Tendring District Council and Essex County Council – Written evidence (RST0003)
1 a. You may wish to reference the impact of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic on your area
1 b. It would also be valuable to hear about any projects that have continued or started since the Committee visited your area
1a. Impact of Covid and Cost of Living Crisis:
COVID-19 affected the local economy. Clacton was found to have the 3rd most vulnerable economy to COVID-19 in UK as 25% of all employed people in Clacton work in sectors which were shut during lockdown. As a result the furlough scheme was particularly important to the District to protect firms and workers. Business grants were also important in keeping firms afloat, and the district designed a slick but accountable process that enabled local firms to benefit.
The cost of living crisis affects Tendring, as it does the rest of the country, with rising food and energy cost inflation putting pressure on household bills. Everyone is impacted; at the same time those essential costs form a larger part of smaller budgets, with those on low incomes facing significant challenges.
While some Tendring firms are ‘hidden gems’ with major manufactures, engineering, import / export and a growing wine sector, the larger sectors include the seasonal tourist economy, retail, and service sector jobs. There is also a significantly larger older population than nationally as people retire to the coast. Overall this impacts on the surplus income available in surrounding communities.
Clacton and Dovercourt town centres were less affected by Covid than others in Essex as they cater for local residents - who could still use them, rather larger centres which saw major drops in footfall. However, those town centres still face challenges, with local residents reporting they miss major retailers in Clacton like Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer’s which have left the town centre in the last five years. As with all town centres, they compete with online, and out-of-town shopping with easy free parking is expanding on the edge of Clacton, and areas of Clacton closest to the high street, losing approximately 10% of their footfall to Colchester.
Housing is a significant challenge as housing costs rise in the private rented sector, tracking rising interest rates for landlords. With rents rising faster than some private sector tenants’ ability to pay, more people require council homelessness support (driving risking costs for the council). Low quality private rented sector housing subsidised by government housing benefit rules remains a core driver of the challenges faced by Jaywick Sands residents, along with high flood risk. There remains strong demand for 1 or 2 bedroom affordable properties in Clacton. As of 1st May 2020, there were 1958 households on the Tendring District Council housing register (up from 608 in 2017). The Council want to provide more social housing but it is constrained by Right-to-Buy rules, which make much development unviable.
Infrastructure is a constraint as Tendring is bounded on two sides by rivers and a third by the North Sea. Tendring towns along the coast are also separated by inland water from each other. A key requirement is improvements to our two main routes, the A133 and the A120, and most importantly, the junction between them. Currently it is not possible to turn right from Clacton towards Harwich from the A133 to the A120 given the junction design, with vehicles taken to Colchester instead. Freeport East at Harwich is source of new jobs and skills but will be difficult to access for students and employees from Clacton.
1b. Projects:
Freeport East
Clacton Civic Quarter Project Levelling Up Fund (LUF) – TDC were notified that their LUF bid for Clacton for the full £19.96m was successful in January 2023 and partners are now in the process of mobilising the programme. The project will will rejuvenate a key area of the town to deliver 28 new homes, and a community hub including a new library and adult community learning space, and proposed University of Essex Centre for Coastal communities. This bid was TDC’s third attempt at securing funding for Clacton following unsuccessful bids as part of the Future High Street Fund and LUF Round 1.
Jaywick Place Plan – TDC have commissioned work to develop a Place Plan, which will set out a long-term strategy for achieving a sustainable community within Jaywick Sands. Alongside this will be a new Design Guide, setting a strategic approach and key design parameters for future development opportunities within the locality. Both documents will be adopted as Supplementary Planning Documents (SPDs) in support of the Council’s Local Plan, with the intention that the Design Guide is adopted in 2023.
High Street Task Force – Between February and August 2022 TDC’s Economic Growth Team engaged with one of the Government-funded High Street Task Force (HSTF) experts as a result of being recognised as one of the first 70 town centres in the UK most in need of support with local placemaking post-Covid. TDC undertook an audit of all Clacton Town centre businesses, with common themes identified. The HSTF recommended establishing a Task and Finish group incorporating town centre businesses, TDC, partners and stakeholders to action solutions.
Jaywick Community Supermarket – Through the Essex County Council Levelling Up Fund, a new community supermarket to support families on low incomes to buy food and essential household items at lower prices has been launched (Jan 23). This is to assist with the cost-of-living crisis and help support levelling up in the most deprived community in the UK.
Jaywick Sands Coastal Communities Team (CCT) – In recent months the CCT has been re-established following a temporary pause on activities during the pandemic. The group includes members and officers from both the district and county councils covering a range of professional specialisms relevant to tackling the complex issues, including landlord enforcement, flooding and the Environment Agency strategic sea defence review and the Jaywick Place Plan and New Design Code.
The Jaywick Commercial Workspace – A £4.7m scheme being delivered in Jaywick, creating 24 affordable business units, a ten-pitch covered market, training room, café, public toilets and community garden. The managed workspace will bring additional jobs to the area and much needed low cost business space for the local community. The scheme received £2.3m initial funding from the SELEP Getting Building Fund, with an additional £2m investment from Essex County Council and £405K from Tendring District Council. The building is to be completed in summer 2023.
Clacton diagnostic hub. The local NHS Trust, ESNEFT and Further Education provider Colchester Institute offered 130 job-seekers a free 12-week programme backed by £470,000 from the Community Renewal Fund. The programme focussed on medical diagnostics, such as phlebotomy, pathology, endoscopy and medical imaging to help recruit staff to the new £22m Clacton Diagnostic Centre, which operates 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. The project successfully enabled learners to find work in the NHS, and the Clacton Diagnostic Centre to launch well-staffed.
Essex Pedal Power – A cycling initiative in Clacton and Jaywick, was launched in July 2021 and has so far distributed approx. 550 high quality, new bikes to local residents. The programme aims to increase physical and mental wellbeing and increase access to employment, training and local services. The bike “loan-to-give-away” scheme provides a new bike with GPS tracker to eligible residents who, if they use the bike regularly for the first year, will then keep it. The scheme includes social prescribing bikes and prioritisation of bike allocation in partnership with the local employment centre. The scheme is funded by the SELEP Getting Building Fund (£2.7m) to deliver over 1,500 bikes by spring 2023 and a major upgrade to cycle route along the seafront from Jaywick to Clacton.
1 c. About any partnership working with the private sector or voluntary organisations
Colchester Tendring Borders Garden Community. Over the next thirty or so years, a new Garden Community will be created on the Tendring Colchester Border, which will feature between 7,000 and 9,000 homes, as well as new employment spaces. A joint committee of Tendring District, Colchester City and Essex County Councils oversees the project, and there is close working with the developer Latimer, a subsidiary of Clarion Homes.
Freeport East ltd. Freeport East is one of eight new Freeports in England that will become a hub for global trade and national regeneration. It has tax sites at Harwich, Felixstowe and Stowmarket. The company that governs the development of the programme has directors from three District and two County Councils, the LEP, University of Essex, and major private sector port companies.
Essex Pedal Power as a partnership includes Essex County Council, Tendring District Council, the Active Wellbeing Society, Suffolk & North East Essex Integrated Care Board and the Council for Voluntary Services Tendring. This approach has enabled the project to successfully leverage additional funding, including from Sport England and London Marathon Charity.
Yes. The District and County Councils have targeted available funding towards projects that tackle local challenges and grasp local opportunities. These are of course small scale and short term compared to the vast majority of government funding to support local areas, which flows through mainstream public sector and welfare budgets.
Tendring was a priority area under the Community Renewal Fund (CRN), a one-year pilot UKSPF programme, which replaced EU funding. Five of the seven successful bids (c£3m) in Essex covering skills, employment and business support, included a focus on Tendring. Projects included training people to work in a new diagnostics centre in Clacton, complete retrofit training, and support those in disadvantaged communities to become self-employed. The programme was short term, and whilst it had some notable successes in addressing areas of concern, it did not dovetail into the UKSPF as UKSPF skills funding comes in two years after the end of the this funding stream.
Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) & Rural England Prosperity Fund – The UKSPF Government funding scheme has allocated £1.18m to Tendring District Council to be spent over 3 years. An Investment Plan was developed and submitted to Government in July 2022. Spend for year one includes support for the business units in Jaywick, a town centre regeneration scheme in Harwich, Cost of Living support to residents facing hardship and preparatory work on an innovation centre linked to Freeport. TDC will run an open call for projects in years 2 and 3, to address the interventions applied for in the Investment Plan. TDC have submitted the Rural England Prosperity Fund prospectus to government and their response is awaited.
Arts Council Cultural Development Fund – Tendring has been identified by the Arts Council as one of its “priority levelling up for culture places” (2021-2024) in acknowledgement that it is an under-funded area. In 2022 TDC submitted in EOI to Arts Council England’s Cultural Development Fund for £5m towards the purchase and development of a local historic building (The Savoy Theatre in Clacton) into a filming skills academy and community centre. Unfortunately, this application was unsuccessful. However further work is underway in terms of a more detailed feasibility study sponsored by ECC to identify possible regeneration opportunities through creative and cultural activity.
No, connectivity is key to growing economic activity in coastal areas and more needs to be done.
Transport: it is widely documented that there is insufficient investment in the transport connectivity and services necessary to support regeneration and growth in coastal areas. Poor transport affects students getting to college when they turn 16, and people getting to work. Most people who work in Clacton, also live in Clacton, and the same for Harwich, especially for lower-waged employment (2011 Census travel to work data). This contrasts with the larger neighbouring economy of Colchester. Transport investment should therefore be designed to support local growth, attracting people in to Clacton, improving access to opportunities in Colchester, and linking Clacton to the emerging Freeport in Harwich.
Clacton to Harwich. The transport network in Tendring, both road and rail, radiates into Tendring from Colchester. This means that links to Colchester are good, although congested at peak times, but local links, eg between as Clacton and Harwich/Freeport East, are relatively poor and not well served by road, bus or train.
Road: By car, the key junction between the two main roads in Tendring (A120 and A133) does not allow vehicles to turn from Clacton to Harwich, and takes drivers on to Colchester. So to travel between the two main towns in Tendring requires either driving up and back to Colchester or cross country. The A120 remains a single carriageway road towards the port of Harwich. The A133 from Clacton to Colchester has single carriageway sections and remains congested at peak times.
Rail: There is a mainline rail station at Manningtree which enables fast access to Colchester, Chelmsford, and takes an hour to get to London. All of the - many - other stations in Tendring are branch lines. For example it takes at least 1 ¼ hours to travel from Clacton to Harwich by train with two changes. The focus of local effort is to advocate for a train every 30 minutes through the day from London to Clacton, which is currently hourly off peak.
Bus: Go-Ahead Essex run routes at a basic standard with older vehicles. Reductions in service as a result of Covid and rising costs have further impacted the service. Away from the coast, Tendring is a very rural area. Connection between Clacton and Harwich take about an hour and are every 1-2 hours through the day, and to Colchester also take an hour and go hourly, so not particularly well suited to attracting people to employment.
ECC’s area bus review is a strategic study identifying a range of potential measures, including the Clacton Connect bid for the Bus Service Improvement Plan. Establishing a transport hub within Tendring would enable better bus links between a wider range of places.
ECC was not successful in a recent Levelling Up Fund bid to Government titled ‘Sustainable Access to
jobs in Tendring’, which included upgraded bus facilities in Clacton and Harwich and the introduction of a new Demand Responsive Transport system in Tendring. This project should continue to be on government’s funding priority list. ECC is currently updating the transport evidence dataset in preparation for the development of Local Transport Plan 4. This new data will support the identification of transport interventions needed in Clacton to feed into all future funding bids.
Digital Connectivity – Lack of affordability digital connectivity is a leading cause of digital exclusion in Essex, especially prevalent in coastal and rural communities. Digital Essex has worked with Tendring District Council on a programme of activities to increase access to an affordable internet connection. Initiatives have focused on Clacton, Jaywick and Harwich targeting residents who could be eligible for a social broadband tariff and potentially save up to £144 a year on broadband bills.
Nationally just 3% of eligible households are taking advantage of social tariffs, and on-the-ground research, has shown anecdotal evidence from coastal residents in Tendring that there is little knowledge of these offers. ECC are sharing these findings with Ofcom, to help them call on more providers to promote what is on offer and improve discounted deals.
A number of Tendring residents have advised that they have no broadband connectivity at home and would therefore be more likely to use mobile data. Work is now underway to make access to free mobile data available for residents.
Some communities, particularly elderly residents, are less motivated to access digital technologies than younger people. Tendring has relatively large older population. Within Tendring/Clacton the North East Essex Digital Access Support Team (NEE DAST) offer support to residents age 18+ free services to gain digital skills.
There is a good base level of digital coverage in coastal communities at 99% 30Mbps+. However future coverage requirements will be gigabit (1,000 MB +) provision. Current gigabit coverage is 29%, which will likely to increase to 92% within Clacton and Jaywick by 2025. Four percent of premises along the Clacton coastline will not get coverage under current plans. Importantly, this data is coverage. The significant cost of connecting to Gigabit service will significantly limit actual take up and use by residents and businesses.
Schools have re-opened post-pandemic. However, attendance remain a concern for some pupils, and the negative attainment impacts that follows from poorer attendance. And more widely educational levels remain below the national average. In 2020, the percentage of residents in the Clacton constituency with qualifications of NVQ4 level and above was 23%, compared to 43.1% across the rest of the country. Tendring is ranked 322 out of 331 English and Welsh local authorities for qualification levels of the local labour force.
The Tendring Education Strategic Board began in 2020 bringing together County and District Councils with local school head teachers, Trusts and other partners to improve teacher recruitment and retention, pupil attendance and attainment, and language and communication support. Promotional work to attract teachers has been undertaken, and training rolled out in speech and language therapy to support children’s communication. This work has been supported by £500,000 from Essex County Council from their levelling up grants.
Proposed devolution areas as set out in the Levelling up and Regeneration Bill have the potential to bring together local levers of growth to support coastal areas in delivering long-term sustainable change. Devolution will enable public sector organisations to join up interventions on a variety of issues in a way that is tailored to the needs of local places and to integrate more closely with the public health and prevention work that is being led by the Integrated Care System (ICS) to strengthen health and wellbeing outcomes.
Devolution provides a greater ability to invest in local skills provision through a devolved adult skills budget which is more closely aligned to future growth sectors such as those provided at Freeport East in Harwich. There are also major opportunities in clean energy generation through hydrogen, solar farms and offshore wind, all possible as result of Essex’s position on the energy coast. Devolution could provide a Skills Academy or funding for providers to have a campus in Tendring. Equally, an enhanced ability to connect residents to these opportunities through greater control of how transport infrastructure is delivered in the future will be of significant benefit to coastal communities. Devolution will provide an opportunity to deliver a more integrated system of sustainable transport which is key to energising and enabling many of the objectives set out by Government, including connecting residents with economic opportunities, removing constraints to growth caused by congested infrastructure, tackling disadvantage and inequality, improving public health and reducing our environmental impact. There are also significant opportunities to decarbonise the transport system to meet targets in the national transport decarbonisation plan.
Securing investment (both private and public) in coastal areas such as Tendring in support of housing development and economic regeneration is difficult due to the complex nature of the challenges the area faces, resulting in public sector needing to play a central role in stimulating market activity. Longer-term and more flexible approaches to public sector investment through devolution, will bring much-needed attention to coastal areas i.e. multi-year financial settlements as opposed to single year competitive bidding, which will bring greater focus to place-based regeneration programmes and ensure a longer-term, more sustainable approach to outcome delivery where it is needed most.
Integrated partnership working through more local control over spending is a positive step forward and will help remove barriers, enhance access to opportunities and maximise shared outcomes to support levelling up our coastal communities.
Essex County Council recently co-commissioned a report through the Coastal Communities Alliance (Communities on the edge – Levelling up England’s coastal communities, published on 1 February 2023) that looks at the challenges of levelling up coastal communities. This report highlights the divide between the performance of coastal and non-coastal communities. One-off and time limited Government support schemes have not improved the economic performance of coastal communities. The report recommends:
6 March 2023
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