‘We need to speak collectively’: can parliament solve the problem of ‘deprivation bingo’ in the UK’s seaside towns? | UK news
IIt’s a beautiful sunny autumn day in Ramsgate, on Britain’s Kent coast, and the quintessential seaside chippy, Peter’s Fish Factory, is doing a brisk lunchtime trade. Across the road, at the entrance to the town pier, local MP and chair of the recently reformed Coastal Parliamentary Labor Party (PLP), Polly Billington, has her photo taken.
Between shots, she shows us the community art project that adorns the fence along the pier entrance. It is made up of photos, drawn mainly by local children and young people, of the 65 small ships which set sail earlier this year from Ramsgate to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation.
This focus on heritage in seaside towns and seeing them as, in Billington’s words, “places of enormous creativity”, is familiar. But we are in Ramsgate to discover what lies behind the colorful seafronts of the coastal areas of England and Wales, and she wants to do the same.
By reforming the Coastal PLP, Billington is attempting to push Westminster to focus on the party’s “sea wall” and, in doing so, generate resources to address some of the most pressing issues common to coastal areas.
“Very often we find ourselves facing a sort of bingo of deprivation,” she says, referring to conversations she has with other coastal MPs about issues such as unreliable public transport, poor job opportunities and geographic isolation. “But these are things we have in common with each other. I have more in common with MPs who represent coastal seats like Lowestoft, Scarborough, Blackpool, Hastings and Weymouth than with those in other parts of the south east, even Kent. We need to speak collectively with one voice otherwise we risk being overlooked and ignored.”
Questions and answers
What is the Against the Grain series?
To show
Over the next year, the Guardian’s Seascape team’s Against the Tide project will report on the lives of young people in coastal communities across England and Wales.
Young people in many of England’s coastal towns are disproportionately likely to face poverty, poor housing, lower education standards and lower employment opportunities than their peers in equivalent inland areas. In the most deprived coastal towns, they may find themselves faced with crumbling and stripped-down public services and transport that limit their life choices.
Over the next 12 months, accompanied by documentary photographer Polly Braden, we will travel across the country between port towns, seaside resorts and former fishing villages to ask young people aged 16 to 25 to tell us about their lives and how they feel about the places where they live.
By putting their voices at the forefront of our reporting, we want to examine the kind of changes they need to build the future they want for themselves.
The English coastline is home to some of the most deprived places in the country. Government data released earlier this month revealed that nine out of ten of the country’s most deprived areas were coastal (seven in Blackpool, Lancashire, one in Hastings, Sussex and one in Tendring, Essex). Children and young people, who have lower levels of mental health than their peers living in equivalent inland regions, are at the forefront of these deprivations. This seems to be a direct result of what is happening where they live.
Billington believes the lack of opportunities available to these young people seriously limits what we can expect of them. “I know there are kids living here who can’t get a job because there’s no bus service or who can’t get to the college they want to go to because they can’t afford the train fare. If you limit the opportunities for these kids, you can’t then say, ‘Why aren’t these kids doing something?’
To help bring about change, Billington is pushing for a Minister for Coastal Communities to be appointed. Specifically, she and other Coast MPs want the position to be a Cabinet position, not just a narrowly focused position within a health or environment ministry.
About 180 miles further north along the coast, Steff Aquarone, Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk, agrees. Earlier this year he led a debate in Parliament on the coast, ending it by calling for a coastal minister to sit in cabinet. He was “blown away” by the participation in this debate, he said, the first he had obtained as a new MP. “It quickly became clear that this concern [about the coast] transcend political parties.
“In my constituency and dozens of others, we are simply not getting viable solutions to our local employment needs, to our provision for young people, to our healthcare. This is because the coastal lifestyle is not well understood and is not central enough in the [government’s] decision-making.”
He wants the government to show the same level of vision and ambition for coastal communities as, he says, it did for post-industrial towns in the 1980s.
Billington’s vision is no different and at Labour’s annual conference she called on her party to launch a coastal version of the London Challenge.
The London Challenge is often cited as one of the greatest political successes of the Blair years, turning around struggling London schools to the point where they outperformed many of those elsewhere in England.
Billington says: “Now what’s happening is we’re failing young people because we don’t have a clear pathway from around the age of 14, through training and education, into work, particularly on the coast. »
Aquarone believes that the focus should be on the coast not only on the problems, but also on the positives – what coastal places could offer. “Yes, it’s important to recognize inequality and that’s where you run the state, but you also have to realize that there are real opportunities here,” he said.
One way to do this, he says, would be to focus resources on creating a strong career path in the social services sector on the Coast. Investing in better education and training in coastal communities would help provide young people with a clear pathway into work and help solve the sector’s recruitment crisis.
He is also aware that a convincing factor for the government could be the political implications of not do anything. “I think there’s a very important political reason why the government is interested in this, especially since I don’t think the Reform Party has the solutions to any of these problems.”
The 2024 election was the first time Labor had won a majority of coastal city constituencies in England and Wales since 2005 – but it is these seats that are now among the most vulnerable. Voter intention modeling carried out for Hope Not Hate and recently published by the Guardian shows that almost the entire east coast of England will swing towards reform at the next election, including Labor seats such as Lowestoft and Scarborough – and the East Thanet constituency of Billington. Other seats in places such as Weston-super-Mare, Blackpool and Clwyd North on the north Wales coast are also expected to be lost to the Reform Party.
The Guardian contacted Richard Tice, MP for Boston and Skegness and the only Reform MP to join the Aquarone debate on the coast earlier this year, to contribute to this article, but he did not respond to our requests for an interview.
Ben Cooper, a researcher at the left-wing think tank Fabian Society, wrote a report before the election, Breaching the Sea Wall, which examined key issues in coastal seats. It shows how strongly coastal town constituencies believe their region is worse off than other places, and on two issues in particular: housing affordability and opportunities for young people.
“I think the government needs to do something in these coastal communities, in addition to the national policies they are implementing, to specifically address the kinds of challenges our report identifies,” Cooper says.
He thinks a minister for coastal communities could be helpful in this regard, but only if he actually coordinated all government departments and “moved forward with a really interesting and progressive approach to tackling the problems of coastal communities”.
But more importantly, he believes the government needs to show respect for coastal areas. “It’s about going into these communities, listening to them, showing that they consider them part of the national story and that they want them and everyone who lives there to succeed,” he says.
“It’s not enough to have good policy. There is a sense of disconnect in many of these places, and unless they tackle that problem, Labor will still struggle.”
