Offering small pots of funding for coastal cities is no substitute for a long term growth strategy.
When it was announced that several seaside towns and cities – including Blackpool, Hastings and Scarborough – would share in £36 million of new funding under the Coastal Communities Fund, here at the Centre for Cities we fielded some calls from local journalists asking for our opinion on whether we thought it was money well spent. It was pleasing to hear that we weren’t the only ones who had greeted the announcement with some scepticism, and that local people too were questioning how funding for walking paths and light shows would help at a time where many seaside towns are struggling.
Given that a similar announcement was made by the previous Government before the last election, the concern is that we remain a long way from reaching a point where Whitehall truly understands that small pots of funding for essentially surface-level projects simply distract from the critical need for investments to be made in the long-term, fundamental drivers of economic growth.
There is no doubt that, for seaside communities, the announcement of additional money to improve their public realm and attractiveness could improve their capacity to attract tourists. But this is very different from making these towns appealing places to live, work and invest – primarily because this funding will do very little to improve residents’ prospects to find long-term, well-paying jobs, nor to encourage businesses to locate there. In this respect, the Coastal Communities Fund is symptomatic of the wider approach to economic development we have seen under successive Governments, which tends to preference smaller-scale pots of funding rather than pursuing a wider strategy for growth. The Regional Growth Fund is another good example of this.
The scale of the challenge in many coastal communities is large, and necessitates a comprehensive response. So while providing bikes for hire on Hastings’ seafront – a city that has the eighth-highest youth unemployment rate of all cities in the UK – may well be a nice thing to have, it will do very little to tackle its economic challenges. Nor will it keep the next generation of Hastings youth from straying elsewhere in search of work.
If we are to help boost the economic performance of our less successful places, then this has to change. We need to build a culture within central government that encourages and enables local governments to move beyond chasing the latest pot of money on offer to them. And for their part, cities and towns need to start thinking harder about how the funding streams they do receive can fit together into a more comprehensive, long-term strategy to better tackle ongoing challenges and support local growth. Only then will we start to see the kind of prosperity, quality of life and optimism we all hope for, spread throughout a much larger number of communities.
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