Patrick Spencer is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social Justice.
OK, so the weather is still pretty awful. But May’s bank holidays typically kick off the summer holiday season, with thousands of Brits setting out on day trips, short weekends, or longer family holidays. Walk down by the coast on a hot summer evening and you will find packed pubs and restaurants, children eating fish and chips on the beach, and shops open late for customers.
Coastal tourism is big business. Before Covid-19, tourists spent £17.1bn across British seaside tourists destinations; 15 per cent of all international visitors to our sunny isle visit the coast.
More than four million people visited Kent seaside towns Margate and Broadstairs in the summer of 2019, generating hundreds of millions of pounds in economic revenue; more than eight million people visited the Norfolk coast, whether that is the pier at Cromer, the sand dunes at Holkham or the Pleasure Beach at Great Yarmouth. In 2019, more than 700,000 people spent the night in a hotel on the Suffolk coast.
Unfortunately, though, this is the story for just one-third of the year. The low season can be desperate for seaside towns. Visitors disappear, jobs dry up, and communities can be left feeling empty.
It is a sad reality that many coastal town economies haven’t been able to diversify away from seasonal tourism, and that some of our coastal towns are the most deprived areas in the country. ONS figures show coastal towns have a residential deprivation rate twice that of non-coastal towns.
Population and employment growth is much slower in coastal towns compared to non-coastal. The average salary in Great Yarmouth is two -thirds that of London. An ONS study released in 2021 found that some of the most deprived areas outside urban areas are coastal towns (name-checking Hastings and Blackpool).
There is a reason that Reform UK are targeting places like Hartlepool and Blackpool. The Brexit Party excelled in the East of England, returning people like three of the seven MEPs for the region (the Tories returning just one, and Labour none). Go even further back and it is easy to understand why Clacton was used as the point of inspiration for Dom Cumming’s character in the Channel 4 drama about Brexit.
It’s because so many people who live in these towns feel genuinely forgotten and left behind. This is more than just a political story; the reality is desperate.
Ten years ago, the Centre for Social Justice released a report, looking at problems afflicting five seaside towns: Rhyl, Margate, Clacton, Blackpool, and Margate. It depicted problems of welfare dependency, educational failure, low numbers of local students going to university, and higher rates of teen pregnancy and single parents (predominantly mothers), homelessness, and drug addiction.
These problems have not gone away; ten years on, we are no closer to making major inroads on these pockets of extreme deprivation.
In the shadow of local elections, and as we career towards the general election, the Conservative Party needs to think hard about how to reinvigorate coastal economies for the future.
Levelling up rightly looked at how policy can boost the post-industrial north. There has been ample time spent talking about urban and town centres can be given a face-lift. Now there should be proper strategy developed for coastal communities that seem to have been forgotten.
A recent report from Onward said Britain needs to think harder about what it sells to the world. Well, tourism really is one of our greatest exports. Foreign capital is flown to Britain and spent here, deposited into our economy, to the tune of billions each year. Why aren’t we doing more to grow that figure.
The April YouGov MRP poll showed many coastal constituencies (Hastings and Rye, two seats in Worthing, East Thanet, Harwich and North Essex, Weston-Super-Mare, Great Yarmouth, North Norfolk, Scarborough and Whitby, even Whitehaven and Workington) that were blue in 2019, but are lost in 2024. It doesn’t have to be this way. The Government can act now.
The post Patrick Spencer: Time is running out to save the great British seaside town – and a clutch of Conservative seats appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Patrick Spencer
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