Thanet is divided over whether hopes for revival lie in ports and factories – or culture and cafes
The economy may be adding jobs at a rate of 50,000 a month, according to last week's figures, but some corners of the country, hit by heavy cuts and closures, are struggling. Thanet, the easternmost tip of Kent, where Ramsgate and Margate jut into the North Sea, has been trying for two years to recover from the blow of US pharmaceutical company Pfizer's decision to close its sprawling hi-tech research centre near Sandwich, putting 3,000 skilled workers out of a job.
The entire local economy, already blighted by some of the UK's highest youth unemployment rates, felt the effects, and the closure has been blamed for the district's lurch to the right in last year's local elections, when Ukip came second to the Tories. Party leader Nigel Farage is considering running for Thanet South, where the party is polling 30%, in next year's general election.
Western parts of Kent, such as Tunbridge Wells and Maidstone, look and feel like satellites of the capital, comfortable in their share of renewed economic growth, expected to have been around 0.7% in the last quarter. But the far east of the county has pockets of deprivation to rival the north of the UK. Ramsgate, Margate and Broadstairs have in recent years seen a sharp decline in seaside visitors, the collapse of the Ramsgate ferry port and the closure of Margate's Dreamland amusements complex.
With Pfizer gone, there is a dearth of big businesses operating in the area. Margate, the much-discussed focus of Mary Portas's high street regeneration efforts, is still blighted, with one in four shops boarded up. Over the district boundary to the south, Dover has suffered a similar decline, losing a third of its channel ferry business, mostly to tunnel operator Eurotunnel.
David Foley, head of Thanet and East Kent chamber of commerce, is optimistic about the region's prospects but despairs at the overlapping planning responsibilities of Thanet and Kent councils and the conflicts among the many funding bodies pumping money into the region.
He angrily tells the tale of the county council and East Kent Opportunities (EKO), a body it funds, taking Thanet district council to court over proposals – blocked by the council's planning committee – for 650 homes on a mixed-use industrial park based around Manston airport. Meanwhile, the Manston Park development has struggled to attract business tenants.
Another victim of overlapping planning responsibilities is the Flambeau plastics factory, on the edge of Ramsgate. Managing director John Wingfield has successfully fought off Chinese competition to make buckets and toolboxes for building materials company Jewson, and a range of parts for car assembly plants in the Midlands.
Flambeau's American owners are frustrated that the dilapidated factory does not come up to the required health and safety standards for manufacturing medical equipment. But the truth is that millions of pounds needs to be ploughed into new facilities just to save the existing jobs. (And, as with many capital-intensive businesses, even an expansion of output would create few new jobs.)
Spending to stand still is the new reality in an age when all Flambeau's plastics-making kit can easily be shipped to a new site. An enterprise zone in, say, the Midlands, offering a tax-free existence, could well tempt the business away – in fact it could move almost anywhere in Europe, which it serves for its US parent.
East Kent does have its own enterprise zone, in the shape of the 50-year-old Pfizer site. In 2012 it was taken over by a consortium that has already made a success of an abandoned factory in Teesside, attracting 65 firms that employ 2,000 workers. The Pfizer site, renamed Discovery Park, was promptly awarded tax-free status by the government, along with 12 other sites around the country.
Pfizer still has 600 employees working there, in a building it rents from Discovery Park, and another 400 people now work there too, mostly in micro businesses that have taken up residence in the site's office blocks.
Anne Stone, leasing manager, says the target is 3,000 employees by 2017: "We were seen as outsiders at the beginning, and local people were suspicious of our motives, but now they are right behind the project."
But Thanet council leader Clive Hart – at the head of a minority Labour administration that benefited from Ukip splitting the Tory vote – says this is hampering his own regeneration efforts. While a fan of Discovery Park, he points out that its enterprise zone status means it can offer five years' tax-free trading, which makes it more attractive than the two business parks in his district. The idea of tax breaks is to create new jobs, he says, not to allow one area to steal from others.
Hart is keen to push through the housebuilding and business development plans that are already in the pipeline, and as a member of EKO is part of the consortium fighting the planning department's rejection of the Manston homes. He supports plans to lease the Ramsgate port to a new operator – even though £3.5m was lost in unpaid fees when the last one went bust – and revamping the amusements complex. after a local trust raised £10m from the government's SeaChange fund, the National Lottery and others to transform it into a heritage-themed amusement park
Other projects are mired in planning wrangles or lack funds. Manston airport was famed for its extra-long runway – badly damaged planes were able to land there having struggled back from the continent during the second world war – but is now a low-key commercial destination for Kenyan flowers and fresh vegetables, and has a twice-daily KLM slot to Amsterdam. Hopes it would be part of Howard Davies's plans for a ring of London airports were dashed when the report he published just before Christmas focused on Heathrow and Gatwick.
Stagecoach founder Ann Gloag recently bought the site, and its debt, but has yet to make clear her intentions. The airport's chief executive, Charles Buchanan, believes Gloag is ready to be the next Richard Branson and will develop passenger flights from Manston, but she could just as easily apply to build houses there.
Kent's local authorities are under intense pressure to build homes. An application for a second development of 850 homes, also next to the airport, is going through the planning process. Separately, local papers have reported interest in buying and renting from several London boroughs in need of properties for housing benefit claimants.
Green councillor Ian Driver accuses council leader Hart of trying to reinvent the past. He says plans for the airport and commercial port in Ramsgate are doomed to fail, and the emphasis should be on developing local culture and attracting visitors.
Improvements to the HS1 high speed rail link from London will help the area win business, he says, but mostly offer Margate and Ramsgate the opportunity to triumph in the way Brighton has. Where the train from London to Margate once took two-and-a-quarter hours, it now takes 90 minutes. With HS1 possibly cutting that time to just over an hour, it's no wonder the scheme is seen by all as the region's saviour.
Even with the longer train journey, Margate's Turner Contemporary gallery has succeeded in attracting over a million visitors since it opened in 2011. The gallery's director, Victoria Pomery, is keen to point out that so far the gallery has generated around £6m a year of additional spending and supported an estimated 130 jobs. At £17m, it is an expensive jobs generator, but Hart at the council and Foley at the chamber of commerce are convinced that it can be the foundation stone for further regeneration.
But others remain to be persuaded that copying areas such as north Norfolk and Brighton by favouring cultural businesses is a better bet than spending scarce funds on reviving the sectors that once dominated this part of Kent.
Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 hours ago.