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Coastal Towns

I rise to introduce the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government’s report on coastal towns. Given that a large number of hon. Members who represent coastal towns are present, I shall try to keep my remarks short. I do not intend to cover everything that is in the report, since it largely speaks for itself. Let me explain why the Committee decided to undertake the inquiry. We have a strong interest in regeneration and we perceived a lack of national policy focus on coastal regeneration. The report reproduces a map of deprivation in the UK. Unfortunately, because it is printed in shades of green, it is not quite as striking as the original, but it shows a clear ring of deprivation around the coast of England, as well as large areas of deprivation in inner-city and former industrial areas. Twenty-one of the 88 most deprived authorities in the UK are in coastal areas. We felt that there was a lack of policy focus on coastal regeneration, in contrast to the Government’s well established policies on urban and inner-city regeneration. There has been a considerable amount of interest in the report both inside the House, where it was most recently mentioned during Prime Minister’s questions, and outside, where it was one of the subjects of a ““You and Yours”” programme that occasioned a great deal of public input and interest. There has been considerable interest from local authorities, local authority organisations and various organisations that are involved in coastal towns. It has also been the subject of discussion at a number of national conferences on coastal towns and regeneration. I am confident that the issues raised in the report will be carried forward outside the House and within it. The evidence given to the Committee demonstrated clearly that although coastal towns are extremely diverse, which we recognise, they have a number of shared characteristics. The most obvious is their physical isolation and peripheral location, which often means that they have poor transport connections. The demography of coastal towns is often skewed by the outward migration of young people. One of the more distressing experiences that the Committee had was when we met young people in Margate, who all said that they would leave as soon as they could because they did not see their future in their home town. One will always be able to find young people who want to leave their home town, but for them all to want to leave is depressing. Not only do such towns see outward migration of young people and inward migration of older people—often those who have chosen to retire by the seaside and so have a reasonable income—but they see inward migration of people on benefits or low incomes who can live more cheaply at the seaside than elsewhere, and the number of transients, including vulnerable adults and children, is high. There is often a two-level housing market, in which the incomers drive up house prices so that they are out of the reach of many local people. Coastal towns have a low-wage, unskilled economy, often with seasonal unemployment. I shall return to that point in a minute because it is the subject of one of the Committee’s recommendations. The Committee also remarked that no one Department has responsibility for coastal towns, which are affected by a range of policies administered by many Departments, and that there is no national strategy or policy framework for coastal towns. In fact, the Committee did not recommend that there should be a national strategy, although many organisations outside the House wanted one, but we stated our belief that some changes in the way in which Government works were necessary to ensure that there was more effective cross-departmental working and to ensure that issues that affected coastal towns were given proper consideration in all Departments. We called for the establishment of a cross-departmental group led by the Department for Communities and Local Government to examine the impact of national policy on coastal communities and to monitor and maintain an overview of the situation in coastal towns. Unfortunately, that recommendation was one of those that were rejected by the Government. I hope that they will reconsider that. I am sure that some of the MPs who are in the Chamber to represent coastal towns will make their own arguments about why the Government should accede to the Committee’s recommendation. I welcome the fact that there has been greater activity on the part of some Departments, notably the Department of Trade and Industry, since the inquiry began. It was interesting that a couple of Ministers who gave evidence to the Committee readily admitted that they had not thought about coastal towns as a group until our inquiry started and they were required to give evidence. We have at least achieved something by focusing individual Ministers’ attentions on coastal towns. The DTI organised a coastal towns conference on 8 May. The Committee can claim some credit for having stimulated greater DTI activity on that front. The Government have agreed to our recommendation that one of the regional development agencies should act as a lead in co-ordinating RDA activity in respect of coastal towns. That RDA is the South East England Development Agency, because it was generally felt that SEEDA already has a reasonably well developed strategy for the coastal towns in the south-east and would be the most suitable agency to lead and exhort the other RDAs to take greater note of their own coastal towns. We also concluded that there was a lack of Government understanding of and of substantive research on coastal towns and the problems that they face. We were particularly unimpressed by the evidence that we were given by the Department for Work and Pensions. It seemed stunningly unaware of the situation on the ground in some of our coastal towns. The DWP did not challenge the findings that we reproduced in our report, which demonstrate that since 1997 the levels of those who claim incapacity benefit, special disability allowance or income support for disability had increased six times as much in coastal towns as the national average. We sought to ask the DWP what evidence it had to show whether those figures meant that individuals in coastal towns were more likely to claim those benefits, or that people who claimed those benefits were more likely to migrate to coastal towns, since the Department’s response would need to be different depending on which explanation was correct. We are not impressed that the DWP does not seem to have challenged those findings or responded to them in its response to the recommendations. It has simply written off the problem as historical. It will also come as a surprise to many of those who represent coastal towns that the DWP believes that seasonal unemployment in coastal towns is"““not substantially higher than the national average””." I recognise that, given that coastal towns are very disparate as a group, there might be some support for the DWP in the numbers if one takes into account all coastal towns, including those that are successful. However, that avoids the issue of those coastal towns that have substantial problems with large numbers of people on disability benefits and with seasonal unemployment. We wish to follow that issue up and will refer it to the relevant Select Committee. I want to draw attention to some other issues, but I shall not expand on them. The first problem is the lack of affordable housing in coastal towns and the fact that young people are often completely priced out by the more affluent incomers. The second issue is houses in multiple occupation, which are a particular problem in those coastal towns that were once seaside resorts and where a large amount of housing that used to be hotels is now HMOs, and the effect that that has on districts in those towns. Further issues are the growing importance of coastal management in the light of global warming, and the need to integrate shoreline management plans with economic planning, rather than treat them in isolation. Funding for coastal towns and the formulae used by Government are also issues of importance, and I am pleased that the Government are reviewing the day visitor indicator, which is obviously significant to many coastal towns.