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Coastal Towns

The hon. Gentleman has had 10 years to do something about it, but let us not go there, because we have built up a cross-party consensus in the Chamber. Transport to many coastal towns, and particularly to the south because of the population density, is not good. When we in the south-east are told that the region stretching from Milton Keynes—the constituency of the Chairman of the Select Committee—to Dover, the Isle of Wight, Sussex, Berkshire and so on, which is amorphous and incohesive, is to be the powerhouse of the European economy, and that central Government must impose housing development on us, many of us have reservations. However, everybody will have reservations if we do not have the infrastructure to support that development. The number of new houses that my constituency is being forced to take is ridiculous given the geographical limitations of the sea to the south and the downs to the north. We simply do not have the spaces for those houses, and we certainly do not have the infrastructure for getting to and from them, let alone to and from the companies for which the people living in the houses are supposed to work. We are dealing with a double-edged sword. The A27 is probably the biggest car park in the south of England. One can drive from Newcastle all the way down south on dual carriageway or motorway until one reaches my constituency when it changes into single-file traffic on a major trunk road. It is crazy putting more and more cars arising from the extra house building on to that road; it is a double-edged sword. Our biggest weapon for combating inappropriate further developments at the foot of the downs is by saying that the roads cannot sustain them. That is the biggest factor enabling us to reject some of the developments on appeal. However, we want infrastructure, investment and everybody to have a good quality of life, so that they can retire to Worthing or bring up their families in Worthing, Shoreham or another town in East Sussex. Brighton is a thriving place and a big town of 250,000 people, but it has its problems. I visited a Brighton school that was dubbed the third worst in Britain a few years ago. At the school, which is in a particularly depressed part of Brighton called the Whitehawk estate, there is some really good stuff going on, and an entrepreneurial headmaster is bringing about change. Brighton is the drugs capital of the United Kingdom, and there has been a great deal of downside to its prosperity and the life that has been put into it. However, Brighton is just a city, and although I am not trying to undermine the place, it has gobbled up the lion’s share of investment, particularly social investment, from the Government. Much regeneration money has quite rightly gone into cities because of their problems, but it has done so to the exclusion of neighbouring towns and villages, which also have big problems. They do not qualify for that help because they do not have economies of scale or the same quantity of problems, and they do not get the help and regeneration that they need. A scheme that worked really well and that the previous Government strongly championed was the single regeneration budget. One did not need to be a big city or a big deprived estate to qualify for it. The SRB did a lot in my constituency and along the Sussex coast in pockets of deprivation to help to upgrade the more downmarket business estates, to regenerate the town centres that had lost out to out-of-town shopping centres and to bring up the standard of the housing. It worked very well, because it was not big-budget stuff, but it had a big bang for its buck. My final point is about coastal erosion. We have benefited greatly from the Environment Agency, I am glad to say. We got £20 million to fortify the coastal defences from Shoreham to Worthing, where we are vulnerable and below sea level. I am grateful for the Environment Agency’s far-sightedness, which enabled us to do that work. The trouble is that because of the pressure on budgets for coastal defence work, and because the problem a few years ago was not coastal but river defences, when the city of Chichester, the town of Lewes in Sussex and other market towns throughout the country flooded badly, a great deal of money that would have gone into coastal defence work had to go into river defence work in our towns. There is a competing equation, and towns are losing out on coastal defence work that is essential if we are to defend them from the effects of global warming. The debate has raised a range of interesting coastal town problems. I am not one to bleat and say, ““Why aren’t we getting more help?”” because ultimately local people, enthusiasm and entrepreneurship, and the flexibility to adapt to new times, markets, customers and interest, are the future of our coastal towns. However, the Government must at least recognise that coastal towns have diverse problems. They are not inner cities with enormous estates that suffer from all sorts of deprivation; they are not rural ex-coal mining or ex-tin mining communities that have specific problems; and although many parts of north-west Sussex are close to affluent rural areas; many parts of south-west Sussex are not. It does not mean that they are without their problems. We want to solve the problems ourselves. We need greater co-ordination and we parliamentarians can be the catalyst for much of that change, but it would help if the Government recognised the problems and responded rather more positively and proactively than they have to the Committee’s otherwise excellent report.