Understanding employment in Britain's seaside towns
Summary
Traditionally, seaside towns have been one of the least understood of Britain's problem areas. Research by Professors Beatty and Fothergill in the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research (CRESR) has broken new ground by finding new ways to collect and understand the evidence on the people and work available in these coastal areas. This research has dispelled myths about their decline, providing instead a more subtle view of trends around the coast – there is economic growth as well as unemployment, and real differences from one town to another.
Where the impact of this research has really been felt is in local and national government. Here, its evidence and recommendations have helped policy makers and politicians make a number of important policy and funding decisions about our seaside towns, including the creation of the Coastal Communities Fund in 2011.
Our research
The seaside towns' research programme was conducted by Beatty and Fothergill and funded by ESRC, government and local partners because of the marked lack of evidence in relation to the evolving economic and social fortunes of these locations.
It had not previously been possible to look at the economic data for a particular seaside town and was therefore difficult to make policy decisions about how best to support them. By defining the boundary for each town and tracking its data from 1970 to the mid-2000s, the researchers were able to track trends, like employment change and net migration. Within the data they were also able to robustly estimate the effect of tourism on employment. The researchers also produced a survey of 1,200 non-employed residents in the seaside towns, and found that unemployment was not so much due to a lack of work locally but because many moved to the towns driven by housing-related factors and the benefits system.
The report by Sheffield Hallam University on small seaside towns, paints a compelling picture of economic and social challenges, enterprise and resilience over the last decade.
Eric Pickles MP
The impact
The research has had an impact on both central and local government policy. Following a select committee recommendation that reviewed the findings of the report, the government commissioned a number of related studies by Beatty and Fothergill. It also led to the licencing to all government agencies of the research method for defining seaside towns so that the government could analyse incapacity claimant trends in these areas. Informed by the evidence collected by the CRESR team, the Coalition Government's new approach to seaside towns was announced in 2011 with the creation of a Coastal Communities Fund, worth approximately £25m a year.
