Coastal issues and the Select Committee Inquiry into coastal towns

Barriers and priorities by practitioners

The objectives of coastal regeneration are to improve the standard of living and the quality of life for coastal residents and to improve the quality and costs of delivering public services. Economic vitality is regarded as essential in addressing deprivation and most coastal regenerators strive to diversify low-wage tourism towns into more balanced, all-year round, well-paying, mixed economies.

A survey of coastal local authority regeneration practitioners for this Handbook asked them to list (a) their barriers to coastal regeneration, (b) their priorities for action, and (c) to state, self-effacingly, their particular and sharable coastal regeneration specialisations.

The main barriers to coastal regeneration were considered to be, in order of mentions:

• the nature of the local economy;
• lack of investment in infrastructure and transport links;
• the levels of deprivation;
• the lack of regeneration funding;
• the nature of the housing market;
• peripherality;
• climate change.

In the ‘other barriers’ section were: an ageing population, local resistance to change, the image of the area, and a lack of community strength found in industrial, mining and shipping areas. Appendix X provides the full list of barriers.

While the barriers to regeneration were spread across a range of issues – the economy, deprivation, location, transport, housing – practitioners’ priorities for delivering coastal regeneration were almost exclusively concerned with economic issues. These were diversification, inward investment, sector development, employment and skills, premises, business development and start-ups, with isolated references to housing need, reducing benefit claimants, enhancing the public realm, raising aspirations and improving partnership working. This is both understandable and a concern.

It is understandable because national policy, regeneration funding and the strong desire for tangible outputs focuses effort almost exclusively on stimulating economic activity. It is easier to audit breeze-blocks and NVQs than measure wellbeing, security and local pride. On the other hand, the emphasis on the ‘economic’ as the solution to coastal deprivation is a concern. Until the current recession, the United Kingdom had experienced almost 15 years of unprecedented economic growth that had enriched many of our towns and cities. However, the rising economic tide did not reach the majority of our coastal towns, and while there have been a number of notable regeneration projects in the larger resorts, deprivation has actually increased in many coastal areas.

Given this relative failure to induce market forces into our seaside economies, and a predicted future of low or no economic growth, coupled with reduced public and individual spending, what should be the priority for coastal regeneration?

If the solution is not exclusively economic, should the emphasis for coastal regenerators be ‘quality of life’ and ‘local distinctiveness’ issues, rather than ‘standard of living’? Could it even be that a focus on the quality of people’s lives and the environment in coastal communities (for example, reducing transience, improving housing, reducing crime, enhancing the public realm, improving health and lifestyles) could actually lead to ‘social regeneration’ by attracting new residential groups and new priorities to the area? Should the economic totem of Gross Domestic Product be replaced by Gross Domestic Happiness, the very product that resorts exist to forge?