Far from the Summit
Just a few miles from the Cornwall hotel hosting leaders of the wealthy G7 nations, some of the UK’s poorest families are strugggling to get by
Three months from now, US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French premier Emmanuel Macron will fly into Cornwall for the G7 summit.
Hosted by Boris Johnson, the world’s most powerful leaders will descend on the South West to thrash out their fightback from coronavirus and the climate crisis.
Expected to touch down at Newquay Airport, once a part of neighbouring RAF St Mawgan, they will be whisked to the splendid isolation of the Carbis Bay Hotel.
Here, they will be surrounded by steel and police on one side and the North Atlantic on the other.
Yet just a few miles from their heavily protected, five-star luxury, some of the poorest families in Britain are struggling to get by.
The contrast between rich and poor is perhaps more stark here than anywhere outside London.
As wealthy second-home owners flock from the capital to multimillion-pound boltholes, hard-up workers on minimum wage or jobless families cram into council houses and old miners’ cottages.
In one part of the county, the unemployment rate is one-and-ahalf times the national figure. In January, Prime Minister Mr Johnson said how much he looked forward to welcoming world leaders to “this great region” – but the admiration may not be mutual.
Cornwall’s fishing industry provides scallops for the most expensive Cornish restaurants, when they are not closed due to Covid-19 lockdowns.
Its fishing fleet is now battling the impact of the PM’s Brexit deal, and the new barriers exporters face
selling to the EU. The hospitality sector is still shut and will miss the lucrative Easter spell for the second year running, ripping the heart out of many towns and villages.
An “economic intelligence” report by Cornwall Council shows the numbers on Universal Credit are up “substantially” – almost doubling between March and S 2020, from 24,876 to 48,890.
The bulletin also reveals HOST Mr Johnson
This will be a pivotal moment, putting the spotlight on Cornwall
KIM CONCHIE HEAD OF CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
there are 27,000 “workless households”. At 15.3%, that is 1.3% higher than the UK average.
And while the UK rate for unemployment claimants among 16 to 64-year-olds in August 2020 was 6.6%, it was higher in all six Cornish parliamentary constituencies. Worst-hit was Camborne and Redruth at 9.8%, with a similar picture in St Austell and Newquay at 9.1%. In both North and South East Cornwall it is close to 8%, and stands at 7.3% in Truro and Falmouth and 6.9% in St Ives.
All six constituencies were won by the Tories at the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections.
Seasonal unemployment over the winter, and the pandemic hit to the hospitality sector, are likely to have made things far worse.
Even those who have jobs earn almost a fifth less, with the 2019 average wage at £20,353 – just 82% of the figure for the UK as a whole.
Cornwall’s struggles pre-date both Covid and Brexit. In 2018 the region’s businesses earned just £19,288 per head of population – two-thirds of the UK average.
At the turn of the millennium, the county qualified for hundreds of millions of pounds of Brussels funding, ranking as one of western Europe’s poorest areas.
Cornwall Chamber of Commerce boss Kim Conchie hopes hosting the G7 could pave the way for an employment revolution, helping young people stay in the county.
He said: “The 20th century didn’t really suit Cornwall. It was the era of mass-production of homogenised products – we didn’t have the scale or the skill or the nearness to market to really benefit from that.”
With one theme of the summit set to be the climate crisis, he wants a focus on high-skill industry for the region such as renewable energy – citing plans already proposed for a floating wind farm off the Cornish coast.
He also points to lithium mining, needed for electric car batteries and mobile phones, and the Cornish space port at Newquay, set to send satellites into low orbit.
Mr Conchie believes driving a green tech revolution will prevent an exodus of youngsters who are forced to seek good employment prospects outside the county.
He said: “I’d like to see jobs and careers created which enable young people to stay, in a way they haven’t been able to for 150 years.
“I hope this will be a pivotal moment, having the world’s spotlight on Cornwall and those new areas which sit very comfortably with the Cornish psyche and the resources we have here.”