Examination of Witness (Questions 280-288)
MS JESS
STEELE
11 JULY 2006
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.
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