POSTCARD FROM THE EDGE
Britons are flocking in their thousands to traditional coastal towns. But is it enough to save Covid-hit local economies?
SUMMER getaways abroad have been all but cancelled. Ministers’ decision to pull Spain off the quarantine-free list with just a few hours’ notice prompted many Britons to set their sights on escapes closer to home.
Boris Johnson last week told the nation 2020 ‘is a great, great year for people to have a staycation’.
Now, as government support unwinds, a tsunami of job losses threatens millions working in restaurants, hotels, tourist attractions and shops.
The question is whether the Prime Minister’s clarion call will be enough to save businesses in Britain’s holiday destinations.
In Blackpool, a favourite of generations of Scots, businesses said they are seeing a rising tide of family visitors after lockdown lifted on July 4.
Earlier this week – despite damp and windy weather – tickets were sold out at the seaside town’s Madame Tussauds, while queues waited for the Tower and amusement arcades.
Trams along the Golden Mile were displaying signs showing they were full to capacity, which admittedly has been heavily reduced due to social distancing.
Claire Smith, of Stay Blackpool, a trade body for the town’s hotel and bed & breakfast owners, said: ‘People are not going abroad, they have been stuck at home for months, and they are coming back to the seaside. They are booking longer stays as well, which is marvellous.’
Smith said her own bed & breakfast, and a second one run by her husband Mark, have both been full on recent weekends.
Also optimistic was Jane Cole, vice president of North West Lancashire Chamber of Commerce, who said: ‘We are getting a lot more families than we usually do, which is nice to see.’
Car parks are 2pc busier than last year and local bus travel is at 50pc of last year’s levels.
Greater Manchester and other parts of north-west England, however, were last month sent into a local lockdown after a spike in cases. But that has not stopped younger day trippers coming out in force on sunny days – but at the same time some businesses are reeling from the cancellation of hundreds of coach trips. It means businesses catering for families and a younger clientele are upbeat, but traditional attractions relying on older visitors are less positive.
Palmist and clairvoyant Debra Petulengro, whose famous Romany family has read the palms of the Queen Mother and The Beatles, said customer numbers have dropped from 50 people per day to a maximum of only 20 on a busy day and sometimes just ‘two or three’.
She said: ‘It’s terrible. Our clientele is more middle age to old age and they are feeling more vulnerable. The only hope we’ve got is the vaccine.’ Further along the beach Neil Parkinson, 62, owner of
Roberts’ Oyster Bar, Blackpool’s last surviving seafront seafood cafe, said Government support – in the form of £10,000 in grants – only paid the bills for lockdown.
He said: ‘The situation is terrible. If there’s a second lockdown it will finish Blackpool off – businesses won’t recover.’
There were already signs of the boost to struggling businesses from the Eat Out To Help Out scheme, through which the Government pays 50pc of diners’ bills up to £10. At the Beach House cafe overlooking the sands near North Pier, manager Nathan McAndrew said he’s fully booked on normally quiet midweek days.
But social distancing remains a spectre for businesses, despite the reduction in distance from two to one metre, and threatens to make them unprofitable as they have to turn customers away.
Publican Kerry Humphries, 49, landlady of The Mitre, in the shadow of Blackpool Tower, said: ‘If it wasn’t for the current restrictions, I’d have normal trading figures for the time of year.’
Tourism was worth about £127bn to the economy last year, and domestic tourism, the mainstay for seaside towns, constitutes about £86bn of that, according to tourism agency, Visit Britain.
Britain’s hotspots are also particularly vulnerable to downturns. They are ‘often constituted of high numbers of small and medium-sized businesses’ and highly ‘reliant on tourism’, a parliamentary report from April 2019 found.
And even with staycations on the rise, the collapse in foreign tourist numbers is still catastrophic.
For Brighton, travellers from abroad usually make up 40pc of summer visitors and almost every business said staycations had failed to fill the gap.
Local leaders said more Britons were making the trip to the beach but, as in Blackpool, some groups still are not confident to head out to crowded areas.
The number of coach trips has collapsed from 200 per day to zero, reducing visitor numbers by up to 10,000 per day.
Anne Ackord, chief executive of Brighton Pier, said: ‘Most businesses in Brighton are trading at only about 40pc to 45pc of last year, and for small firms that’s way below the break-even point. I think when September comes there will be an awful lot of jobs going and businesses going under.’
Brighton’s nightlife is also closed, meaning the stag and hen parties that fill the streets
‘ A vaccine is our only hope’ ‘A second wave will finish Blackpool off’
until the early hours, and support the night-time economy, are also staying away.
The New Madeira Hotel, which overlooks the beach and draws a young crowd, said bookings were down 40pc because of the closure of nightclubs, but right next door the A Room With A View guesthouse said it was fully booked.
The problem for Brighton and Blackpool is that any return to normality is likely to be too little too late. Week by week consumers are gaining confidence to leave their homes and spend, but footfall on the High Street is still down 47pc.
There are only six weeks of the season left, and Britain’s Indian summer will disappear at the same time as the Government ends the furlough scheme – on October 31. Little doubt, then, that without this business lifesupport many small businesses will go bust, potentially tearing the heart out of some of the UK’s most loved towns.
Apart from sunshine, business leaders called for staycations to be more widely promoted and for an Eat Out-style subsidy for domestic tourists.
Miss Ackord said: ‘Seasides will always be popular, but many businesses won’t survive this year.’
by Tom Witherow and Richard Marsden