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The hidden plight of seaside Britain

Great Yarmouth trades council president JOHN CANNELL and secretary LEE SUTTON puncture the Tories’ lies and show Morning Star editor Ben Chacko how their policies have dragged down the town

CONSERVATIVE Party chairman Brandon Lewis calls his Great Yarmouth constituency “a fantastic example of the British tourism industry.”

Like the Tory-run council, Lewis is friendly with the owners of the hotels and caravan parks, praising them for attracting millions of families to the seaside town each year.

But speak to local trade unionists and the picture isn’t quite so rosy. On a recent visit I was taken on a tour of the centre by trades council president John Cannell and secretary Lee Sutton, who pointed to the many boarded-up stores and the almost empty shopping arcade as evidence of a “town in major decline.”

Cannell gives me a whistle-stop tour of Great Yarmouth’s history, from its days as Britain’s biggest herring port to its role as the hub for a “vibrant holiday industry” centred on boarding houses.

“We’d get the people down on holiday from the big industrial towns — the Glasgow week, the Sheffield week, the Leicester week, or fortnight,” he says. “But then the industries closed, the old fortnights stopped, and coupled with the birth of holidays abroad the old boarding house town disappeared.”

Today’s holiday industry is different, “run by large, national and multinational companies.

“They pay the minimum wage and employ people on zero-hours contracts.”

It’s not the only work available — there’s “some based offshore, but there’s been massive redundancies in recent years.”

While some of the offshore jobs — such as those created by the wind farm industry — pay better than the English average, “it’s people who are living elsewhere commuting into the borough to do those jobs. They’re employing people who have relevant skills rather than training up the local populace.”

The government had a target for 50 per cent of offshore industry supply-chain jobs to be in Britain — but when the trades council wrote to local MP Lewis about whether that had been met, they were fobbed off with “a bland reply that didn’t answer the question. There was no way that that had been reached.”

Another major employer is the care industry. Twenty-four per cent of Great Yarmouth residents are over 65, more than the English average of 17 per cent, meaning there are jobs in care homes. “But that again is a sector characterised by zero-hours contracts and the minimum wage.”

What with low pay and unemployment, around 40 per cent of the population are on one form of benefit or another, according to Cannell.

“And an upsetting thing about it is politically we’ve got a Tory council. There was quite a high level of Ukip councillors who’ve now joined the Tory Party” (seven crossed the floor in one swoop last autumn).

“People blame the foreign workers for the economic problems of Great Yarmouth — problems actually caused by the decisions of our elected representatives,” says Sutton.

“The Tories are interested in defending the tourist industry, but not the quality of the jobs in it, and they defend it to the detriment of better paid jobs. Actually what Great Yarmouth and other seaside towns need is diversification away from tourism. And if the private sector is not going to deliver that, you need government intervention, local or otherwise.”

You have to start somewhere, however, and for the trades council the tourist industry was the obvious place.

That’s why last August drivers entering the town were greeted by local trade unionists carrying a banner reading: “Welcome to a Low-wage Town: Holidays Come At a Price, Zero-Hour Contracts and Poverty Pay.”

“We had a positive response from the people driving past — buses, motorists. But the manager of Parkdean Resorts came out and said you can’t stand there, we don’t pay [just] the minimum wage!”

Cannell and Sutton don’t believe that. But it was clear management was rattled. “People were going into reception and asking the workers how much they were being paid. There was quite a chain reaction in the holiday camps.

“We had people who used to be miners coming up, the solidarity was great. If you think about the market for caravan and camp holidays, the customers are often in the same position. They can empathise with the plight of the workers in those camps because they are familiar with zero-hours and low pay.

“But at the end of the day you need trade union organisation. We’re yet to break in as we’re very much at the start of the campaign.” Sutton calls last summer’s activity a “dummy run for our activity in 2018.”

The activists didn’t start by seeking to shame the big employers. “At the start we took the view, at least give the holiday industry a chance to respond. We wrote to all the major ones asking if they recognised trade unions.

“Not one responded. None were prepared to engage. So since we weren’t able to open up a communications channel we picked on an employer — Haven, we had our reasons — and sought to raise awareness.”

Haven is sponsoring Great Yarmouth’s first air show in June. “They’ve got money for that, but not to pay their workers a real living wage?”

As well as direct pressure on the companies, the trades council seeks to prod the borough council into action. A question asking about the air show will go to the council when it meets to set its budget on Thursday.

A supplementary question asks the leader of the council to “ensure that the tourism strategy addresses the issue of low pay in the industry by agreeing a strategy that encourages businesses to adopt the real living wage” and asks the council to “use its influence and leverage in terms of resources used in supporting the industry to bring about the early adoption of the real living wage by Haven Leisure and Parkdean Resorts.”

These resources are considerable. “There’s a close relationship between the council and the holiday industry. The town hall tourism officer is shared with a private company.

“A lot of the assets on the seafront are actually owned by the borough council and leased to businesses. Look at its asset register online and a large number of the hotels are not freehold. Haven Seashore caravan park used to be the racecourse, that land is part owned by Great Yarmouth borough council. It’s one of the most asset-rich councils in the country and since it does own the land it should have the leverage.”

In combining political pressure with direct challenges to employers, Great Yarmouth trades council is taking rather more responsibility for the town’s future than the borough council is.

But the low-pay campaign is just one sign that the town’s trade unions are determined to make a difference. They played an instrumental role too in setting up the Unemployed Workers Centre — whose volunteer staff’s amazing work with the most vulnerable I was also privileged to witness.

The second part of this article will appear in Monday’s Morning Star.

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