Examination of Witnesses (Questions 88-99)
PROFESSOR STEVE
FOTHERGILL
4 JULY 2006
Q88 Chair: Welcome to this session on
coastal towns, Professor Fothergill. Can I start by asking you
what prompted you to carry out your study on seaside towns, whether
you think they have a future and, if so, what it is?
Professor Fothergill: There are
rather a lot of questions there. Let us take the origins of this
particular study. I am an academic who has worked on British urban
and economic development issues for many years in many different
contexts, not least, for example, in the context of the coalfields,
which one or two of your colleagues around the table know that
I am fairly heavily engaged with, but this particular study was
driven by pure old-fashioned academic curiosity in the sense that
very little was really understood about the dynamics of Britain's
seaside towns, the economy of the seaside towns, and, at least
in theory, it seemed to me we might be looking at a serious problem
in that many of the towns have quite high unemployment compared
to neighbouring areas, and we all know that many people now do
not go for their holidays in British seaside towns, they go abroad,
and so I wanted to pick apart what was going on, and I think we
have been able to get some way in terms of answering that question.
Q89 Chair: Does that then lead you
to think that there is a future for seaside towns and is there
a future or a lot of futures?
Professor Fothergill: I think
what we thought we might find was that seaside towns had entered
a spiral of decline rather similar to some old industrial areas
and that that would be marked by loss of employment, particularly
in the tourist sector, and that, in turn, would trigger further
job losses in the local economy, out-migration of population,
et cetera, et cetera. What we actually found was the opposite
of that, which is that there is strong growth in employment and
in population in seaside towns. That is not to say that they are
all without problems, but this is a very different scenario to
that which you find in some of the old industrial areas.
Q90 Chair: Is the population growth
(so the in-migration) true of all coastal towns?
Professor Fothergill: The overwhelming
majority, yes. We looked at data from the beginning of the seventies
right through to the beginning of the present decade and there
are one or two slow growers admittedly, I think there are probably
a couple which have not shown growth, but the average growth across
the 43 principal seaside towns in the working age population is
in excess of 20% over that 30-year period; so this not a situation
like the old coalfields.
Q91 Chair: Before I let my colleague
in, can I ask you to say in what sense you think that seaside
towns are problem areas?
Professor Fothergill: As I said
a moment ago, I think in theory we thought we were looking at
a problem. In practice, the problem that we have found is that
to keep balanced in the labour market of the seaside towns, the
economy of the seaside towns has got to grow very quickly. The
seaside towns are attracting large numbers of in-migrants from
other parts of the country. To avoid that feeding through to unemployment,
you have got to keep employment in the towns growing quickly,
much quicker indeed than the national average, and, in fact, there
are a number of seaside towns where the balance between the available
supply of labour and the supply of jobs is still seriously out
of kilter and there is quite a lot of unemployment, either visible
unemployment or hidden unemployment still.
Q92 Anne Main: Can I ask you about
the correlation between employment and the demographic needs of
the people that are moving in. Are you finding they are a certain
age group and fit the right skill-sets? Has the employment which
is growing been matched by the people who are coming in or are
they coming in for different reasons, such as to retire, or trade
down, or whatever else you might suggest—quality of life
issues?
Professor Fothergill: There is
undoubtedly an inflow of people over retirement age, but what
we were documenting is that even among people of working age there
is a inflow from other areas, and it is an inflow particularly
of people, let us say, in the second half of their working lives—from
35, 40 upwards—and amongst those that we did interview (and
they were only a subset obviously), residential preference, the
desire to be living in a seaside town, seems to be the driving
factor rather than necessarily it all being driven by the fact,
"Oh, there was a job there, therefore I moved to a seaside
town." It is people wanting to live in these towns because
they are attractive places to live.
Q93 Anne Main: What is the employment
that is growing then: servicing those people?
Professor Fothergill: The employment
growth in seaside towns has been surprisingly broad based. One
of the things that we had expected to find was that those sectors
most closely linked to tourism would be on the slide. In fact
that is not the case, they are surprisingly robust, which tells
us that the tourist industry is surprisingly robust, but even
beyond that there is quite broad-based growth, in large parts
of the service sector particularly, in seaside towns.
Q94 John Cummings: Did you do any
specific research in relation to the unique circumstances which
prevail in the likes of Seaham in County Durham, Sunderland and
South Shields. I mention more specifically that Seaham had three
working collieries, Sunderland had one and South Shields had one.
I thought you were looking at whole of the United Kingdom?
Professor Fothergill: John, you
will know in many other contexts I have done a lot of research
on the former mining communities. The particular project I am
dealing with, seaside towns, dealt just with what we call the
43 principal seaside resorts around the country, which actually
in the north-east, I have to confess, did not include the places
you have just mentioned. It did include Whitley Bay, it did include
Whitby and Scarborough but I am afraid not Sunderland, Seaham
or South Shields.
Q95 John Cummings: Why, given your
particular interest is in mining areas?
Professor Fothergill: This was
not an attempt to monitor the economic change around the whole
coastline; this was a project that was trying to look at what
had happened to seaside resorts, not all coastal areas. We were
concentrating on the places where the tourist industry was or
had been a dominant component of the overall economy.
Q96 John Cummings: So there might
be a further report in the future?
Professor Fothergill: I can point
you in the direction of plenty of work I have done on the coalfield
economy.
Q97 Chair: Would it be possible for
you to say, given the amount of work you have done on coalfield
communities, whether the coastal coalfield communities would share
characteristics with the coastal resort towns that you have studied
in that particular project?
Professor Fothergill: I do not
think I have ever disaggregated the coalfields to look specifically
at coastal coalfield communities, so perhaps I had better not
shoot from the hip on that one.
Q98 John Cummings: The research is
entitled "the seaside economy" not "seaside resorts",
Stephen.
Professor Fothergill: But if you
look more carefully, that is the strapline, the seaside economy.
If you look more carefully, it is clearly saying this is about
seaside resorts.
Chair: We understand that.
Q99 Alison Seabeck: You talked about
employment growth across a lot of seaside towns and areas, is
it largely low-paid employment? I am talking about outside of
the tourist industry specifically here. You have people moving
into the care sector, for example, because you have a very large
elderly population. Was that evidenced or were there places like
Butlins where you can have some really quite high paid jobs and
was there a reason for that?
Professor Fothergill: I have got
to say, if there is one weakness in the particular research we
have done, it is that we have not looked enough at the quality
of jobs. I could not comment on pay. What I can comment on is
the full-time/part-time split. What we did observe is that there
has been growth in both full-time and part-time employment in
seaside towns and jobs for both men and women. On the other hand,
what we also note is that the disproportionate share of the overall
total of jobs in seaside towns are part-time, and that obviously
raises worries about what the implications are for household incomes
and so on. So, there clearly is an issue, which I think you are
getting at, but beyond those simple statements on full-time/part-time
I cannot really elaborate.
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