Labour knows it needs to win over the ‘sea wall’ cohort of coastal voters in the next election. But as anger over inequality grows, time is running out
It is a lovely sunny autumn day in Ramsgate on Britain’s Kent coast, and quintessential seaside chippy Peter’s Fish Factory is doing a roaring lunchtime trade. Across the road, at the entrance to the town’s pier, local MP and chair of the newly reformed coastal parliamentary Labour party (PLP), Polly Billington, is having her photo taken.
In between shots she shows us the community art project that adorns the fence along the entrance to the pier. It is made up of pictures, drawn primarily by local children and young people, of the 65 little ships that 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 a familiar one. But we are in Ramsgate to pick at what lies behind the colourful seafronts of coastal places in England and Wales, and she is keen to do the same.
By reforming the coastal PLP, Billington is trying to push Westminster to focus on the party’s “sea wall”, and by doing so generate resources towards some of the more pressing issues shared by coastal places.
“Quite often we find ourselves having a kind of deprivation bingo,” she says, referring to the conversations she has with other coastal MPs about problems such as unreliable public transport, poor job opportunities and geographical isolation. “But these are things that we have in common between us. I have more in common with MPs who represent coastal seats like Lowestoft, Scarborough, Blackpool, Hastings and Weymouth than I do with those who are in some other parts of the south-east, even in Kent. We need to speak collectively in one voice or we risk being overlooked and ignored.”
Over the next year, the Against the Tide project from the Guardian’s Seascape team will be reporting 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 educational attainment and employment opportunities than their peers in equivalent inland areas. In the most deprived coastal towns they can be left to struggle with crumbling and stripped-back public services and transport that limit their life choices.
For the next 12 months, accompanied by the documentary photographer Polly Braden, we will travel up and down the country to port towns, seaside resorts and former fishing villages to ask 16- to 25-year-olds to tell us about their lives and how they feel about the places they live.
By putting their voices at the front and centre of our reporting, we want to examine what kind of changes they need to build the futures they want for themselves.
The coastline of England features some of the most deprived places in the country. Government data released earlier this month found that nine out of 10 of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country were coastal (seven were in Blackpool, Lancashire, one in Hastings, Sussex, and one in Tendring, Essex). At the sharp end of this deprivation are children and young people, who have poorer levels of mental health than their peers in equivalent inland places. This appears to be as a direct result of what is going on where they live.
Billington thinks the lack of opportunities these young people have is seriously limiting what we can expect from them. “I know there are kids who live here who can’t get to a job because there isn’t a bus service or who cannot get to the college they want to go to because they can’t afford the train fare. If you limit the possibilities of these young people, you can’t then say, ‘why aren’t these kids doing something?’”
To help make change happen, Billington is pushing for a coastal communities minister. Specifically, she and other MPs along the coast want that position to be a cabinet position, not just a narrowly focused one within a department health or the environment.
About 180 miles farther north along the coastline, Steff Aquarone, Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk, is in agreement. Earlier this year he led a discussion in parliament about the coast, ending it by calling for a coastal minister to sit in cabinet. He was “blown away” by the attendance for that debate, he says, the first he had secured as a new MP. “It was soon obvious that this concern [about the coast] cut across political parties.
“In my constituency and in dozens of others like it, we’re just not getting viable solutions to our local employment needs, our offer for young people, our health care. That’s because the coastal way of life isn’t properly understood and it is not central enough in the [government’s] decision making.”
He wants the government to demonstrate 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 not dissimilar and at the annual Labour party conference she called for her party to initiate a coastal version of the London Challenge.
The London Challenge is often cited as one of the greatest policy successes of the Blair years, turning round failing London schools to the point they outperformed many of those elsewhere in England.
Billington says: “Now, what is happening is we are failing young people because we don’t have a clear pathway from about the age of 14 through training and education into work, particularly at the coast.”
Aquarone feels the focus on the coast needs to shift to not just being about problems but looking at the positives – what coastal places could offer. “Yes, inequality is important to recognise and it’s where you direct the state, but you also have to realise there are real opportunities here,” he says.
One way to do this, he says, would be to focus resources on creating a solid career path into the social care sector on the coast. Investing in better education and training in coastal communities would help provide young people with a clear pathway to work and help solve the crisis of recruitment in the sector.
He is also mindful that one persuasive factor for the government could be the political implications of not doing anything. “I think there is a really sharp political reason for the government to be paying attention, particularly as I don’t think that Reform has got the solutions to any of these problems.”
The 2024 election was the first time the Labour party won a majority of coastal town constituencies in England and Wales since 2005 – but it is those seats that are now some of the most vulnerable. Modelling of voter intention done for Hope Not Hate and recently published by the Guardian shows almost the entire east coast of England going to Reform at the next election, including Labour seats such as Lowestoft and Scarborough – and Billington’s East Thanet constituency. Other seats in places such as Weston-super-Mare, Blackpool and Clwyd North on the north Wales coastline are also predicted to be lost to Reform.
The Guardian approached Richard Tice, the MP for Boston and Skegness and the sole Reform MP to join Aquarone’s debate on the coast earlier this year, to contribute to this article but he didn’t reply to our requests for an interview.
Ben Cooper, a researcher with the leftwing thinktank the Fabian Society, wrote a report before the election, Breaching the Sea Wall, that looked at key issues in coastal seats. In it he documented how there is a strong belief in coastal town constituencies that their area is worse off compared to other places, and on two issues in particular: the affordability of housing and opportunities for young people.
“I think the government needs to do something in those coastal communities, on top of the national policies they are implementing, to specifically tackle those sorts of challenges that our report identified,” says Cooper.
He thinks a coastal communities minister could be helpful towards that but only if they were really coordinating across every department in government and “pushing forward with a really interesting, progressive approach to tackling coastal community problems”.
More importantly, though, he thinks the government needs to show respect for coastal places. “It’s about going to those communities, listening to them, showing that they see them as part of the national story and that they want them and everyone in those places to succeed,” he says.
“It is not enough to just have good policy. There is a feeling of disconnect in many of these places, and unless they tackle that, Labour will still struggle.”
The Against the tide series is a collaboration between the Guardian and the documentary photographer Polly Braden and reports on the lives of young people in coastal communities across England and Wales
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