Cornwall torn by need to stay safe and cash in on summer
On the Friday before a sunny bank holiday, St Ives should be filling up with out-of-towners. Instead, it is a ghost town.
The car park has three cars in it, the beach is quiet save for a handful of dog walkers and the streets – which by summer are effectively pedestrianised they are so jammed with people – are empty. On the seafront, pubs have their storm gates up and many of the shops are closed — fudge, “nautical goods and pirate bits” and paintings of St Ives don’t qualify as essential items.
But while Cornwall waits to be told when it can safely open its doors to the five million tourists who flock here every year, tension is building between wealthy retirees who would have holidaymakers stay away and small-business owners staring down the barrel of what many are calling “the year of three winters”.
Mike Hancock, who owns boat tour company St Ives Boats, and relies on the summer tourist trade, says he has had no income since September.
“It’s always a long, hard winter and you hope for a good summer to make it up. We’ve missed our two busiest times already, which is Easter and the May bank holidays, when we would be out 15 hours a day, doing 15 trips.”
Like many skippers, Mr Hancock is trying to make plans for how he could get up and running safely, starting by halving the number of passengers. With no government grant to tide him over, he is “desperately hoping” to be operating again in time for the school holidays, which generate “30 to 40 per cent” of his annual income.
“[The grant] is based around business rates,” he explains. “We don’t pay business rates, not having premises. So it’s been no help for us.”
One restaurant owner, who declined to be named, said he would like to “wake up and for all this to be a dream”. He owns 10 businesses and employs 300 staff around St Ives, but may not be able to keep them on if he can’t trade at full capacity. “We’ve just got through one of the harshest winters on record, and we solely rely on the trade from July to September to get us through. The pot is empty.
“Our worry is that when the furlough ends we can’t trade at full capacity. Lots of our restaurants are too small for social distancing.”
For some, the decision to open isn’t simple. Martin Van Staeyn’s B&B, The Old Vicarage, has been in the family since 1969. Lockdown has hit his guest house hard, but he is on the fence about reopening. “We’d want to make sure we’ve got the proper tracking and tracing in place. Business-wise we’re losing, obviously – but we’ve got the grant, which is good.”
He is cautious about allowing tourists to descend on Cornwall before it’s safe, but adds: “There will be a point where we’ve got to say, well, we’ll have to open, or we’ll close forever.”
Carol Davies, who runs a holiday let from a renovated cabin in her garden, says many self-catering holiday businesses like hers have not received help from the Government. “It’s an administrative anomaly,” she explains.
Meanwhile, the law currently enables people who use second homes as businesses to avoid council tax.
The mayor of St Ives has pleaded with tourists to stay away. Councillor Tony Harris said second home owners should not come to Cornwall yet. “There is no need for visitors to come to our town during the present crisis.”
Social media has been filled with animosity towards people who have travelled to Cornwall since restrictions were lifted, with so-called “corona police” reporting sightings of children they don’t recognise on the beach or accents that don’t sound local.
James Mustoe, a Conservative councillor on the south Cornish coast, says some of this has come from out-of-towner retirees. He says: “A lot of those people have moved down here and retired, so they don’t need to work because they’re of a certain age, and they’re also more susceptible.”
Elsewhere, police went on dawn patrol on Thursday in Newquay to target campervans that had come to Cornwall, while nearby Perranporth was described as experiencing a “visitor tsunami” by one councillor.
A “tsunami” has not swamped St Ives, though many would be keen to start trading if it did. As skipper Mike Hancock says: “We’re now on the seventh or eighth month of no income. Winter is going to come fast again.”