Select Committee on Communities and Local Government Committee Minutes of Evidence


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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