Memorandum by the Southport Partnership
(CT 17)
1. INTRODUCTION
The Southport Partnership has been an integral
part of the regeneration of the resort of Southport for over eight
years. It is the conduit through which some £80 million of
investment in Southport has been supported. It has had direct
responsibility for both Regional Development Agency monies and
for ERDF monies via its current Action Plan.
The Partnership has a small executive team managed
by a 15 person Board consisting of five community representatives,
five private sector stakeholders and five public sector representatives.
Because the Partnership originally was initially
focused on social and economic improvements using SRB funding
and is now involved with major public realm schemes using ERDF
and NWDA monies it has developed a very sophisticated understanding
of the inter relationships between all the various elements needed
to make a coastal town more successful and to engender a long
term sustainable improvement in investment and growth.
2. EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
Ten years ago Southport was an almost typical
example of a coastal town in long, slow, shabby and genteel decline.
Lack of investment and maintenance had damaged private sector
confidence and the town was looking tired. It had lost competitive
advantage.
Over the last 10 years this situation has been
turned around. Briefly, a new sea wall unlocked the investment
potential of our seafront, we renovated the pier, built a new
bridge, brought in business and community support schemes and
are continuing to improve our town through an Action Plan which
included major public realm improvements and the improvements
to our conference and hotel offers.
We have maximised the opportunities given to
us by Objective One and the Government Office for the North West
and have matched these monies wherever possible with North West
Development Agency resources and those of Sefton Council, which
has led to a significant boost in private sector confidence and
investment.
The key concerns now facing the coastal town
of Southport are:
— Encouraging and maintaining private
sector confidence and investment.
— Having a skilled work force &
ensuring that educational attainment is driven to at least standard
UK levels.
— Affordable housing and accommodation,
ensuring that we are a sustainable community.
— Increasing the scale of cultural
investment.
— Integrating matters of health and
human well-being more effectively into overall strategies.
— Bringing in sufficiently high service
standards to the tourism sector which has a tradition of being
dominated by the small owner/manager scale of business.
— Understanding the impact of migrant
workers on our economy and community relations.
— Recognise that the leisure/tourist
sector has an enormous (and growing) impact on GDP and as such
needs more targeted political support.
There is a huge library of strategies and studies
to further the statements made in this submission but we have
decided to aim for readability and to focus on the key issues
rather than including tables and data.
3. PRIVATE SECTOR
CONFIDENCE AND
INVESTMENT
Coastal towns with problems are too easily characterised
as resorts with ageing stocks of hotels, ageing populations and
low levels of investment. They will only attract new investment
when they can demonstrate to the private sector that there are
good returns for any investment they make (concomitant with risk).
Coastal towns are generally denied access to
major sectors of the economy—Southport has seen a significant
decline in manufacturing, its lack of Motorway access removes
it from the warehousing/logistics sector. Southport is by its
very nature, faced with both natural barriers and opportunities.
It was built as a private sector speculation to service the cities
of Manchester and Liverpool and all the cotton and mining towns
of Lancashire. This gives it an enormous catchment population
of around 10 million within a two hour drive-time.
However if there are structural barriers to
our access to the 20th century's industries there are real reasons
for optimism in the 21st. Coastal towns can be very pleasant places
to live and work. New IT based industries can be located anywhere,
the information highway is of equal importance to the motorway.
Resort towns can also take advantage of the
changing holiday market—just as they lost out to the package
holiday boom they can now gain ground in the second and third
holiday market (the week away or long week-end break). This market
is steadily growing, Southport hotel rack rates are now at a premium
on a week-end rather than during the Monday to Friday period.
This reflects the lack of commercial travelling that now is drawn
to Southport.
The retail sector has seen changes. Southport's
second biggest trading day is now Sunday—again this is contrary
to the patterns expected in more central urban areas.
Hotel stock and services are generally poor
and reflect the decades of under investment. Southport is not
alone in this, Blackpool being an even bigger example. Customers
now expect better standards in both the physical state of their
hotels and the quality of service. The opportunity is opening
up for good quality 3 and 4 star hotels to be built and they will
have first call on the customers. The commercial traveller type
client is, in Southport's case, being replaced by the visitor
and the conference delegate.
This change will lead to the demise of a significant
number of the small hotels in the town over the next 20 years—bringing
with it a (admittedly worst case) scenario of having a town centre
with a large number of failed hotels converted into sub-standard
Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO's).
Coastal towns future's lie in tourism investment,
workforce and management skills and their promotion as a great
place to live and work (as opposed to just visit). In addition
they need to attract investment from the new IT and Web based
industries on the basis that the lifestyle offered by a coastal
town is a viable alternative to a more urban centres such as the
cities of Liverpool and Manchester.
Southport has seen, through the public sector
investment programmes, a return of private sector confidence with
major investments beginning to be made without public sector grants.
The fragility or otherwise of this confidence is not yet understood
and there is still a substantial need for ongoing funding in areas
where the private sector is reluctant or unable to engage eg investment
in cultural assets and in key public spaces such as Lord Street
"the finest shopping boulevard in the UK".
4. A SKILLED
WORKFORCE
Coastal towns are traditionally seen as visitor
destinations with a plethora of jobs in the leisure/retail/caring
sectors. These are immediately characterised as low paid and unchallenging
with little scope for personal development and as such do not
attract the best talent.
There is a failure of substantial parts of these
industries to engage in the long term process of training and
improvement of staff skills (again a reflection of the negative
attitude many owner-managed businesses have towards training).
Southport has a strategy called the "Classic
Resort". In developing the strategy exemplars have been given.
Interestingly, the most potent comparisons are not with UK coastal
towns but with the classic resort towns in Europe, eg Deauville,
Le Touquet, Baden Baden.
Looking at these towns and their workforces
reinforces the view that they [our European cousins] take these
sectors far more seriously, they see employment in the service
sector as a real profession and employers see real value and returns
in training staff to high standards.
There is a strong belief that to develop our
workforce of the future we need to be promoting the careers and
opportunities open in our local economy at an earlier stage in
the education cycle. Like all such issues we cannot promote a
positive attitude unless the opportunities presented are real.
This then turns full circle back to the attitude of the service
sector employers to training and staff development.
5. MIGRANT WORKERS
In Southport over 600 new jobs have been created
(with more to come) over the last eight years in the leisure/retail
sectors. We (the Southport Partnership) were very concerned that,
in a period of structural full employment, we would be unable
to fill the vacancies. We investigated options for enabling areas
like Bootle with its high levels of unemployment accessing the
new jobs to little effect.
The private sector has solved the problem by
the employment of migrant workers. The migrants have been successful
in getting these jobs because they are perceived as being better
motivated and effective employees than those available in the
workless resident pool in Southport.
This means that current workless residents have
been presented with an additional barrier to employment and will
therefore need more training than previously to compete in the
market.
Job Centre+ have reported that they have seen
over 400 jobs "disappear" from their books—they
believe this is because employers are now directly hiring migrant
workers.
We are currently engaged with Sefton MBC in
carrying out a detailed study of the impact of migrant workers
on Sefton and on Southport in particular. This piece of work will
be completed in the first half of 2006.
6. HOUSING AND
ACCOMMODATION
Coastal towns are often (and it is certainly
the case in Southport) a mix of expensive private sector houses,
often occupied by retirees, a mix of mid range private ownership
properties, flats, and HMO's.
Southport is a housing "hot spot".
Affordable housing for our workforce is becoming more and more
limited, particularly for people engaged in our traditional sectors.
Southport has only a small stock of public sector
housing which means that a lot of private sector housing is subject
to market forces. The influx of migrant workers has meant that
the private sector can obtain higher than previous income levels
which impacts on the amount of affordable rental properties available
to local residents.
In the longer term we face the combined problems
of a lack of affordable housing for our workforce and a (probably
shorter term) dependency on migrant labour, yet we need to sustain
both economic growth and a cohesive community
The Southport Housing Strategy Forum (made up
of the LA, 7 Housing Associations and other engaged bodies, including
the Partnership) is carrying out detailed research and planning
further submissions to the Housing Corporation targeted at bringing
resources to bear on this problem.
7. HEALTH MATTERS
Southport has a larger proportion of people
aged 45 and over than for England as a whole. The increasing numbers
of older members of the community will mean a rising prevalence
of long-term conditions such as heart disease and dementia and
health and social services need to take this into account.
The projected decrease in people of working
age is critical in terms of providing community support and the
economic well-being of the area. In 2003 there are 58 dependents
for every 100 people of working age. This is projected to change
to 76 dependents for every 100 potentially economically active
people in 2028.
Employment and the type and quality of the work
has a significant impact on long term health needs. If we can
shift the status and remuneration levels in the resort's jobs
we will see a significant reduction in health problems.
The resort attracts seasonal and migrant workers
with their own health and social needs and we need to engage with
these hard-to-reach groups in order to maintain a proper balance
between health needs and resources.
In coastal towns there is an additional requirement
on health resources. For example, Southport has a population of
circa 90,000. but has over 6 million visitors per year and can
have hundreds of thousands of visitors for one-off events and
festivals. There is a need to take this into account when resourcing
coastal resort towns. The walk-in centres so familiar from holidays
to the Med are needed in towns such as Southport.
8. GEOGRAPHY
Southport, like most coastal towns, are destinations
at the end of the line. They rarely benefit from passing through
traffic and as such can be poorly served by rail and road routes.
Infrastructure improvements are needed to make
them easily reachable for the short holiday/day visitor market.
A direct and efficient train link from the catchment areas to
the coastal resort will re-open the market.
9. RETAIL
The growth of shopping malls of enormous scale
and with highly convenient access are having a deleterious effect
on the retail offer in Southport. We are steadily slipping down
the retail league tables in terms of rental rates and in terms
of the breadth of retail offer.
Southport has always prided itself on the range
of quality independent retailers—we are not "any cloned
high street, anywhere". One of the legacies of this is that
our retail units are by and large too small to interest major
chain stores. There is a real need to implement a retail strategy
that changes this situation.
Southport has a fine retail Boulevard—Lord
Street, with canopied shops along one side of its tree lined one
mile length and fine gardens on the other. However it needs to
be competitive with other retail centres to maintain its offer
of both being a seaside resort destination and a quality retail
centre.
There needs to be put in place a clear strategy
of encouraging the investment by quality brands and chains whilst
balancing this with the specialist shops that separate our offer
from the norm.
10. HERITAGE
AND CULTURE
Like most coastal towns Southport has inherited
some significant (and in their day expensive and leading edge)
buildings and open spaces, such as civic buildings, parks and
marine lakes.
Whilst it has proved relatively straightforward
to approach funding agencies for some heritage sites it can be
highly problematic for others. In Southport's case we have successfully
pursued Heritage Lottery and European funds for some improvements
but where a key asset falls outside the targets set either by
the EU or the UK government then severe problems arise. In Southport's
case we are bringing about significant regeneration improvements
to our seafront but they surround a 48 hectare lake ( the largest
man made marine lake in the UK) which is in dire need of improvement.
It is silted, unkempt in many places and no longer the asset it
was when our Victorian forbearers developed it for the town.
Because the outputs do not fit those required
by either ERDF or the NWDA we cannot access sufficient funds to
do the necessary remedial works. Marine Lakes and sea fronts with
promenades, piers and sea walls are what make UK coastal towns
different, to build some of these assets from new would cost astronomical
sums but to bring the existing structures up to an acceptable
condition is entirely feasible.
Equally, there are civic buildings which house
significant cultural assets, libraries, museums, art galleries
and theatres. Given the geography of coastal towns they are often
isolated from regional cultural centres. In Southport's case one
has to go to the cities of Preston, Manchester or Liverpool to
enjoy the best cultural offers. However, cultural assets serve
not only their local communities but also the visitor. All too
often they are the missing piece in the offer of coastal towns—and
one only has to look at the Tate at St Ives to see the impact
such assets can have on a coastal town.
Southport's art gallery, theatre and library
are all in desperate need of remodelling, refurbishing and development.
The local Council has stoically maintained its acquisitions budget
throughout the years of cut-backs, but it faces real problems
over the quality, access to and content of its exhibition and
performance spaces.
11. WHAT WORKS
AND WHAT
DOESN'T
11.1 Take a long term view
In Southport we have successfully addressed
some of the key social issues, formalising community and voluntary
sector engagement, increasing community engagement in decision
making whilst substantially lacking progress in other areas, eg
the quality and availability of private sector housing. It is
interesting to note that in 1895 it was reported that affordable
housing was a problem for the local workers—as it still
is today.
11.2 Building confidence
The Objective One programme for Merseyside gave
us a one-off chance to invest public monies in the pursuit of
private sector investor confidence. We have always understood
that sustainability was the key to maximising the benefits on
offer from the ERDF and ESF up to 2008. Regeneration works most
effectively when the investment is made in towns and communities
where a foundation of entrepreneurial skills already exist.
The use of public monies to engender a sea-change
in private sector investor confidence has been a considerable
success. The very visible physical improvements have led to a
significant increase in private sector investment, with new shopping
parks, apartments, leisure offers and hotels all either being
built or demonstrating a serious level of commitment at the time
of writing.
However, it has to be noted that Southport is
an entrepreneurial town—it has a clear understanding that
it is betting its future largely on the visitor/tourist segment
of the economy, which is sensible since this is the segment of
the economy it has the most experience of
11.3 Partnership Working
Real and effective partnership working is one
of the cornerstones of our success. Influential members of the
community, public and private sectors—real stakeholders
in the town's future—can add value to the process by bringing
their skills and experiences to bear on dealing with both the
opportunities and the problems that regenerating a coastal town
throws up.
The Southport Partnership has been in existence
for over eight years through successive regeneration programmes
and this long term stability has paid dividends in enabling the
Board to keep a whole range of measures and interventions on target.
The Partnership has always used other agencies
to deliver its programmes—thus avoiding a bloated executive
team and making transition from programme to programme easier
and (critically) easier to fund.
Good partnership working engenders itself in
others, Local Authority departments have readily developed a much
closer liaison with each other to work at delivering projects
on a team basis—often across traditional internal barriers.
12. WHAT DOESN'T
WORK
12.1 Need for transparency in funding
Lack of clarity from Regional Development Agencies
as far as their investment commitments are concerned. To change
the future path of a town takes time and money. In our experience
it is clear that a 10-15 year strategy is the minimum needed to
bring real change. Whilst it is impossible for any RDA to make
a commitment over that long a term, a clearly funded plan of investment
for the first five years of the strategy would enable towns to
plan effectively.
This investment commitment must be made transparently—lets
have the pain up front and work with what we know we will get
rather than a "jam tomorrow" approach.
AND FINALLY
This submission to the Coastal Towns Inquiry
has been made by the Southport Partnership because we believe
our extensive (and successful) experience in playing our part
in revitalising Southport may be of use to the ODPM in its deliberations.
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