---

Coastal Towns

Like other Members who have spoken today, I pay tribute to the work of the Select Committee. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Marsden) who has over the years lobbied Ministers along with other Labour MPs representing coastal towns and seaside resorts. I shall try to start with the positives. Cleethorpes itself is a small part of my constituency, but the name conjures up an image of saucy seaside postcards and end-of-the-pier shows. Blackpool, Southend and other coastal towns and resorts also have that image, which is still stuck in many people’s minds. That perception is detrimental to the development of our economies. Nevertheless, coastal towns have a lot going for them, and I do not think that we talk them up enough. Cleethorpes has about four and a half miles of sandy beach, although unlike Southend, we probably have the stumpiest, shortest pier on the east coast. It used to be considerably longer, but for some reason, after the second world war, the War Office decided to blow up most of it—I think that the office thought that that was a matter of national security. So we were left with the pavilion, but no pier attached to it. The timbers were then sent to Leicester, I think, to rebuild its bomb-damaged football ground. At least we managed to help out there. On any sunny Sunday bank holiday, Cleethorpes remains the playground of south Yorkshire. People from Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster all head to Cleethorpes, so it remains vital to day trippers. People still spend holidays there. We have the wonderful, listed Humberstone Fitties chalet park, which is enormously popular, as well as some very large caravan sites. However, the core of the tourism economy is now day trippers from south Yorkshire. As others have said, there is a lot of entrepreneurship in coastal town resorts, and there have been new developments on our seafront—restaurants, coffee bars and other such facilities. We even have our own boutique hotel. The coastal light railway has been expanding; in the 10 years in which I have represented the area, the railway has expanded year on year—it is probably the only railway in Britain about which that could be said during that time—run on time and been very cheap. The track is being extended into the theme park in Cleethorpes. A new cinema was opened recently as well. Until a few years ago, there was no cinema. Given British weather, it is absolutely outrageous that the resort had nowhere inside where visitors could go if it rained. Good things are happening, but they are happening in spite of the Government. We are seeing this development only because of action taken by some very determined, single-minded visionary people in the area. Cleethorpes has another wonderful attraction: the meridian line runs straight through the resort. Cleethorpes is 9,919 miles from the south pole and 143 miles from London, but frankly London might as well be 9,000 miles away given the understanding of some Departments of what is going on in seaside resorts. The last calculations that I looked at estimated that about 2,000 people work in the tourism economy in Cleethorpes. However, as the Select Committee and others have mentioned, there are serious problems. There is physical and social isolation in the area—it is true to say that we are at the end of the line. The railway stops there. The A180 stops at the outskirts of Grimsby, and from there to Cleethorpes there is one huge traffic jam as people try to get into the resort. The A46, which comes up from Nottinghamshire, is a dual carriageway to Lincoln and from there it is an ordinary road. That creates further problems. The hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds) will understand those problems; some of those who go to Boston and Skegness travel the same route. Those transport problems are quite serious. On the question of the skewed demographics, as in other coastal areas, young people want to move out—particularly talented young people. They do not see a future for themselves there, so if they are bright, they move. There is therefore a much lower than average number of 18 to 44-year-olds. There is also a larger number of elderly people in the constituency, and as other hon. Members have mentioned, many of them do not have family and social networks there, whether because they moved to the area to retire as it is by the seaside or because younger members of the family, seeing no future in the area, have moved out. We therefore need to consider loneliness and social isolation as well, which naturally impact on the Department for Work and Pensions. Apart from the outward migration of young people, most residents who remain in the area are manual workers. The number of unskilled and semi-skilled workers is much higher than the national average. In the 2001 census, Cleethorpes came fifth in the UK for people in lower supervisory jobs and 37th for semi-routine jobs—routine is the term now used for unskilled jobs. As for professional, managerial and technical jobs, the numbers were negligible. That skewed demographic profile impacts across the board in an area, including politically. In the part of Lincolnshire to which I am referring, there has never been Government investment in a Government agency to bring white-collar jobs to the area. I would love to see that; other areas such as Blackpool have it.