE CLARKE and MR DUNCAN McCALLUM

MS JESS STEELE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 170 - 288

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Communities and Local Government Committee

on Tuesday, 11 July 2006

Members present

Dr Phyllis Starkey, in the Chair

Sir John Beresford

Mr Clive Betts

John Cummings

Dr John Pugh

________________

Witnesses: Mr Colin Dawson, Chief Executive, BALPPA (The British Association of Leisure Parks, Piers & Attractions Ltd), and Mr Philip Miller MBE, Managing Director of Stockvale Ltd, owners and operators of Adventure Island Amusement Park, Southend on Sea, The British Association of Leisure Parks, Piers & Attractions Ltd, Mr Michael Bedingfield, England Marketing Director, and Mr Stuart Barrow, Government Affairs Officer, Visit Britain, gave evidence.

Q170 Chair: Can I welcome you to this afternoon's session on coastal towns and could I ask you to introduce yourselves and say which organisations you are representing?

Mr Barrow: I am Stuart Barrow. I am Government Affairs Officer at Visit Britain.

Mr Bedingfield: Good afternoon. I am Michael Bedingfield, England Marketing Director from Visit Britain.

Mr Dawson: Good afternoon. I am Colin Dawson. I am the Chief Executive of BALPPA.

Mr Miller: Good afternoon. I am Philip Miller, the Managing Director of Adventure Island, Southend on Sea.

Q171 Chair: Can I start with the first question, which is to ask you whether you think coastal towns have unique attributes compared with other UK visitor destinations?

Mr Dawson: Yes, I think they do. I think the tourism product in coastal towns is one that in many cases has been developed over generations. There is a long tradition in our coastal towns of tourism and visitor attractions in particular, and that is something that I think we should protect and guard against any potential danger of ever losing.

Q172 Chair: But why is that different from other towns that are established tourist destinations, like Bath or London, for example?

Mr Dawson: I think one of the simplest answers is catchment. Very often they are backed to the sea. Half of their catchment is fish and therefore they are very much dependent on pushing and enabling themselves on that 180 degrees as opposed to inland tourist destinations that have a much wider and larger catchment area. Also, the road systems tend to be so much better inland than they are on the coast.

Q173 Sir Paul Beresford: You said "protect" but really what we ought to be looking to do is enhance, surely.

Mr Dawson: Yes, I agree with that.

Q174 Sir Paul Beresford: Can you give some suggestions? The knee-jerk reaction for some of the people from some of the towns is to say, "Here is my hat. Please fill it". I am a taxpayer, you are a taxpayer. Are there things that Government could do to make it easier for them to move ahead without necessarily doling out all our money?

Mr Dawson: I think there is a partnership between the two. I think there is a partnership between the private sector and the public sector that is where the future lies but that needs to be a co-ordinated approach. At the moment there is insufficient co-ordination in the development of many of the tourist destinations that we have around the UK, particularly on the coast, and I think it is that lack of guidance and that lack of co-ordination that is causing some of the difficulties they are facing.

Q175 Sir Paul Beresford: How would suggest that comes about?

Mr Dawson: I would suggest some form of a national policy coming from the Government and coming down through the regions giving a much firmer direction to the local authorities and the regions to help put that right.

Q176 Sir Paul Beresford: Why through the regions? Why not something that is related to the coast?

Mr Dawson: I think it is generally accepted that the regions are getting more and more say in what happens in our areas now and as a consequence of that they need to be very firmly in the loop.

Q177 Chair: Can I bring in Visit Britain? What would you feel about whether coastal towns are different from other places?

Mr Barrow: It depends which coastal town you mean. If you are talking about Deal it does not have the same profile as, say, Poole would have or a seaside resort town like Scarborough. You mentioned Bath. If you are interested in Regency architecture in Bath or Cheltenham you might see Brighton as a Regency architecture site you would want to go and see, so it depends what your motivation would be. Obviously, seaside resort towns are different from cities but seaside cities will have the same market profile as cities inland.

Q178 Sir Paul Beresford: What do you suggest to improve things?

Mr Barrow: It is up to the local authority. The interests of the local authority in creating a bigger tourist market will lead it to make its own policies and that is for them to decide.

Q179 Chair: Do both groups think that English coastal towns have a viable economic future?

Mr Bedingfield: Absolutely. What we have seen recently is rejuvenation of many coastal towns. There has been a historic appeal of coastal towns and I think rejuvenation by both the public and the private sector gives that longevity.

Q180 Chair: You are obviously largely about tourism from outside the UK.

Mr Bedingfield: I am actually not. Visit Britain comprises two bodies. One is certainly that we lead the world to Britain but we also have responsibility to ensure that the domestic visitor stays in England for their holidays. If you look at the mix of that, about 77 per cent of our total visitor economy is from the British people holidaying in England, and by far one of the main reasons for staying in this country is the quality of our seaside destinations.

Q181 Chair: What about marketing our seaside destinations abroad?

Mr Bedingfield: We do that as well. Part of my remit is also to market England to our near European markets, our major markets, so France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands, and certainly we make sure we feature those coastal towns, but also in the work that Visit Britain does overseas we make sure that we showcase England's coastline, which includes our coastal towns and also areas that are not necessarily associated with those towns, like the coastland owned by the National Trust, which is all very much in the vicinity of the coastal towns so that they can be used as a place (a) to get there and (b) to stay to enjoy that coast.

Q182 John Cummings: Would you tell the Committee how you believe English coastal towns are responding to the changes in tourism trends? In my lifetime I have seen immense changes, people moving away virtually en masse from domestic locations to locations abroad. How are you responding to these particular trends?

Mr Bedingfield: Taking one example that was in the press at the weekend, the Brighton initiative to bring 12 trucks(?) over, that has got national coverage, and that is a way that a coastal town is using a type of transportation from overseas just to give it a different sort of flavour. What you have actually seen is rejuvenation in many areas in terms of upgrading of accommodation, also the variety of attractions at the seaside. Again, to use Brighton for a second example in my answer, they have got the largest sandcastle in England and that is bringing more people to that particular town to experience a wider variety of attractions. It is all about increasing the number of attractions for rejuvenation.

Q183 John Cummings: Do you think local authorities are aggressive enough in pursuing tourism within their particular area?

Mr Bedingfield: I think there is a great variety of local authorities.

Q184 John Cummings: Give us some good ones and some poor ones.

Mr Bedingfield: I think Brighton is a very good example of a local authority that has undertaken a lot of pioneering work in terms of rejuvenating Brighton which is no longer classified necessarily as a resort but an excellent example of a city by the sea.

Q185 John Cummings: And a poor example, some local authorities who are not responding? There is nothing sadder in this world than travelling along the seafront and looking at dilapidated buildings, peeling paint, a forgetfulness about the whole place. Can you identify any readily?

Mr Dawson: I think Margate is probably a very good example of what you are referring to. It is a very sad case but equally perhaps we could give the Southend example to answer your question on a good opportunity.

Q186 John Cummings: How do you tackle these problems?

Mr Miller: If you compare Southend to Margate, I have an interest in Margate. I am trying to do some business there on a park that was there for 90 years and has now closed down. The demise of Margate as a town is really built around the demise of Dreamland Amusement Park. That is another story, but if you look at Southend, 30 years ago - I own a business on the seafront, about eight or nine acres. It is called Adventure Island, but my family bought it from the receiver. Southend was really in the doldrums, for whatever reason, and over the years we have kept reinvesting, and particularly in the last ten years I have put in £15-£16 million of my own money and others around me have followed, so you have got another attraction up the road. It is all private money and the council come along with all their bits as well. Your question was about a good one and a bad one. I do not think it is quite as simple as good and bad ones. You could not necessarily call the Isle of Thanet a bad one because it is a private guy that has ruined the site, who owns the park. You cannot blame the council for that because it was not theirs to do anything with. In Southend it ranges from good to indifferent to bad, depending what the time of the year it is and where the moon is half the time. If you ask what is the answer to it, some sort of guidance for all the councils to follow in regard to all coastal regions that rely on tourism would be helpful.

Q187 John Cummings: Do you have any examples where coastal towns capitalise on unique selling points?

Mr Dawson: Yes. From our prospect, we are a national organisation and we have a lot of coastal members. One of the prime examples is where Newquay, for example, has identified a niche market and they have done very well with the surfing business down in Newquay. It was because there was something unique about Newquay and they have done very well with that.

Q188 John Cummings: Are you embraced by central Government in as much as they seek your advice when developing policies? Do our friends sitting next to you meet with you on a regular basis? Does Visit Britain meet with the Department on a regular basis and which other bodies do you meet with?

Mr Barrow: Which department in particular?

Q189 John Cummings: I thought it might be the department that led to your being. I think you are funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Mr Barrow: That is right.

Q190 John Cummings: So obviously that is the body to which you will be ultimately responsible.

Mr Barrow: Yes, we have regular contact with the DCMS.

Q191 John Cummings: Do you have regular contact with the association here?

Mr Barrow: Through various bodies.

Mr Dawson: We do indeed, yes. We sit on a number of bodies together and we also have very regular contact with the DCMS at minister level and at officials level.

Q192 Chair: Can I pursue this issue about the unique selling point? Do you think that every coastal town has to try and find its unique selling point?

Mr Barrow: It helps. Southport, for example, would have the Royal Birkdale, golf tourism. Some coastal towns might have a pier that is particularly attractive or a natural coastline. The international market being what it is, the consumer will want something that they cannot get anywhere else. They want that "must see" attraction, so obviously it helps if you have got one. Hull, for example, which was not regarded as a tourism destination for many years, now has the Hull Submarium, which is an add-on to the aquarium idea that has boosted tourism to that city.

Mr Dawson: I think the piers are offering significant opportunity for a number of coastal towns. The difficulty is the high maintenance cost of piers. It is the issue of trying to get some help with those maintenance costs which are very significant. Take Southend pier, for example. There is a projection of a £6 million spend to put that pier back into the required level of maintenance over a ten-year period. It is an awful lot of money to be found, and if there could be some assistance, and we have suggested maybe through rate relief, it would help those pier owners to advance their piers and take advantage of the opportunity.

Q193 Dr Pugh: There are lots of excellent examples of Victorian piers that have been restored. There are piers that need restoring and there are piers for which astronomic sums are projected for their restoration and they are uncertain as to whether they will get the money. In some cases the decision is made that the pier just has to go. For example, in Morecambe, at the end of the day the pier ended up in the scrap yard and Brighton has about three. I think one of them the axe may fall on; we do not know. It is a glorious ruin at the moment. In terms of cost/benefit analysis is there any cost/benefit analysis that could be done on piers because obviously there are some which can be absolutely huge, can they not?

Mr Dawson: An interesting factor is that the ones that are successful are the ones that are in private ownership.

Q194 Chair: Which ones would they be?

Mr Dawson: I think Brighton is a good example of one. I know it has been mentioned previously but that is a good example. Teignmouth is another. Those are good examples of piers that have been identified as having some uniqueness about them and people have made major strides in developing them.

Q195 Dr Pugh: But generally they are not restored with private funds, are they?

Mr Dawson: No. They are not in private ownership. Some of the problem is that in transferring them into the private sector the sums of money invested just to get them back into a reasonable state of repair are very significant because they have been allowed to get into a very poor state.

Q196 Dr Pugh: So what decides it? In a sense the pier is something that you perambulated along in Victorian times. It is an old holiday custom, maybe a very natural holiday custom, but it is not a very lucrative holiday custom in many respects in this modern age.

Mr Dawson: No.

Q197 Dr Pugh: There must come a point, and I go back to my original question, where you have to reach a decision about a pier, that it really cannot be refurbished; it just has to go or it cannot be economically repaired. When does that scenario occur?

Mr Dawson: It is the identification of some opportunity that the pier presents that would not otherwise be available. There is still this huge fascination for people about being able to walk out over the water.

Q198 Dr Pugh: Take the case of Brighton that has got a pier that needs restoring. Has that reached the point of no return?

Mr Dawson: It is a different scenario there slightly because you already have a very successful pier there and I think that has always been the problem with any potential development of the west pier, that you have the central pier which is hugely successful and there will be little scope for another one to duplicate the success. Something unique would have to be found in order to develop the west pier, and that has been the problem.

Q199 Dr Pugh: So Brighton might not need another pier?

Mr Dawson: I think Brighton might not need another pier.

Q200 Dr Pugh: Can I turn to Visit Britain? I have a question to ask you in relation to the action you think the Government are making. What more can the Government do to increase the attraction of English coastal resorts apart from giving them more money to do it?

Mr Barrow: Obviously, our remit is to market what is there, and we have to market what we are presented with rather than actively lobby local government to produce things for us, though we can highlight good practice. Take the piers example. Bognor Regis has a pier which is pretty dilapidated but they have an annual birdman competition which has sponsorship from Red Bull these days. Rather than have a unique physical attraction you can have unique events that might attract visitors.

Q201 Dr Pugh: If the Government give you money it will be value for money? It will help the coastal towns?

Mr Barrow: We have a very good initial investment.

Q202 Dr Pugh: The reason I ask that is that when we were in Lille I picked up this document which you may have seen, Le Nord d'Angleterre, which tells you all about the north and the attractions, and I looked to see what you were doing for seaside resorts. You mention, I think, about four on the map - Whitby, Scarborough, Blackpool and Morecambe, a strange eclectic choice, and you miss out some very good examples. Obviously, Southport is one I would mention. I poured through the document thinking, "Is there a mention of Southport in it?", so I turned to the Liverpool page and you have got as far as the squirrel reserve just outside Southport but you did not mention that it was next to Southport, and I looked at the Lancashire page hoping you might mention Southport so that people in France, Germany, wherever know it is there, only to find you did not. You did tell them about Oswaldtwistle, which I thought was an eccentric choice. Can you explain how that happened first? This is going out all over Europe and you are promoting seaside resorts. You are actually promoting four seaside resorts and missing out one, I would have thought, fairly obvious case.

Mr Bedingfield: The way we put the brochures together is in consultation with the local tourism bodies and they give us a flavour of what they would like to promote.

Q203 Dr Pugh: And they did not tell you Southport was there?

Mr Bedingfield: It might be that Southport is featured in another one of our brochures.

Q204 Dr Pugh: So far as I know it is still in the north of England.

Mr Bedingfield: It is.

Q205 Dr Pugh: You have just mentioned the golf so I looked with some enthusiasm when I saw the picture on the Merseyside page of golf. I thought this must surely be the Royal Birkdale which was mentioned, and it is not; it is Hoylake, the other side of the Wirral, so in a sense you lost the opportunity. What I am really asking is, have you the skill, the background, to promote coastal resorts successfully when you - or somebody in your organisation - do not seem to know that much about them?

Mr Bedingfield: There are two things. First, we take the information that is given to us by the local tourist boards in terms of the regional tourist boards who want us to promote what they call their attack brands or whatever they want to promote.

Q206 Dr Pugh: Morecambe is an attack brand, is it?

Mr Bedingfield: Again, I do not think I am in a position to comment on the information that we are given to promote. The second part of my answer is that the piece of print you have in front of you is designed as an entry into our website where you will find far more information. What we have proved now is that it has made people laugh, it has made conversation, and that is exactly what we want to do to make people go on to our website.

Q207 Dr Pugh: I do not think they are laughing about it in France or Germany. They just do not know about half the seaside resorts in the north of England. I have not checked out the Le Pays de Galle version of this but I do not think it is good enough to say that you work on information given. You are the experts in tourism.

Mr Bedingfield: We are the experts in tourism. What we use the printed piece of material for is ideally to make people go on to our website and find out far more information. What we cannot do is put out pieces of print that are 200-300 pages long which cover every part of our tourism infrastructure.

Q208 Dr Pugh: You are doing a good job. It would be more reasonable to say there is an omission here and maybe one should review the reprinting next time round and make sure you include things that perhaps ought to be included.

Mr Bedingfield: I take it on board.

Q209 Chair: Particularly where members of the Select Committee represent them, obviously. You said that your remit is essential to sell Britain abroad, or indeed within the UK, but not to advise local authorities on how better to develop the tourism attractions within their areas. Is that right? Whose job is it to do that?

Mr Barrow: Under the restructuring, when the British Tourist Authority became Visit Britain policy went to DCMS and was removed from our organisation, so we are allowed to advise but we are not allowed to lobby.

Q210 Chair: Who looks at the tourism offer, so to speak, of UK plc and thinks, "There is a bit of a lacuna here. We need to develop more golf courses", or whatever, and takes some sort of initiative? Who would do that?

Mr Barrow: The initiative we have already started is Partners for England which is going to meet every six months. The first one was before Christmas. The last one was in late June. That brings together all the RDAs with Enjoy England, Visit Britain and local authorities to look at the whole tourism package and to see what more could be done at a local level under the initiatives of new localism and regionalisation.

Q211 Chair: And that has not been done up until now, has it? That is a new initiative, to bring all those together?

Mr Barrow: Yes. It is the new reality of RDAs.

Q212 Chair: Do you think part of the problem is that tourism is too fragmentary, that there are too many different groups involved? The RDAs are for all economic development, not just for tourism.

Mr Barrow: There are a lot of bodies that are involved that are not necessarily networked in the way that they should be, and one of the challenges for Partners for England is to network them successfully.

Q213 Mr Betts: What percentage of overseas visitor nights are spent at the seaside?

Mr Bedingfield: I do not have that information, sorry.

Q214 Mr Betts: Does anyone have it?

Mr Barrow: I am not sure that the figures are compiled by ONS in that way. I think they are done on a regional basis, so for the south west it would not just have the seaside towns. It would also have places inland, in Wiltshire, for example.

Q215 Mr Betts: So in each region they would have a percentage of overseas visit nights which were spent at the seaside?

Mr Barrow: There are some figures that are being compiled and I would be happy to send some research we do have. It is not in the form we would like it in at the moment but I would be happy to send it.

Q216 Mr Betts: Could you send it and say how you would like to improve it as well?

Mr Barrow: You mean the way it has been collated?

Q217 Mr Betts: Yes.

Mr Barrow: Okay.

Chair: That would be very helpful.

Q218 Mr Betts: How do you monitor how effective you are at getting overseas visitors to go to the seaside?

Mr Barrow: Obviously, overseas visitors have their own views of where they would like to come in the first place and most inquiries will be about London. One of our challenges is to get people who come to London then to visit other areas.

Q219 Mr Betts: How do you monitor how successful you are in doing that?

Mr Bedingfield: My primary remit is looking at influencing the domestic visitor to holiday in England. How we do that is that first of all we make sure that we get as much information on somebody as possible when they inquire for a brochure, when they go on the website. We take their details. We have a comprehensive system in place where we have to then contact those people to find out, on seeing our marketing activity, how that has influenced their decision to have a holiday in England. That is part of our remit with the DCMS, to make sure we give them a comprehensive return on investment over statistics.

Q220 Mr Betts: Do you do surveys afterwards to find how successful that has been?

Mr Bedingfield: Absolutely, yes.

Q221 Mr Betts: It is possible to have any information about those as well?

Mr Bedingfield: Yes, we can do that, absolutely.

Q222 Mr Betts: Let me turn to BALPPA. You suggest in your evidence that a specific scheme to help coastal regions would be helpful. Given that we have just been talking about the diversity of all the different coastal resorts and towns and cities, would a scheme really be helpful or are you talking about a variety of schemes that could be pulled together or targeted at appropriate locations?

Mr Dawson: Yes. I think schemes as a strategy are that what we are trying to identify here. There is a need for the various agencies and the RDAs to be pulled together to concentrate their efforts with a partnership between the public sector and the private sector that moves things forward because all too often, certainly from the private sector perspective, it is not always simple to identify where you should go in order to make things happen. We have had a classic example in Southend where all the money that has been spent down there so far has been from the private sector but there are more opportunities down there, as there are in numerous other places around the coast, where more could be done to invigorate and rejuvenate tourism.

Q223 Mr Betts: Who is going to be pulling it all together? Is it a central Government responsibility or do you think some of the RDAs should be involved?

Mr Dawson: I think there has to be guidance from the Government on a national strategy that pulls the thing together. All too often now they are dispersed and they are operating individually.

Q224 Mr Betts: I am not quite certain I am getting the flavour of this. We have talked about a national strategy but then we are talking about the fact that every town, every city on the coast is very different.

Mr Dawson: Yes, but that is why it would have to go down through the regional bodies. What I am saying is that there is insufficient guidance to the regions for them to concentrate their efforts. They need that guidance. There needs to be a policy from national government which says, "This is the strategy and you will follow it", and that comes down through the regions so that the region then takes that on board and works with the partnerships in the area, private and public sector, to make things happen.

Q225 Chair: Is that your view, Mr Miller?

Mr Miller: I can give you a few examples in Southend. We have got various grants from various bodies. We have had Thames Gateway give us some money for a big scheme. Objective 2 have given money for the high street. We have had a small amount of lottery money for the cliffs. If we could talk about the cliffs, at the moment they are in danger of bowling into the sea. They are a big threat to the local economy, let alone the people. We have had one collapse and we have had a £35 million estimate come along that the council have not got any money for but in the meantime they are spending £6 million or £7 million on one scheme not too far away, another £10 million or £15 million somewhere else of this grant money, and the people of Southend are saying, "Why are you doing that when this is the most desperate, horrific business here?", because it is a danger to people's homes. That is a classic example. Instead of having all this money where the council is given the opportunity to bid for the money and they have to meet these criteria in a short space of time, where they really want it they would like to divert it there.

Q226 Chair: Are you saying there is a lack of an overall strategy?

Mr Miller: Totally, yes.

Q227 John Cummings: I am rather surprised that none of the witnesses has made any reference to the present debacle with the provision of casinos. Do you see the provision of casinos being very high? Will it help the regeneration of seaside towns? How do you view the way in which the legislation is being shoved through the washing machine at the present time?

Mr Dawson: I think the regional casino does offer opportunities for regeneration of coastal towns but, going down the scale to the small and large casino, I do not think it offers anything. In fact there is a great problem of transference of business from the coastal arcades that have been the tradition in this country for so many years to the smaller and larger casinos. With the regional casino, of which one is currently planned, we know not where, that is a totally different operation because that has very significant leisure and hotel support, and that is definitely an opportunity to regenerate a town.

Q228 John Cummings: Do you feel the same way?

Mr Bedingfield: I agree.

Mr Miller: I do not; only in certain places. In Southend we all breathed a big sigh of relief when we did not get it, the people that live there. The council has one view but the residents - and there are a lot of businesses - have a completely different one. It just would not have worked in Southend. We have not got the car parking, we have not got the infrastructure. If you look at the Blackpool model it is absolutely perfect for them. Let them have it, please do.

Q229 Mr Betts: Sheffield wants it too.

Mr Miller: Have two. I am not against casinos per se. I do not mind them at all. I even got married in one.

Mr Dawson: So if we gave the impression it was within our gift it certainly is not.

Mr Miller: It is no good living in a nice town if you cannot get around it. Southend is in good luck already. If you suddenly have these hundreds of thousands of people coming to these casinos where are you going to put them? Where are you going to park them? We just have not got it.

Q230 Sir Paul Beresford: Let me take you back a little bit to the question before the last one. The problem with national guidance is that it must be national and it has to apply across the board but in your particular cases the most striking thing is the variety of the towns. Do you want guidance or do you actually want more freedom?

Mr Dawson: No, I think it is guidance, because without the guidance what is happening at the moment is -----

Q231 Sir Paul Beresford: What is the guidance going to say?

Mr Dawson: I will give you an example. We have just had the tourism policy guidance. That is a classic example which is pointing out to local authorities that when you consider planning applications for tourism destinations this is what you should be considering. It is that sort of guidance that is bringing a focus into tourism which previously did not exist. That is what I am talking about. Mr Betts made a classic example just now when he said that the brief of RDAs is extremely wide and as a consequence of that tourism gets pushed to the end, if it is there at all. In many cases there is no tourism represented in the RDAs at all. That is the sort of policy guidance that I would like to see.

Q232 Mr Betts: If I can turn to Visit Britain, how well do you think Government departments work with you and listen to you about making sure that regeneration developments are linked into tourism and the needs of that industry?

Mr Barrow: There has certainly been much interest in an initiative such as Liverpool winning Capital of Culture 2008 or the Olympics or many events that will help us promote Britain internationally as a tourist destination. Local government is quite responsive to the need to attract tourists to the local economy. We are very worried that the Lyons review might suggest a bed tax on tourism which we think would be detrimental to the tourist trade, but in general we feel that the Government is supportive of the tourist industry. It is one of our biggest industries after all, £74 billion a year.

Q233 Chair: Can I ask you about the bed tax routine? Might it not make some local authorities rather more enthusiastic about promoting tourism if they thought it was going to bring in income, because one of the points that has been made to us by local authorities is that from the point of view of a council tourism may increase their costs enormously without giving them as a council any additional income whatsoever.

Mr Barrow: If those local authorities that have publicly said they are against the idea, such as Bournemouth, do not impose a bed tax but other local authorities do, then Bournemouth, which is already a popular tourist destination, is going to become relatively more attractive than those that want to promote more tourism to their area. It is a bizarre way to try and attract visitors by making them pay more.

Q234 Chair: Unless it might be seen as a way of mobilising funds to maintain the public fabric which we are told is what attracts people to seaside resorts.

Mr Barrow: Which is exactly what they thought would happen in the Balearic Islands when they imposed an eco tax on tourists, and they have had to abandon it because they saw a big drop in tourism to the Balearic Islands.

Chair: Thank you very much indeed. If, when you disappear, you think of something you should have said, drop us a note.

Witnesses: Ms Judith Cligman, Director of Policy, and Ms Kate Clarke, Deputy Director, Policy and Research, Heritage Lottery Fund, and Mr Duncan McCallum, Policy Director, Policy and Communications Group, English Heritage, gave evidence.

Q235 Chair: Would you say who you are and which organisation you represent please?

Mr McCallum: I am Duncan McCallum, Policy Director of English Heritage.

Ms Cligman: I am Judith Cligman. I am Director of Policy and Research at the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Ms Clarke: And I am Kate Clarke. I am Deputy Director of Policy and Research at the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Q236 Chair: Can I start by asking you whether you think that the role of heritage in the regeneration of coastal towns is any different from its role in other towns and cities and whether you can give any specific examples?

Mr McCallum: English Heritage has been investing in seaside towns and coastal towns for a long time. We recognise that there are specific qualities and challenges faced by those towns. If we take, for example, the extreme climate, more maintenance is needed than for many other buildings. There tend to be a large number of listed buildings, a large number of public buildings, so there is a range of issues that are perhaps broader and more challenging than in other areas, so I think they do stand out as a specific group. Although we have never targeted them as a single group, when you look at the figures and the way we have been targeting our funding in the last few years, we have put a significant proportion of funding into these areas. Perhaps I can give you a couple of examples. In our area grant funding, that is principally to the conservation areas, around 20 per cent of our regeneration funding since 1999 has gone into coastal towns; that is around £10 million. In our individual building grants something over ten per cent has gone into buildings in and around coastal towns, and also in our places of worship grants 14-15 per cent of our funding has gone into these. We recognise that there are particular issues that need addressing and in a way they are slightly different from other historic towns.

Ms Cligman: I would make the point first of all that the Heritage Lottery Fund has a very broad remit so we do not just fund historic buildings; we also fund the cultural sector, so museums, libraries and archives; we fund biodiversity projects too which is something that people tend to associate less with us. Of course, we also fund cultural and intangible heritage, so cultural traditions. Our attitude to the role of heritage and culture in coastal towns is that they are extremely important in defining the distinctive character of those towns and very often coastal towns do have a very distinctive heritage. Indeed, the whole nature of the seaside town grew up around a certain history and social development which means they have a very special heritage. They also, of course, have particular attractions which are associated with coastal towns, such as public parks that are particularly designed to attract tourists as well as the more general leisure market of the people that live there. Clearly, therefore, we recognise that there is an extremely important heritage in those towns. We have put a lot of our resources into English coastal resorts. Over £66 million has gone into 43 townscape heritage schemes in towns which are defined as English coastal resorts and we have given more than £230 million to more than 517 projects in towns that are formally designated as English coastal resorts, and of course a great deal more money has gone into other towns such as Liverpool which are not defined as resorts but are obviously coastal towns. We do not treat them differently except in so far as, with our Townscape Heritage Initiative, we give priority to towns which have distinctive heritage needs combined with social and economic needs. Because those two are very frequently found together in coastal towns they have benefited from our funding to quite a considerable degree, but we do not treat them differently in any other way.

Q237 Chair: When you are taking decisions on funding things on heritage grounds, you have just said that you take into account some factors but how much are you taking into account the abstract (if I can describe it that way) heritage value of a particular building or park and the contribution that facility might make to economic regeneration and tourism?

Ms Cligman: We do both because we ask the people that apply to us to demonstrate why that heritage asset is of importance to them and to their local community, and we ask them to explain how it is significant to them. We do not define heritage ourselves. We ask the people who apply to us to define it. We ask them to make the case in terms of the value of the place to them in heritage terms, and we also ask our applicants to define the social and economic needs when we are supporting things within a townscape heritage scheme, which is a programme which is specifically designed to help historic urban areas. We ask people to make the case and they have to have a strategy for dealing with the wider social and economic problems within which the role of that heritage asset is set. We will not just help the heritage asset unless there is a clear strategy to maintain and sustain it for the benefit of the community in the long term. We ask them to provide that evidence to us.

Q238 Chair: What about English Heritage?

Mr McCallum: We take a similar line, but obviously, because our remit moves into the planning world and we spend a lot of time out there discussing planning applications and things in seaside or coastal towns, I suppose we think that generally we have a reasonable context for understanding the decisions and where we give grants. We are also involved in quite a few regeneration partnerships because of our regional presence. So often it is the case that we will be sitting on a town regeneration board, and Margate was mentioned, for example. We have a place on the Margate Regeneration Board and we make sure that heritage plays a proper part in the regeneration, so I suppose we have a wider context in understanding where we think grants can best be focused.

Q239 Sir Paul Beresford: Anybody involved in regeneration in this country will know that sooner or later you bump up against English Heritage. English Heritage has spent a lot of time looking at and listing things. They do not de-list things. Do you ever look at some of the projects, some of the people that come to you, and think, "Hang on a minute. Should we not actually de-list this building to give an opportunity for its regeneration which it may not have otherwise?"?

Mr McCallum: I believe we have just supplied a list of all the buildings that we have de-listed to the House of Commons Library and it goes to 44 pages, I understand, so we do de-list things but we do not do it very often. The point is that if a building is listed it does not rule out either its demolition or its significant alteration. If a building has been so altered that we recognise that it is uneconomic to repair, and the west pier at Brighton is an example of that, a listed building that we recognise is simply uneconomic, no scheme will make it viable to repair, but many other buildings do have some kind of future. I believe the Treasury is now looking for regeneration proposals rather than saying, "No, you cannot do that. That is affecting the historic character". I t is much more realistic in accepting change to bring on that vitality because we are not now just looking at individual buildings and safeguarding them. We are often looking at the wider area and we are prepared in some cases to make a compromise on an individual building in order to achieve a wider regeneration.

Q240 Sir Paul Beresford: Do you not need a programme, a review, of listed buildings? If you have got 37 examples of it, three might suffice, or, if you have one example, perhaps you have got one example because no-one would ever build a building like that again because it was so damned awful in the first place.

Mr McCallum: The Heritage Protection Review will be looking at the whole of the designation system. Although at the moment there is no programme to go through and look at all the listed buildings, as we move from the old system towards the new system I am sure there will be some buildings where, now that we know more about a certain building type, we recognise that this example is not a particularly outstanding one. We have moved away from walking round an area and looking at buildings one by one and more towards a thematic approach. We look at industrial buildings and we look at mills and that gives us a much better understanding of the national picture, and therefore where an individual building sits in that quality framework.

Chair: Can we get back on the agenda?

Q241 Dr Pugh: Can I ask about the issue of compromise? You have an excellent reputation for a number of very good projects indeed, but at the same time people have a sense that you are purists. For example, when restoring some piece of seaside heritage we have to acknowledge the fact that people's habits change and people's uses of things have changed. I think of parks, for example. Many of the original Victorian and Edwardian parks did not have things like cafés in them, did not have things like children's swings, did not even have things like modern toilets, all of which are highly desirable if a thing is going to be used. How do you deal with those issues where you are involved in a dialogue with the council who wish to do something which requires your funding and they justifiably call for heritage funding but what they are restoring is not quite the original article?

Ms Clarke: One of the ways that we deal with that is that we help people find new uses for things. All heritage is a dialogue about what is important; that is what makes it interesting and that is what makes places special, so you accept that. For example, we have funded park restoration in seaside towns. At Clacton Marine Gardens, for example, we have funded new facilities. In our THI schemes we help people to find new uses that are going to keep buildings there. That is the important thing, bringing together regeneration and heritage and what we have shown with seaside towns is that it works very well.

Q242 Dr Pugh: But by being over-rigid you can very significantly adding to costs, can you not? For example, the Victorians are very fond of wrought iron which is very costly now and replacing like for like is extraordinarily hard, is it not, and can cripple a project financially?

Ms Cligman: Our approach with parks has been that we ask the local authority, because it usually is the local authority, to work closely with the local community in defining what the needs of the local community are now, today, because parks have always been about meeting the needs of the community that lives around them. We ask them to work with the local community and many of our parks projects have set up user groups in order to do that. They define what their needs are and we fund children's playgrounds, we fund modern facilities of all kinds, and we spend a very considerable amount of money on that, but we also ask them to do that within looking at the character of the park as a heritage asset.

Q243 Dr Pugh: So there is that flexibility?

Ms Clarke: Yes.

Ms Cligman: And we will fund all aspects of the park - the loos and the things that people need now to make them usable, as well as the railings. We spend a very great deal of money on railings but we think it is worth it if you are going to get a quality product that the local people can enjoy. In the case of coastal towns, parks have always played an important role in the leisure aspect of coastal towns historically.

Q244 John Cummings: Your memorandum supports the need for special initiatives to tackle the various challenges faced in coastal towns but you do not give any specifics of the nature of these special initiatives. Could you give some indication to the Committee what you have in mind?

Mr McCallum: A good example, I think, is in the south west region where the South West Region Development Agency is working on a Market and Coastal Towns Initiative, which is focused on regenerating these areas. We have put a post in there to deal specifically with the heritage issues because one of the things that coastal towns have often suffered from in the past because of under-investment is that slow slide in the drop-off of quality, and I think that is why the Heritage Lottery Fund and ourselves put money in and why we put a lot of effort in. It is to try and bring that quality threshold back up again. That is one example. The Margate Renewal Partnership is another one in the south east of England, and indeed, somewhere like Seaham, where I know that we have been working with our grant scheme and the local authority, the county council, the district council and other partners to bring the whole range of different activities together, in a way, in trying to create a critical mass. Sometimes in the past we have perhaps grant-aided small, individual regeneration projects and because there is not a whole range of activity going on at the same time sometimes that effort gets lost. For that critical mass it is about partnership and that is why in my view the regional development agencies often offer the key to that because they are sufficiently local to know the names of the people that need to be involved. They do have access to sources of funding and they understand the local circumstances in a detailed enough way compared to maybe a national approach which would be rather too general.

Q245 John Cummings: Are the regional development agencies willingly embracing your concepts or do you think there ought to be an element of compulsion in relation to coastal town strategies imposed upon regional development agencies?

Mr McCallum: We work with all of them and I think they all recognise to a greater or lesser extent the importance of their coastal towns. As I say, there are some in the south east and the east of England and in Yorkshire, particularly good examples, that we know about that -----

Q246 John Cummings: Do you have some bad examples?

Mr McCallum: There are others that are not quite as far ahead of the game as those in terms of specifically building in the heritage element. All the agencies are working very hard at the regeneration angle and sometimes we feel that the heritage angle, which we believe is a key element in success, is not always built in at an early stage.

Q247 John Cummings: So would you like to see an element of compulsion upon regional development agencies to develop specific coastal strategies?

Mr McCallum: I do not think compulsion is the right way to go. I think it is about persuasion and making people understand the importance and the unique place that coastal settlements have in this country's history.

Q248 Chair: Can I pick up what you have just said about the heritage angle not always being built in? Do you think that sometimes strategies are relying on heritage without assessing whether there might not be another way of doing it?

Mr McCallum: We encourage the characterisation, as we call it, the historic landscape characterisation or appraisal work before they start making the big decisions to understand what they have got and the historic asset they have.

Q249 Chair: If I could use an example, speaking from ignorance, Brighton and its famous pier, has there been such an emphasis on preserving that second pier that it has diverted a huge amount of energy from other projects that it might have been better spent on, given that it appears that it has finally been decided that it is a no-hoper?

Mr McCallum: Specifically in Brighton, you mean?

Q250 Chair: As an example. There may be some others.

Mr McCallum: We all hoped for quite a long time that we could make the scheme work, so I think that certainly English Heritage and, I understand, the Lottery Fund for a long time were battling to keep the thing going. We recognised we would have to put a lot of money in and it was only when there were further catastrophic problems with it -----

Q251 Chair: Like arson.

Mr McCallum: ----- that we came to the conclusion that there simply was not enough money to go round. We try to take a balanced view in terms of being realistic and not throwing all our money at one-off projects, doing that in certain instances for a few key projects but also trying to build other projects around there and maybe doing enhancement work. If you are restoring a pier you do not just do the pier; you do enhancement around it and maybe some of the buildings facing the pier to try and create that critical mass to change the perception of an area.

Q252 Chair: If I may turn to the Lottery Fund, can you comment on the relationship with RDAs as well? English Heritage seem to feel that the RDAs are important and effective. What is your interaction?

Ms Cligman: We have regional teams in the regions of England. We also, obviously, operate in the rest of the UK where we have country teams and they are increasingly working with the RDAs and are looking at the regional economic strategies and the work that the regional development agencies are doing. We are finding that there is increasingly a recognition of the role of culture and heritage and regeneration and that is growing. I think it is something that we would like to see recognised more by the RDAs and built on more. It is only, if you like, a small element of their strategy but in some places the RDAs are very actively recognising the role that heritage and culture can play in revitalising coastal towns and we are certainly involved in partnerships in a number of areas where they are doing that. It is something where we think there are some very positive things going on. For example, in Great Yarmouth, I think the borough there has recognised that the heritage and the culture can play an enormous part in revitalising Yarmouth and so they have had £6 million worth of funding from us for a range of schemes over the years but they are also now working with a partnership which we are involved with called Integrate which involves the regional development agency in a programme of enhancement works, and indeed marketing initiatives which are aimed at developing the offer that Great Yarmouth has for tourists and also its general economic development. There are some very good examples where the RDAs have taken heritage on board as being one of these distinctive USPs of a place and then I think there are other areas where we have found that the RDAs have only come on later once they have seen what can be done.

Q253 Chair: Can you give an example of that?

Ms Cligman: I think we saw that very strongly in the case of Chatham Dockyard. It is probably not particularly central to your inquiry but at Chatham we put £13 million worth of funding into reviving the historic dockyard and now that the RDA has seen the economic benefits that can come out of creating a destination like that they have begun to engage with that and see that as a potential for further economic development, but it can be quite difficult in some cases for the RDAs to come in and fund things like that because it does not tick all their boxes.

Q254 Chair: Which boxes does it not tick then?

Ms Cligman: In terms of their formula for economic regeneration they are often focused much more on indicators such as job creation and other things and they do not necessarily always see the economic and social benefits that heritage can have because that is often something which is quite difficult to define in terms of hard outputs. It is something that we look at when we evaluate the impact of our schemes but it is not something that is very easily done in sheer square metres of floor or jobs created. You have to tell the story in a more sophisticated way than that.

Q255 Dr Pugh: Is it that they do not see it or is it that they do not see it in a seaside context? We have things like the Lowry Centre, we have things like the museum in Liverpool, which are all financed in part with RDA money and they are cultural offers, are they not? They are heritage offers.

Ms Cligman: As I say, I think they are beginning to see it. Much more familiar to the RDAs and perhaps much more recognised in Government policies generally is the role of culture, so that the role of the Lowry and Falmouth Museum and the Baltic Exchange, those sorts of cultural offers, I think are recognised as being important to regeneration but heritage is not always seen in that light. It is more about big new cultural offers that will attract people rather than the general urban grain of a historic place.

Q256 Mr Betts: Is the portion of funds which goes to coastal towns from the Heritage Lottery Fund a fair one? I understand it is about seven per cent of your total funds that goes to coastal towns. Secondly, is that sufficient to deal with their heritage needs?

Ms Clarke: Can I say one thing about our figures? I cannot tell you how much we have given to Britain's coasts because it is a very much bigger sum than that and we have funded a lot of things outside coastal towns, for example, Chatham Dockyard.

Q257 Mr Betts: The figure we have from you is £234 million, which is seven per cent.

Ms Clarke: What I wanted to stress was that that is only part of what we have given to Britain's coast.

Q258 Mr Betts: You have confused me completely now. You give us a memorandum saying you have given a certain amount and now you are saying it is not the right figure, so can you explain that to me?

Ms Clarke: What I have given you is the figure that we have given to British coastal resorts as defined by the British Resorts Association; that is the figure you have got. In terms of whether that is a fair sum, what we try to do with our funding is to spread it equitably across the country and ensure that as many people as possible have funding from us so that it does not just go to London, Edinburgh, to the great cities. We have to take the applications that come to us.

Q259 Mr Betts: Is it sufficient?

Ms Clarke: There will always be more that we can do anywhere and we have got a huge demand for our funding. What we try and do is distribute it fairly and equitably.

Q260 Mr Betts: Can I pick up the point you just made that you are obviously dependent on bids? I just wondered to what extent that leads the whole process to being a bit hit and miss. If you look at the distribution, for example, on the figures I have been given, probably St Anne's gets £168,000 or has had during that period. Southport has almost got money coming out of its ears, has it not, with £5.5 million? I just wondered to what extent the money is allocated not on the basis of any strategy with the wider potential economic regeneration implications but is that a nice project because someone has bid for it? Does it tick all your boxes in this case, and is that how money is allocated by you?

Ms Clarke: There are two things here. We do have to take the applications that come to us but what we do have are development areas, which are areas of country that have had less funding and where the success rates are not as high as other places.

Q261 Mr Betts: So no jam for Southport in the future?

Ms Clarke: Well, we do try and spread it across. For example, some of the development areas that we have got are in coastal towns - Bournemouth, Blackpool, Torbay, Eastbourne, King's Lynn and West Norfolk - are all areas where there has been less funding and we are working with those areas to try and raise the success rates actively.

Q262 Mr Betts: When you approve funding is this just a matter of keeping a building in good condition or whatever or do you actually look at these wider issues, "Can we stimulate other developments surrounding the area? Can we pick a focal point for other things to happen?"?

Ms Cligman: The first thing I would like to say is that our region and country teams work very closely with the local authorities, and indeed with the RDAs in their areas, and they encourage them to tell us about their priorities and what their strategies are. We like to have an overview where we can of what is coming to us and to see where the projects that are coming forward from local authorities fit within their overall strategy so we are a responsive funder. We do not go out there and say, "Please apply to us for such-and-such a project", or, "We think more of these are needed in your region". We try and work with the local authorities to understand what their strategy and their priorities are for the region. Having said that, we are very interested in the sustainability of our projects and as a funder you will be aware that we have had no major projects that have failed because they have not been viable so far, and long may it continue. We look at whether a project is sustainable and how it sits within the local economy and what the visitor figures are going to be and what role it is going to play within that economy, and we ask the local authority to justify it in terms of the sustainability of the asset.

Q263 Sir Paul Beresford: Can I pick up on what Clive has been saying but turn it the other way round? Presumably you have got more demands than you have got funds, that would be fairly normal, so it would be sensible not to spread the jam too thinly and what you really ought to be doing is looking at sufficient funds for some projects to make sure they get on their feet and go and really work even if others do not get the funding that they have applied for. The alternative, if you follow Clive's thinking and if I can take words out of his mouth, is to spread it sufficiently thinly that everybody is happy because they have all got a little bit but actually nothing happens.

Ms Cligman: I think our track record shows that that is not the case. We have a record of funding some very considerable projects which we have always seen through with very substantial amounts of funding coming from us as well as from other partners. We also have adopted the approach of using our portfolio of smaller grants, not small grants but smaller grants, to make sure we can support heritage projects very widely. The very nature of lottery funding is that it comes out of people's pockets and people need to see the benefits of lottery funding in their communities, so we have used our Your Heritage programme, which is for grants of up to £50,000, to make sure that we can get our funding out as widely as possible. Indeed, the title of our strategic plan is Broadening the Horizons of Heritage, and we have tried to make sure that every community can have a chance of defining what their own heritage is, what is important to them, and getting our funding to do that. At the same time I think we have done a good job of focusing our funding for larger projects to make sure that we are funding things that there is a genuine need for and which are sustainable in the long run.

Mr McCallum: Can I just add, where English Heritage and the HLF work very closely together is on partnership working, and we are quite interested in looking at the pump priming activity. Sometimes we spot an area that we believe is particularly in need of regeneration. We might fund, in conjunction with the local authority or other partners, a post to go in there to start that work, to do the thinking, to do the background research, to actually put together the bids for the large sums of money. We are never going to have huge sums of money in terms of the size that the HLF have, but I think it is efficient use of our local knowledge and our local contacts to actually put the case to the HLF and to actually say, "We believe this particular town is very needy", or, "We believe it has a particular problem that can be solved or helped along its way by a lottery grant."

Chair: Thank you very much.

Witness: Ms Jess Steele, Deputy Chief Executive, British Urban Regeneration Association, gave evidence.

Q264 John Cummings: Would you tell us what the drivers were behind the recent establishment of the seaside network, please?

Ms Steele: Yes, BURA is an independent cross-sectoral organisation, so we have members from different areas across the whole of the UK and across all sectors and all types of geography, all scales of towns and cities. We were approached by a number of different coastal towns, seaside towns, and that included Hastings and Scarborough, and once we got those two approaches we started to talk to others, and in those towns people from the private sector particularly were keen to see a cross-sectoral network. This is very much a learning experience. All of BURA's work is about bringing people together who are involved in different angles; so it is about sharing learning across the sector.

Q265 John Cummings: How many seaside resorts do you have involved with yourselves and what activities will your organisation undertake to achieve its objectives?

Ms Steele: We are launching the network tomorrow; so it is literally only just happening. Really I am here to talk about BURA's work rather than specifically the seaside network. At the moment we have 80 signed-up members. Some of them are from the same town; they might be a pier owner and the local authority and possibly a voluntary organisation, all from the same town, it is not 80 different towns at this stage. As I said, we are launching tomorrow in Hastings, and we will then be drawing in more and more members, I hope, over time. In terms of answering your question about what do we hope to achieve, it is very much about bringing people together. Everything that BURA has done since 1990 has been about bringing people together who would not normally meet. Some of them would meet through other networks. The local authorities, for example, involved the seaside network are likely to meet in a number of ways.

Q266 John Cummings: How will you achieve this?

Ms Steele: Through a combination of best practice visits to places that we have given awards to in the past or places that have won other awards, show-casing visits, which might not necessarily be best practice but where somebody wants to show something they have done, discussions about the very issues you are talking about, the need for special initiatives, particularly initiatives that draw the whole nation's coast together rather than specifically regional initiatives, and we will use our capacity around research, holding events, running training and running the "best practice" awards and bring all that to seaside towns.

Q267 John Cummings: Under whose umbrella do you operate?

Ms Steele: BURA is an independent not-for-profit membership association, so BURA is an entirely stand-alone organisation - it has no core funding, it is a not-for-profit social enterprise. I suppose you would call it, a membership association.

Q268 John Cummings: Given that regeneration is one of the responsibilities of the DCLG, how do you think the department could best support the seaside network?

Ms Steele: What I would like to see is a national shared learning programme. I understand that the way the regions and the RDAs approach it inevitably is that they see more in common within the region than between coastal towns from different regions. It may well be true that there are clear regional similarities in the nine regions of England, Wales and Scotland, and so on, but our experience since 1990 has been that people respond well to shared learning nationally, and I believe that DCLG could help to support that. This is not, of course, a bid for support in any sense (s I say, it is not about the seaside network), but I do believe there is scope for a shared national learning programme.

Q269 John Cummings: Would you suggest that the impetuous to form the seaside networks actually demonstrates the need for some sort of national seaside strategy?

Ms Steele: I do think that. When we first started it we were not sure what response we would get. We sent out a little questionnaire, a very simple questionnaire that said: "Do you think this is a good idea? What would you like to see it do?", and so on, and we got a very good response with a lot of people saying, "This is a fantastic idea. We cannot wait." So, we really felt that meant that there was a demand there, but also, from our point of view, it is clear that the best things that we have done in the past have been about bringing people together from different parts of the United Kingdom to share their learning. I also think that there are very big policy themes that impact not just on coastal towns but in particular ways on coastal towns and a national strategy would not solve those but it would come to understand how those things like houses in multiple occupation, the way the welfare system works, issues around enterprise support and so on, work specifically in coastal towns. I think that would help the local organisations and strategic partnerships in those coastal towns to get more of a grip on the issues for them and to understand where government is going with those big policy questions and how that might impact on them in the future.

Q270 Dr Pugh: When we spoke to the local authorities they were quite supportive and appreciative of what the RDAs had done on their behalf, but there again, you do not bite the hand that might possibly feed you, do you?

Ms Steele: No.

Q271 Dr Pugh: From a rather more neutral point of view (marks out of ten), what would you give the RDAs for their efforts with regard to the seaside economy?

Ms Steele: They all differ. They would get nine different scores, but I think that there is a basic problem for the RDAs, which is that they will always argue that their region is the coherent unit - they have to argue for that - and they therefore do not see, in general, they do not have any incentive to see, the specific interests of the coast.

Q272 Dr Pugh: How could they improve on that?

Ms Steele: We have seen already that SEDA have come up with their own coastal strategy. You could invent regional coastal strategies, I think a national strategy would be better value for money and better use of everybody's energy and time, but, more importantly, I do not think that any kind of compulsion should be put at the regional level to do that. I think a national strategy would enable the local and sub-regional organisations to put pressure at regional and at all kinds of levels on organisations like English Heritage as well, all kinds of funders and strategic bodies. For me a national pulling together of coastal issues is the way forward.

Q273 Dr Pugh: Do you think nationally there are some very specific problems that define coastal resorts? As has been mentioned, things like the higher cost of housing, the land and infrastructure, which, is it suggested, is more difficult to produce in the coastal towns than it would be in say, the middle of a city or on brownfield sites in the heart of desolate industrial waste land?

Ms Steele: The most obvious thing is the sort of geographical, topographical thing that you are at the end of the line (you have got only a 180-degree catchment), and that means that all those issues around transport make it much more difficult to develop land, even if the land is available. I also think there is an important revenue issue which I think BARDA have raised that this is not just about physical development or capital investment, it is about the on-going revenue needs of places that are both difficult geographically, in the sense that they have to deal with the sea, they have to deal with sea defences, and so on, but they are also difficult because they are often tourist places.

Q274 Dr Pugh: There are special funds for sea defences, are there not?

Ms Steele: The Environment Agency deals with flooding, and so on, and so, yes, there are special funds, but there are not special funds to recognise local authorities' additional burdens in seaside or coastal towns.

Q275 Dr Pugh: Are we talking about burdens on social services?

Ms Steele: Both. You could say the two examples would be a burden on social services, but the other would be a burden on the maintenance of the public realm because of visitor numbers, for example. It is a totally different experience for a local authority to try to deal with that effectively in a place which is just a straightforward residential area compared to a place that has high numbers of visitors.

Q276 Dr Pugh: Going back to the RDAs and their mission apropos coastal towns, there are two types of seaside resorts, and we can talk about them for the moment. Some seaside resorts have obviously had their best days and are on a path of gradual, but nonetheless identifiable, decline from which they will not really recover and go back to their former glory; others have prospects and can be regenerated. What should the RDAs do? Should they respond by addressing the needs of those in most immediate decline or should they put their money into those resorts that look like they have a burgeoning future ahead of them?

Ms Steele: I would like to say that all towns have some kind of future. Presumably what you are saying is a tourism future, a domestic future.

Q277 Dr Pugh: If I can give an example, a resort like New Brighton, on the other side of Liverpool, will never be what New Brighton was in the past when it had a pier and a boost of holiday-makers, et cetera, for very, very obvious reasons that I think people would accept. The question is what do you do there? Do you leave that alone on the grounds that there is no potential for the RDA, or do you say actually this is exactly the sort of place where you should be putting money in because, like a coalfield community or whatever, there is likely to be a lot of unemployment in that area?

Ms Steele: We have to recreate that place somehow, yes. One of the most obvious national strategic things is to look at all these places and say that not many of them are going to be about inward investment because they are at the end of the line in the sense of the country. They should all be about looking at what value is locked into that place, that town, and how can that be released. For example, in Hastings, where I am from, which would have been one of the ones where people said, "Oh, that has not got any future", some years ago, I do not think that is any longer true either for tourism or for home-grown enterprise development, which is the route they are heading down. Each town has to be dealt with on its own merits. We always would say that, but at the same time New Brighton, Hastings, all these places, I would suggest it would be good for the people who are responsible for developing strategies in those towns to spend time with each other, because they will gain ideas about new niches, new approaches, "How can we find a new future for this town?" I do not think we should have something that is only about tourism, the coast is not only about tourism, and the finding from the 2003 Sheffield Hallam Report was that domestic tourism has not collapsed in exactly the same way that we once thought.

Q278 Dr Pugh: The point I was trying to make really was that, if we have an area of industrial deprivation in the middle of a city, it is very rare that the Regional Development Agency say, "They will never get their car manufacturing base back. We will walk away from that", but that approach is not taken towards quite sizeable coastal communities. In a sense they are left to languish, are they not, by RDAs and by others as well?

Ms Steele: Absolutely, and that is why we need a much stronger focus, and obviously we welcome this inquiry because it is beginning to bring that focus to it. We must not let RDAs walk away from any town which still has people in it and has the serious problems that these places have.

Q279 Sir Paul Beresford: What about other quangos? You have touched on the Environment Agency and this old friend of mine, English Heritage. Do they help or are they getting away?

Ms Steele: I think there is some really exciting thinking going on in some of these agencies. I know the Environment Agency better than I know English Heritage. The Environment Agency is a huge piece of bureaucracy with a pretty dead culture in a lot of ways. This is my personal opinion. On the other hand, there are some people within it who are really going to make waves, as it were, who will really change this: because they are starting to think they could spend their flood defence money in ways which will contribute to regeneration. When people start to think like that, instead of thinking in terms of engineering for flood defences, when they start to think about how it can contribute, I certainly would not write either of those agencies off in any sense. They both have an important role to play.

Q280 Sir Paul Beresford: Would you keep them? One of the problems of regeneration in this country, because of its heritage, is sooner or later you bump up against a building that is absolutely worth it, and along comes English Heritage and says, "No, no, no, you have got to keep it."

Ms Steele: What would I say about that? I think that heritage-led regeneration can be extremely effective, even in places where you might not imagine it, like in Deptford, in South-east London, where I was from before I went to Hastings, and people should have the right to argue for that and really push for it. I do not think English Heritage stands in the way of regeneration. I think usually you can make the case that a building is really unusable in the future and eventually that case would be accepted.

Q281 Chair: The point you were making about the Environment Agency thinking imaginatively, I am trying to remember something that was in the papers a week or so ago about some salt marshes that were being created somewhere where English Heritage had broken down the old sea defences. You would not happen to know where that was, would you?

Ms Steele: I do not.

Q282 Chair: But that is obviously a good example.

Ms Steele: The Environment Agency is saying, "Our flood defences raise the value of this land. Let us get developers to recognise that and pay for part of that" - not pay for part of the flood defences but pay for regeneration on the back of that.

Q283 Chair: Can I go back to your parent department, the Department for Communities and Local Government. How effective do you think that has been thus far in tackling the needs of coastal towns?

Ms Steele: Not.

Q284 Chair: "Not", okay.

Ms Steele: I would say "not" because there is no national strategy, there is even no encouragement for RDAs to consider coastal towns and there is no understanding of how these big policy claims about HMOs or the benefit system or how any of those things impact on coastal towns. I have been involved in the ODPM for five years, in the sense I have been on the National Community Forum going on about these subjects taking along time.

Q285 Chair: I guess you would say that, in your experience, coastal towns suffer from a lack of government departmental co-operation, not to say, presumably, any government departmental interest.

Ms Steele: Yes.

Q286 Mr Betts: You seem to be saying that there are certain common characteristics of seaside towns. Should there, therefore, be a special approach by central government? Should it be central government led or should they be trying to shape and help other agencies and organisations to form their own strategy?

Ms Steele: I think that would be a bad reaction to something if it felt like it was just imposed from Westminster. I think that would be a problem. What I think the department can do really well is encourage what I was talking about, a national shared learning programme between all interests in coastal towns. The idea would be that you would start with that kind of shared learning, you would lead to a shared strategy and then you would debate the best way to address this funding-wise. I would not say at the moment that we have a clear answer to that. There are various different options. If a pot of money was available at some point, how would you do that? The way that I think seaside towns would react against would be the kind of LEGI (the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative), which is an example of an initiative by the DCLG where there is lots of money but very competitive, some winners but lots and lots of losers. Something like that, I think, would probably not help. What we are trying to do is draw a line round the coast and say, "This coast has something in common. It is very important to us as a nation. Let us support it over time." There are other examples, like the coalfields investment programme, which was much more a mixture of learning strategy and money. I am not saying that was perfect in any way, and we have things to learn from that, but that kind of mixture of those three things rather than just, "Here is some money. Who is going to bid for it?", which I do not think is a useful approach.

Q287 Mr Betts: There should be a national strategy of some kind built up from experiences?

Ms Steele: Yes, built up from experiences, and some of the people who have put into your inquiry as well, the networks and agencies as well as the towns themselves.

Q288 Mr Betts: In terms of what might be learnt coming towards that strategy from tourism, is there a sense in which trying to regenerate towns on the back of tourism has its down sides and lots of low-paid, low-skilled sometimes seasonal jobs?

Ms Steele: Yes. There are two problems. One is that tourism will never run a town by itself. It will never sustain a town on its own. It never did. That is one of the important things, that the towns that were most successful on tourism also had other industries, they had winter-based industries as well as summer bathing and so on. Tourism on its own is not going to be enough to maintain an economy, but the other thing is that seasonal and sessional work is becoming more and more common anyway, and that is why I said the benefit system needs to be considered in this because the benefit system is incapable of understanding seasonal and sessional work and it is one of the reasons that you end up with lots of people on incapacity benefit not even taking up the seasonal work opportunities and sessional work opportunities because, as soon as they do, they lose their benefit status, which means they lose their housing benefit, which means they are taking an enormous risk for a very small amount of pay. Until that system is reconsidered around sessional and seasonal work, that situation will remain and, therefore, that kind of tourism at least, which is probably the only kind we have got on offer, is not an effective, long-term answer on its own.

Chair: Thank you very much indeed.