A group of Labour MPs representing coastal areas will demand urgent action to tackle deprivation in their seats, warning a lack of progress could leave them vulnerable to Reform.
They will use the party conference this weekend to call for an equivalent of the London Challenge, which turned around failing schools in the capital under Tony Blair’s government, but with a focus on post-16 training and apprenticeships.
The Coastal Parliamentary Labour party group, set up earlier this year by Polly Billington, MP for East Thanet, which takes in the Kent coast around Margate and Ramsgate, is also demanding a dedicated minister for coastal communities, as well as spending on public transport and efforts to reduce entrenched health inequalities.
The campaign is a counterpoint to the repeated focus on red wall seats, generally based in formerly industrial towns and cities in the north and Midlands, dozens of which were won by the Conservatives in 2019 and re-taken by Labour last year.
While definitions of the red wall differ, Labour holds at least as many“sea wall” seats, with 66 MPs in the coastal group, and many of them face similar or greater levels of deprivation.
The call for major investment in skills and training, with a focus on non-graduate jobs, is because of the particular problems faced by many coastal areas of young people being neither in work nor education, and the “brain drain” of young people who do get degrees away from such areas.
The London Challenge is often cited as one of the greatest policy successes of the Blair years. When Labour came into power in 1997, many London schools were failing, with only 16% of students reaching the then-accepted standard of getting five GCSEs at grades A to C.
But a combination of extra investment of about £40m a year, which involved not just new school buildings but also better school leadership, meant that by 2010, London schools tended to out-perform those elsewhere in England.
The coastal MPs said there is also a political imperative for ministers to focus on improving their areas, given Reform’s record in performing well in such places – of the five seats the party won in 2024, four were coastal.
Billington will lead an event calling for the policies on Sunday at the Labour conference in Liverpool. She said: “My constituency may sit in affluent Kent, but the deprived towns of East Thanet have far more in common with Blackpool, Scarborough, or Rhyl than they do with leafy Sevenoaks or Tunbridge Wells.”
Coastal communities often face “unique challenges”, she said, including terrible transport links, less scope for people to travel to find work, and economies based on seasonal tourism.
She said: “Yet they also hold enormous untapped potential – spectacular natural landscapes, world-class clean energy opportunities, and under-served job markets full of ambitious young people waiting for better opportunities to come along.
“It seems hard to believe now, but in the 1990s people wrote off London as a lost cause, with underperforming schools and serious problems with crime. But the last Labour government ignored the doomsters and launched the London Challenge, which transformed the lives of London’s youngsters and delivered lasting change to communities across our capital.”
A series of studies over the years have shown coastal towns and communities tend to dominate statistics for deprivation in the UK, with young people particularly, through the impact on their education and employment chances, but also their health.
Ahead of the party conference, ministers unveiled a new levelling up-style fund for hundreds of deprived communities, including some coastal areas, with the aim of combatting Reform.
Among areas receiving money intended to revive high streets or other public areas from the Pride in Place programme are parts of the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, Southend in Essex and Torbay in Devon.
A Labour spokesperson said: “Britain faces a choice between decency and renewal with Labour, or the division and decline offered by Reform. Labour’s conference will set out how we choose the path of renewal towards a fairer country that has rediscovered its pride and is taking control of its future.”
