Examination of Witnesses (Questions 141-159)
MR STEFAN
JANKOWSKI, MR
NIGEL BELLAMY,
MS JANET
WAGHORN AND
MR PAUL
TIPPLE
4 JULY 2006
Q141 Chair: Good afternoon. Would you
mind telling us who you are please?
Ms Waghorn: I am Janet Waghorn.
I am the Executive Director of East Kent Partnership.
Mr Tipple: I am Paul Tipple, Chairman
of the same body but also a private citizen.
Mr Bellamy: I am Nigel Bellamy,
the Vice Chair of Southport Partnership and I work in the voluntary
sector.
Mr Jankowski: Stefan Jankowski,
the Partnership Manager and Deputy Chairman.
Q142 John Cummings: I would like
to address this question to both sets of witnesses. Would you
tell the Committee whether you believe that you get adequate support
from the regional development agencies?
Mr Jankowski: Certainly in our
case we work very closely with the regional development agency
to develop a coherent and clear strategy for our town.
Q143 John Cummings: But the question
was, do you get adequate support from the regional development
agency?
Mr Jankowski: I would say yes,
we do, but, of course, as we always say, more would be even better.
They give us a fair crack of the whip.
Mr Tipple: That is our view. SEEDA
is the RDA but I would have to add that just as important is the
Government Office in terms of policy functions that they exercise
on behalf of central Government. That is just as valuable.
Q144 John Cummings: So do you get
adequate support from the Government Office?
Mr Tipple: Considerable.
Mr Jankowski: We certainly do.
Q145 John Cummings: Do you believe
that regional level is the most appropriate for co-ordination
of action on coastal towns?
Mr Tipple: It depends how you
want to define it. If you do it on the basis of an RDA's coverage
then no, it is not in the sense that from our perspective it is
too big an organisation with far too great a geographic area to
necessarily understand the particular sensibilities of somewhere
like East Kent. Where the SEEDA RDA has scored is in the creation
of what they call area investment frameworks, of which we are
one, which works through the local communities building up, in
our case, over three district authorities to articulate what the
needs of those communities are and to put in place not simply
the strategy but also the action plan over a period of 10 to 15
years as to how that will be delivered, and that enables the RDA
and all the other Government departments successfully to get behind
that with funding.
Q146 Dr Pugh: Is that a sub-regional
strategy?
Mr Tipple: Effectively.
Mr Jankowski: We sit within the
Merseyside City Region, which is a sub-regional strategy as well,
which brings up another set of tensions and we have to fight our
corner for that.
Q147 John Cummings: Are you successfully
fighting your corner?
Mr Jankowski: It is too soon to
say. The sub-regional strategies are still being written and the
funding and the allocation of resources are subject to lively
debate.
Q148 Anne Main: Are coastal towns
viewed too much within the context of tourism?
Mr Jankowski: Southport was built
for tourism, interestingly, in the 19th century. Its raison
d'etre is tourism. It is what the town understands best. It
has decided that, although there are additional areas it could
benefit from, tourism and regeneration through the enhanced tourism
model is where its future lies.
Mr Tipple: The traditional form
of tourism, no. Tourism is an important component, yes, of the
economies of the three districts I represent, but tourism is grossly
overrated in terms of the way Government departments approach
these areas and it is not really closely addressing the market.
The other aspect I would add is that tourism can be a part of
economic regeneration provided that the nature of the tourism
offer itself has a quality product behind it, and more often than
not in a lot of the coastal towns, as a result of dilapidation
and lack of investment over the decades, the quality of that product
is sadly lacking, which is why in the East Kent instance we are
looking at tourism, culture and leisure, those three components
coming together, and driving them forward in a way that improves
significantly the tourism product that people are looking for
in today's modern age.
Q149 Anne Main: Can I tease that
out a bit? Generally speaking the tourist sector is seasonal and
often characterised, as you have said, by low skill, low paid
jobs, a rather faded image, so how are you going to move away
from that, if you are going to move away from it? Are you going
to move away from tourism? Are you going to develop other economic
activities or are you going to enhance the product, and if you
are how are you going to do it?
Mr Tipple: We do both. In the
case of East Kent we conducted some important research that identified
which sectors over the next 20 years we would successfully be
able to attract, and in our case we are trying to exploit the
coastline and the heritage we have in a way that will attract
the marine and aviation industries, particularly at the hi-tech
end, to be able to locate close to the key sea ports we have,
and also we have an international airport in Kent which again
can be home to high technology companies which need to be co-located
to an operational airfield. We are also looking at inward investment
from the mainland as well as from beyond the EU in the sense of,
again, hi-tech industries coming from South Africa and Israel,
to name but two countries, which are expressly looking for locations
that are close to the continent of Europe, thus exploiting the
gateway potential but, for a variety of reasons, have difficulty
coping with the culture and temperament that is continental Europe.
They feel more comfortable working in East Kent.
Mr Jankowski: We have a classic
resource strategy which is based on the principle of a pristine
built, high-class environment, so a high quality physical structure
within the town, but our regeneration is firmly directed to sustainability
which is the bringing in of private sector investment. We believe
that we now have significant levels of private investment that
did not exist eight years ago.
Q150 Anne Main: So both of you are
drawing mostly on the private sector to drive this upgrade?
Mr Tipple: Yes.
Mr Jankowski: Yes.
Mr Tipple: At the end of the day
nothing will work unless we have sustainability but somebody will
make some money. That is a very crude position to take but frankly
if we are going to get the private sector they have got to see
that they can make something from it.
Q151 Mr Betts: What do you think
are still perhaps the biggest barriers you are facing for successful
regeneration and where you have been successful what have been
the key elements to that?
Mr Bellamy: The public realm is
important. I think you have to look at the social and community
side of it as well. I think that was touched on in the last bit
of evidence. Whilst unemployment is relatively low in Southport
we have to remember that these industries predominantly produce
low paid, low skill jobs, and the other dominant industries I
think are care industries, which are the same, and that inevitably
means we lose a lot of young people who go off to look for careers,
so there is a gap within the labour market that is fairly noticeable.
In terms of those who are left, there is perceived to be a lack
of opportunity because of that skills gap and that needs to be
addressed. There is also the fact that, although we are doing
our best to even out the tourism trade, the fact that there are
peaks in the season does affect people's attitude to education
and the college. People drop out as they are offered more hours,
et cetera. You have got those social factors that need to be addressed
hand in hand or otherwise you will not get a holistic approach
that is owned by the community and the town as a whole. I think
those have been recognised over the years as the three sectors
that have worked closely together.
Ms Waghorn: Building on that,
we have also got to support the public realm. We have just had
a study done in Margate about tourism and the biggest thing it
came out with was, forget the tourism product unless you improve
your public realm locally. Otherwise you can ask for people to
come and visit and tell them it is a good place to be and you
might as well forget the whole thing. The public realm is a real
thing and I would support everything that has been said about
that. I would also cite accessibility and infrastructure: to be
able to get in and out of places in a reasonable time and to be
able to visit. One of the things that is unique about some of
the things we have done is that it is about the links we have
with the higher education and further education sector and getting
them to develop new courses and new products that can train local
people in new skills. In that I am thinking around the cultural
developments that we are trying to achieve and new industries
that we are trying to set up locally. They have got some bespoke
courses now that they are putting on in the local area for local
people and we have now got an HE campus in the Thanet area to
take that on and let people really take on the education element
and that is working.
Q152 Mr Betts: Would each of you
like to say what is the biggest success story you have had so
far which others might be able to learn from?
Mr Bellamy: I think it is the
fact that we started as a partnership with an SRB and we have
kept that together despite the fact that the main tranche of money
that came next was on the infrastructure side. While in the last
three or four years things have been in separate pots we have
managed to the partnership together and retain the fact that we
still talk about issues like housing problems with tourism deliverers,
et cetera. I think our greatest success is the fact that partnership
has remained intact.
Mr Tipple: From my perspective
I would say it is the buy-in by all the stakeholders, be they
public sector, private sector, community or the voluntary sector.
They are all behind the strategy, they have all been involved
in its conception, they have tracked it through at every stage
and there is total transparency across the piste. Against that
backdrop the most tangible form of progress has been in the cross-boundary
order working, therefore, how communities work with communities
which might be 20 miles away in order to promote the area as a
whole and not necessarily their particular destination or location.
That has proved an enormously helpful tool in mobilising people.
There is a wealth of talent out there, as I am sure you will appreciate,
particularly in the voluntary sector. If you can mobilise that,
which I like to think we have been successful in doing, it really
does make an impact.
Q153 Mr Betts: Can I pick up on the
point about housing? Would you want more affordable housing in
your area? Would that enable you to retain some of the young people
who would otherwise leave or is there a danger that if you provide
it you end up attracting people from elsewhere, as one or two
witnesses have said, who simply come because it is a nice place
to live on their benefits?
Mr Bellamy: The evidence we have
is that in the main people who come can afford the houses that
are there but we have seen a huge rise in house prices in the
last three or four years. If you bear in mind that you have a
lot of young people on minimum wage jobs who are earning £10,000
a year and the starter flats are £100,000, there is no hope
for them to be able to see a start in living in that economy,
so they are going to move away to get jobs in higher paid areas.
We have done a lot of research which has shown that the unit cost
for builders is wrong because it is done on a sector basis rather
than on a Southport basis and equally the numbers we are allowed
to build are just not keeping pace with the needs that we have
within the town. One of the things that has been successful has
been a lot of private retirement flats but they are very expensive.
We meet a lot of young people who are moving away because they
simply cannot get jobs that will enable them to get on the mortgage
ladder and in the private rented sector there are issues about
quality and safety. We have done a lot of work through the SRB
but we continue to struggle with that.
Mr Jankowski: There is additional
pressure now which is probably an outcome of economic success
with the influx of migrant workers who are tending to take some
of the lower priced rental accommodation. Southport has a disproportionately
high level of private rented accommodation. We are now seeing
problems in the housing market that have been brought about through
the influx of migrant worker labour.
Mr Tipple: We want a balanced
approach. If you look at the whole of East Kent it is characterised
by fairly affluent Canterbury and its region and you look at the
coastal areas, characterised by, again, quite affluent wards living
cheek by jowl with seriously deprived areas, so it is a mix, I
think, of affordable housing, particularly linked to key workers,
and there are schemes now where certain companies have actively
been promoting that with some success. It is looking at those
properties that traditionally have been broken up into however
many apartments and trying to restore them so that they become
family units again; in other words, trying to reflect in your
housing stock the need to stabilise the determinants in the local
population.
Q154 Mr Betts: If I can turn to Southport,
is the evening economy a major player for you?
Mr Jankowski: We have an evening
economy strategy which we look at and try and drive forward. The
evening economy is very difficult in our town. It is run by small
businesses who perhaps compete on price in terms of the night
time economy offer. We have issues about the cultural offer in
terms of theatre and other things for a broader look at the demographic
in our evening economy, but we are aware of the issues and are
working on them.
Q155 Alison Seabeck: Can I ask Southport,
we have looked at the information in your Classic Resort strategy,
and obviously you in turn have looked at how that relates to what
is going on in some European areas. Earlier today we talked about
issues around sustainability and growing private sector investment.
Is that what has driven the European comparisons that you have
looked at? Was that private sector investment in those European
towns?
Mr Jankowski: When we took our
exemplars of successful European resorts, it was to try and identify
what makes a classically good resort. Why do you get towns of
similar scale to Southport with quite powerful visitor economies
like some of the ones in Europe? We wanted to look outside the
UK model of resort towns to see what was the best practice Europe-wide.
Q156 Alison Seabeck: But did you
pick up evidence to support your view that private sector investment
is the most powerful driver as opposed to perhaps French resorts
drawing in funding from local or central government?
Mr Jankowski: Yes, there is that
and the fact that in the European resorts the wage rates and the
career progressions tend to be better than in the UK.
Q157 Alison Seabeck: What would you
put that down to?
Mr Bellamy: It is the educational
structure, I think. We have struggled quite a lot with the college
to get them to re-gear their day-release programmes. It is very
difficult. They do courses as if it is a school curriculum and
people cannot just get a straight day off in the way they want
to and that makes it difficult for both the students and the employers.
The other thing is maintaining a progression that they can keep
in-house. We need to do work with the private providers and make
them not just give their time up but also pay them work-based
training because part of the classic resort is also about having
a high quality service offer.
Q158 Alison Seabeck: And that is
clearly evidenced from the European example?
Mr Bellamy: Yes.
Q159 Dr Pugh: What you are saying is
that in Europe tourism is treated as an industry, as a career,
something that needs developing, but in a lot of our seaside resorts
people just regard tourism as a way of getting cheap labour to
make a fast profit and get on kind of thing?
Mr Jankowski: We still suffer
from being seen as somewhere where people will retire and say,
"I will open a boarding house in Southport. There can't be
much to it", and you see them in Sainsbury's buying the food
for their guests and you think, "Oh, dear me". That
is part of the problem.
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