Examination of Witnesses (Questions 520-529)
MR PHIL
WOOLAS MP
24 OCTOBER 2006
Q520 Mr Hands: I guess my question
is that instead of changing the formulae you should have a more
frequent assessment of the data which goes into the formulae to
reflect Britain changing. This is moving slightly away from coastal
towns but coastal towns are visibly affected by this. You should
have the data updated more often than every three years.
Mr Woolas: We use the projected
population for each year, and therefore that does not change,
even within the three-year settlement.
Q521 Mr Hands: Then to reduce the
lag time I guess.
Mr Woolas: Whatever one does with
the formula there are losers as well as gainers until you have
to strike a balance in that. My own view—and I have looked
at this personally in some depth, as have our statisticians and
policy officials—is that we have the balance as right as
is possible in the system we have. The population fluctuations
in two types of areas, coastal towns as a result of seasonal labour
as well as the immigrant point you make and student towns where
there are dramatic shifts in population to coincide with college
and university term times, present a particular challenge in the
funding formulae because as well as how frequently one refreshes,
there is also the question of the point at which you measure and
this is one of the challenges for the statisticians. If you take
a measurement of students in August you well get a different figure
than you will if you take it in December and similarly with the
coastal towns. I appreciate that is playing off the point about
immigration; I am sorry if I am diverting you. It is something
we have looked at and if one examines the statement to the House
on the RSG settlement in December of last year, that point is
specifically addressed and indeed I think some Members asked questions
about it.
Q522 Dr Pugh: In the Government's
own memorandum they say "...the Government has not undertaken
any large scale research in recent years into the problems facing
coastal towns", which is why I am delighted to hear that
your Department has had a summit on the issue. Do you think the
absence of research is a real deficiency in terms of teasing out
what are the generic problems of coastal resorts or whether in
fact they do have generic problems? Is there scope for further
research or do we have a known phenomenon with obvious solutions?
Mr Woolas: I think there is. It
is a personal view and I shall tell you why I think there is.
I think that there is, because what is happening in towns and
cities around the country through the better joining up of financing,
the better ability that councils now have to work with other government
agencies, to work with the private sector and the voluntary sector
in producing strategies for their towns and cities and indeed
counties through the sustainable communities plans, through economic
regeneration plans, indeed through the local development framework
planning documents, that greater freedom of flexibility that local
areas have, their attempts to re-invent their economies, is a
common theme throughout the country, but is particularly sharp
in coastal towns where there has been and is a heavy dependency
on the tourism industry, coastal towns where there has been a
heavy dependency on fishing and coastal towns where the port is
the economic raison d'etre. In order to better inform those
strategies more research has to be done and in some cases outside
the big cities their capacity to do that research is not as great
as everyone would desire. The regional development agencies in
some instances can help fill that gap. I think particularly of
the South East strategic priorities for their coastal area—which
includes two `Diamonds for Investment and Growth' areas. These
are set out in the South East Regional Economic Strategy. I do
not know whether you have come across that yet. That is a good
example. If you look at the South West Regional Development Agency
economic plan, which recognises the sub-regional differences,
that has been a great, great help. In all honesty, the answer
to your question is yes.
Q523 Dr Pugh: In order to benefit
from research and get results we obviously require integrated
policy across the piece. We have been much tasked with the problem
of how you get policy properly integrated and unified and a common
answer we have had this afternoon is to say that it is done at
the RDA level. Then we always ask what happens at central government
level and how far the efforts of central government departments
are coordinated. The DCLG has a series of cross-cutting responsibilities,
the DCMS is responsible for tourism, Defra are described in your
memorandum as having the lead responsibility for coastal policy
and the RDAs, who sew it together on a regional basis, are answerable
to the DTI. You can see the difficulty we have here in understanding
how, if there is a common view about how things are to be progressed,
they are to be progressed at the central government level as well
as through regional level.
Mr Woolas: What we attempt to
do as part of the enhanced policy, again through changes in the
Department's function, is to become better at what we describe
as place-making. Those economic regeneration strategies, which
are multifarious, are fundamentally bottom-up. They are fundamentally
about empowering local councils and their partners to lead economic
regeneration. What we do through multi-area agreements as they
emerge, through sub-regional strategies of RDAs and indeed working
with Government Office, is to make sure that those strategies
are complementary; a point the Committee considered last week
in your deliberations on regional policy. What seems to be common
through the coastal towns is a greater emphasis, apart obviously
from the fishing and maritime industries which are inherent in
coastal towns, not just on tourism but on culture as a vehicle
of regeneration itself. Therefore the relationships become a bit
more complex. The tourism may be a regional or a sub-regional
as well as a local offer; the culture may be specific to a particular
town or cultural city. We think that the building block approach,
the bottom-up approach is the right approach. I am confident that
the Department has or is obtaining a good understanding of each
strategy in each area. Not that we can dictate the policy but
so that we can facilitate it, acting as what we describe in the
Department as a junction box between the local area and the regional
and national strategy. May I just give one example to illustrate
my point, which is a very powerful example and relates to Torbay.
Torbay are trying to re-invent and re-engineer their tourism offer
to one of the most important domestic tourist destinations in
the country. Torbay is made up of three towns essentially, one
of them being Brixham, the second highest fishing port by value
in the United Kingdom.
Q524 Mr Hands: By value of what?
Mr Woolas: Fish sold. The quantity
is not great but the crabs are more expensive than the haddock;
in fact I am told the Brixham crab is now a world-renowned dish.
The point is that Defra's fishing investment grants looked at
particular bids, particular projects proposed by local areas all
round the coast. The particular one in Brixham, although only
£2 million of bid, was a central part of their regeneration
strategy of the waterfront including a £100-plus million
private sector development and was a central part of their job
creation and educational strategy building around the fishing
industry, restaurant trading, catering, fishing, engineering,
boat building and so on. So the £2 million, although a small
amount of money if looked at exclusively as a fishing project,
would have had various merits over other bids, but looked at as
part of a regeneration strategy became much more important and
by working with Defra, Defra of course recognised that point and
were able to facilitate that particular grant, giving the taxpayer
essentially much better value for money and giving Torbay a real
opportunity. There are similar examples elsewhere.
Q525 Dr Pugh: So a scenario we fear,
which is somebody looking at their fish and the DCMS doing something
different with it vis-a"-vis the hotels and not talking to
one another and not colluding at any government level, is a scenario
which we wrongly fear because it just does not happen.
Mr Woolas: I think it is a scenario
every elected Member of Parliament is very familiar with and that
understanding is what the Department for Communities is attempting
to act as a facilitator of. The key weapon in that, as our memorandum
points out, is the local area agreement. Again in the case of
Torbay, their further education college is a major partner of
the local strategic partnership and they have a very innovative
principal. Because that strategy has been drawn up locally, the
partnership is able to facilitate that, with our help, across
Whitehall. So their information to the DfES or in that case the
Learning and Skills Council was part of that and was successful.
Q526 Anne Main: In terms of partnership
and communication, I just feel that the picture you have painted,
which sounds absolutely admirable, is not exactly the picture
we were given by the Minister of State for Industry and the Regions
when she gave us a very frank answer that no, they were not good
enough and yes, they needed to do better. Would you endorse that
view or would you say that your view, which seems to be a little
rosier, is more the accurate picture?
Mr Woolas: One can always do better.
The local area agreement process is very early in its life. We
are only in year two. Every area in England will have an LAA up
and running by 1 April next year, so there are areas where it
is too early. Conceptually, if one tries to join up strategies
from Whitehall, I do not think personally you will ever succeed.
You can join them up locally and Whitehall can facilitate them
and that is what we are trying to do.
Q527 Anne Main: We were concerned
about lines of communication; that departments work together and
communicate with each other so we do not have the ridiculous situation
which we had in sea and coastal defences where money may be going
into a project that may have the rug pulled from under it a few
years later as somebody changes strategy. We want to make sure
that the communication between departments is going on.
Mr Woolas: That is a good point.
One can strive to be perfect of course, but the locking in of
those decisions in the local area agreement is the solution to
that point, in so far as there is a perfect solution. The other
point worth making is that many of the examples I receive as local
government minister on the alleged lack of "joined-upness"
actually reflect a lack of money, not a lack of joining up. You
can be joined up as much as you want, but it does not pay all
the bills so not every town can have its ideal plan.
Q528 Chair: May I just take up the
question of simplifying the money which comes to coastal towns?
It was put to us in Margate that it would be helpful if the Government
could simplify the number of funding streams which are available
to coastal towns and given that Margate is in Kent they drew an
analogy with the coalfield communities' funding where there had
been a single stream going into those communities and they thought
that maybe coastal towns should be considered in a similar fashion
and get a single stream of funding.
Mr Woolas: One of the objectives
of the local area agreements is to bring as many specific area-based
grants as possible into a pooling arrangement to give areas greater
flexibility on the use of their funding and to simplify arrangements
by having a similar set of terms and conditions. Our White Paper
is due out shortly.
Q529 Chair: Excellent. We look forward
to it with bated breath.
Mr Woolas: It is a very important
point. Our policy is that unless there are exceptional circumstances
area-based funding should be pooled or aligned exactly to meet
the point Margate made.
Chair: Excellent. Thank you very much
indeed, Minister.
| 
