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Coastal Towns

As someone who sat on the Standing Committee that considered the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, I welcome many of the changes that the subsequent Act brought about; indeed, I put some of those changes into the Bill. That legislation has made it much easier for residents in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency and mine to extend their leases. The reason why many people do not take advantage of that legislation is probably to do with the type of people who live in those areas. In the part of Cleethorpes where most leasehold properties are, many people do not have post-compulsory, school-age qualifications. There is some ignorance, much as I try to let people know about the legislation through leaflets and advice surgeries. The problem is purely down to fear and ignorance. However, it does cost money, and many people simply do not have the money to pay surveyors to give estimates of what it will cost to buy the freehold. People either do not know about the legislation, or they feel that they cannot afford to take advantage of it. Things are not as bad as they were, but it is particularly difficult to get that knowledge to people, especially given that freeholders, frankly, do not want folk to know about it. That is a problem. I try to tell everybody, ““Enfranchise, enfranchise, enfranchise.”” I tell people, ““Buy it: you might think that it is expensive, but it is better than losing your home.”” I thank the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill) for making that point, because I have now put another advert on the record telling my constituents, ““Buy your freehold.”” On Government strategy, I shall not use such strong terms as the hon. Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess), because I am such a Government loyalist, but I am sorely tempted to use similar language. Instead I shall say that I was somewhat disappointed by the Government’s weak response. It was fragmented and did not seem to be a coherent response. Is not that typical of the whole approach to coastal and seaside towns? Perhaps we would have been more surprised if it had all fitted together and been coherent, because so many Departments have responsibilities for such towns. Let us consider the issues that have been raised today: we have discussed transport, work and pensions, health and education. The Minister who will respond to the debate is from the Department for Communities and Local Government, but the Department of Trade and Industry also has an input because of its role with regional development agencies. We are talking about life—people’s lives and people’s towns—so every Government Department is involved in this issue. I was disappointed with the Government’s response to the report, but my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool, South and I, and other hon. Members present, have been banging this drum for an awfully long time, so perhaps we should not have been surprised by the response. I want to discuss RDAs and their input. The RDA with which I work has the wonderful title: the Yorkshire and Humber RDA. The Humber is a river and although Cleethorpes is in Lincolnshire, Lincolnshire is not mentioned. As there is only a tiny bit of Lincolnshire in the RDA, we are, again, on the fringe; the vast majority of its work focuses on Yorkshire. I have read about all the wonderful innovation, and, yes, there has been wonderful innovation in places such as Leeds, but we are still on the fringe. The psychology of the RDA is to put us to one side. Yet again, we are at that end-of-the-line place. For those reasons, I have my doubts as to whether RDAs are an appropriate vehicle with which to tackle the common problems of seaside and coastal towns. I shall give hon. Members an example to illustrate my point. A few years ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Mr. Blizzard) did some work on former fishing ports, many of which are, of course, still coastal towns. We tried to track down Government money that had been allocated to RDAs for the regeneration of former fishing ports, and discovered that it had been divvied up almost equally across the RDAs, including London. The RDAs then spent that money, which was meant to be tagged for specific purposes, in many different ways. In one region, we discovered that it was used to put new lampposts somewhere not remotely near the seaside. When money is earmarked, can we guarantee that when it has been filtered through all the relevant organisations it will get to its intended targets? I have worries about that. I shall try to end on a positive point. One positive point is that Cleethorpes is a most wonderful place, and save for Tory MPs who are trying to campaign, anyone is welcome to come and have a nice wee break there. As we are next to Grimsby, our fish and chips are probably the best in Britain. Hon. Members will recall that I raised this matter with the Prime Minister yesterday, because the debate was coming up today. I must admit that the wee bit of sniggering from those who do not represent coastal towns did not go down terribly well. Although he is going to be around for only a couple more weeks, I shall remind hon. Members what the Prime Minister said, because it might be good to repeat his comments to a future incumbent. He said:"““Because the focus is sometimes on inner-city regeneration, people forget that some coastal towns have large numbers of people who are either socially excluded or unemployed and that such local economies can be difficult. It is precisely for that reason that we are looking at what more we can do to support our coastal towns and to make sure that a fair proportion of the £20 billion that we are spending on regeneration gets to them to allow them to develop local economies that are sustainable in the future.””—[Official Report, 6 June 2007; Vol. 461, c. 254.]" Having rubbished the Government response to the report, I must say that I thought that a better response than anything in the Government response. It is a shame that the Prime Minister is off, because with that attitude, we could have worked on him a wee bit more. It has been wonderful for us to discuss the problems of our coastal towns. Yes, they are all very different, but we have come together today to share our concerns about the problems in our constituencies.