Such are the details of care at this stage of life — and there will be hundreds of thousands of families dealing with similar situations right now. Whatever Andy Burnham does to reform Britain’s care sector will already be too late for us. It’s been too late for millions of elderly people and their carers.

I have written extensively about care in the past — interviewing careworkers for my book, Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care, investigating the precarious finances of care homes, and arguing that we need a complete reframing of care. Still, even when you are familiar with the details, nothing fully prepares you for the reality of caring for those closest to you.

What I find particularly painful in the case of my in-laws is seeing their own commitment to self-reliance, so characteristic of their generation, turning against them. Both were wartime children, raised in modest circumstances to work hard and be careful in their budgeting. They bought a modest bungalow, and have a small nest egg of savings. Until only a few months ago, they were insistent they could still cook their own meals, and were reluctant to accept any help. On my visit at Christmas, my mother-in-law insisted on making me a cup of tea. She brushed aside my protests, saying she needed the exercise of the painful walk to the kitchen. Stoical to a fault, uncomplaining and proud.

Now, they have finally acknowledged that both of them are falling too often for them to manage at home. They will have to move into a care home, and the costs are eye-watering: £10,000 a month for the two of them, which will wipe out their lifetime savings in a few months, and the value of their bungalow in a couple of years. “And then what?” asked my mother-in-law yesterday, with characteristic acuity. We promised her that the local authority would step in. That is what we have been assured by the care home manager — but Adult Social Services have not yet provided the crucial care needs assessment and financial assessment forms, despite my in-laws being categorized as a priority. For now, they will have to pay for their own care — despite already meeting the financial eligibility criteria for state support.

Given all that, I found it hard to remain unmoved last week as I watched Burnham’s speech on social care alongside Baroness Louise Casey, who is now heading up the review into the care sector. Burnham declared that he would not forgive himself if he didn’t do his best to sort out the scandalous, expensive mess of social care, that this would be the defining test of his premiership, and that he was going to “stick this out”. The crack in his voice was unmistakable, as he said he was doing this for his father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, and for the millions like him.

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But as I watched the speech on YouTube, I skimmed the comments scrolling alongside, and found a depressing litany of cynicism, impatience, abuse of migrant care workers, and antisemitism, only occasionally interrupted by someone suggesting that some of what Burnham was saying made sense. It was a reminder that our political culture has profoundly changed over the last 25 years, and that the electorate’s patience, interest, and even tolerance of politicians has evaporated.

This matters, because at the heart of Burnham’s care agenda is a bold ask of the media, his fellow politicians and the electorate: please, please can we have a grown-up conversation about this? (He actually called it a “factual debate”.) Everyone is affected by the care crisis, either directly — those unfortunate enough to be dealing with the social care system — or indirectly, since the NHS is crippled by coping with its failures. Burnham’s sincere hope (and it really does seem sincere) is to get beyond point-scoring and “screaming headlines” — that is, to face up to the scale of the problem and reach a consensus. Do we have the collective wisdom to recognize the necessary trade-offs and back a plan that will last? Britain managed to achieve something like this in 1948 with the founding of the NHS. Can we do it again in a time of bitter and impatient hyperpolitics? I’m doubtful, but these are the right questions to be asking — and not just of our politicians but of ourselves.

Burnham is of course correct that any future National Care Service will depend on a properly paid workforce with secure, rewarding jobs and appropriate levels of staffing. He is, however, less convincing when offering paeans to how “hugely valuable” care work is. It might mean something coming from Angela Rayner, who has worked in the sector; but we’ve heard these words from countless (male) politicians, and it has always meant little in terms of pay or job security. Indeed, it plays into an age-old gender stereotype of idealizing women carers who do it all for free — or near to.

Care remains deeply gendered. No philosopher or economist took any interest in the labor of women in raising and sustaining human life until the arrival of feminism and the breakthrough academic work of the last 50 years. But, too often, that work has remained in academia, with little percolating through to mainstream politics. It has meanwhile been ignored by career feminists focused on individual ambition.

When I wrote Labors of Love, drawing on the brilliant work of Annemarie Mol, Nancy Folbre and countless others, I wanted to acknowledge how care is full of paradox. It is boring and deeply creative; it is routine and spontaneous; it is a complex interplay of physical and emotional labor, medical expertise and heart. We have failed to find a public language for this, let alone the appropriate respect for the work. The carers I interviewed were suffering from a kind of moral injury. Their work is not respected and they know it. A young woman in Norwich reflected: “I suppose I just wipe bums — that’s what my friends think — but I think that I make my clients’ day better, we have a smile and maybe a laugh, and that’s worth more than working in a nail parlor.”

It’s no easy task to suggest a nation reappraise its value systems, so that the act of looking after another human being is recognized as a difficult — though bold, creative, fulfilling, intelligent and dignified — career path. But it has been done before, and in my research I found several examples. One radical re-framing of a form of care work is famous. When I began to read about the life of Florence Nightingale, the figure that emerged was infinitely more interesting than the saccharine Lady of the Lamp of childhood picture books. Prior to Nightingale, hospital nursing was seen as the lowest form of work, filthy, riddled with alcoholism; only women who were desperate for the money would turn to nursing. Nightingale transformed standards with a relentless military-style focus on discipline and cleanliness, and made the job a profession. However, her real skill was in public relations. She challenged the strict conventions about the role of women in mid-Victorian England, and made it possible for single women to care for male bodies. Using Christian references to self-sacrifice, she made it possible for women to leave the home (and parental supervision) to earn a living. This was nothing short of revolutionary — though it came at a cost. Nightingale’s legacy was also to confirm the assumption of women as “angels of the hearth”, a gilded cage which we are still reckoning with.

Interestingly, it’s another Christian who is now challenging us to a new paradigm shift. Burnham is the first practising Catholic at No. 10 and the first Prime Minister since Gordon Brown to communicate a clear sense of moral purpose. Faith feels relevant here, since care is primarily a question of how we value people. Care is profoundly ethical in its attentiveness to another person as an end in themselves, not in how they contribute to the economy — this is deeply countercultural when the language of the market has established a crippling stranglehold on our culture. Indeed, on that hideous YouTube comment thread, there were plenty of commenters asking why bother spending money on old people who have nothing to contribute.

In his Catholic education, Burnham will have had drummed into him the dignity and value of every human being made by God — as I did in mine. Does this Christian ethic still have purchase in a country where Christianity has declined dramatically? Catholics number a quarter of what they did 60 years ago, and the Church of England’s decline is even more dramatic — hence why Burnham balanced his speech to appeal both to the ethics of caring for the elderly and the utilitarian argument that the current system is crippling the NHS’s ability to care for all of us.

One thing that is clear is that if Britain’s care sector is to be reformed, the issue that has to be tackled is ownership. Private equity and investment funds have turned care into a lucrative money-making venture. This is where tragedy becomes scandal. Using care home property as collateral, huge borrowing has loaded the sector with debt. A large part of the faintly unbelievable costs of care homes are to pay interest on debt; pay dividends to investors; and to pay huge salaries to the chief executives who have constructed rickety financial structures teetering on insolvency. This is the really thorny part of Casey’s review, and it is analogous to how investors have preyed on another essential service: water. The public won’t stump up more money in taxes if it is going into the pockets of overseas investors. It’s not entirely clear if Burnham has fully grasped the issue. All he had to say on this when questioned was that there should be “no profiteering in the system’” and lamenting that “the vulnerable pay with everything.”

Indeed. My parents-in-law’s assets are modest, and they look set to lose everything. Both have exceptionally clear minds for their age and it feels like a betrayal of everything they have believed in over their long, hard working lives: a state that stood by them in their hour of need, if they played their part. It was heartbreaking to stand by my mother-in-law yesterday, as she adjusted to her new reality. I can only hope — and it is not much more than hope — that future generations will not have to go through this.

Visitors simply aren’t spending enough money or staying long enough to ensure a strong local economy. Most are day trippers, or stay over in the sea of caravan parks which has now spread along the coast. As a result, Skegness is sinking into destitution.

More than 80% of the residents along this part of the Lincolnshire coastline live in areas categorised as in the 20% most deprived in the UK. Around a third have no or low educational qualifications, considerably below national averages. And 42% of the population, twice the national average, is economically inactive, due to either disability, retirement, or caring responsibilities.

This issue, however, isn’t confined to east Lincolnshire. A desperate combination of low pay, low productivity, low educational achievement and poor health is trapping coastal towns in a spiral of deepening poverty. Skegness is a long way from anywhere but the sea. Connections to medical services and further education often entail a trip to Lincoln, over 40 miles away. It takes the best part of two hours to get by car to Nottingham, and the train is no quicker. To make matters worse, local coastal economies are dominated by the two employment sectors — hospitality and care — which have the lowest pay and the lowest productivity. One in five coastal jobs pays below the living wage.

Like other English seaside resorts, Skegness is haunted by its glamorous past. It was once an elegant resort attracting visitors from London to its smart hotels, making a virtue of its bracing breezes for city dwellers in need of fresh air. In its park strolled men in three-piece suits and women in high heels, hats and frilly summer dresses. Then along came cheap flights and package holidays abroad, which devastated Skegness’s hotel-based economy. Since then, little thought or attention has been given to how to reinvent the English seaside resort.

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While other deindustrialised regions in the Nineties and 2000s attracted government investment, small family businesses running coastal resorts were expected to make do and mend. After austerity ripped apart local authority funding — Torbay, for example, lost £200 million a year — coastal towns have been forced to compete for grants from pots of money such as the Town Deal. Often, outcomes are required within a three-year time-frame or even less, a short-termism which does little to enable the kind of long-term strategic reinvention of a tired seaside resort. Redoing a piazza to accommodate outdoor café-style hospitality, for instance, doesn’t begin to address despair and poverty crouching a few streets away.

The effect of poverty is borne out in public health. Coronary disease is particularly prevalent along the coast of England. And East Lindsey district — which covers Skegness’s coastline — has one of the highest rates of antidepressant prescription in the country, coming close behind two other coastal towns, Blackpool and Sunderland. Male life expectancy here is 10.3 years shorter than in wealthier areas of Lincolnshire, and for women it is 7.2 years shorter. It is a tragic inversion of the seaside resort’s therapeutic history. And as Chris Whitty warned in his 2021 annual report, “there will be a long tail of preventable ill health which will get worse as populations age”.

That time has already come. Young people are moving away to get jobs and training, and the retired are moving in. More than 30% of GP patients in Skegness and Mablethorpe are over 65, compared with the national figure of 18%. In the next two decades, the over-65s will increase by 44% and the over-85s by a staggering 116.6%.

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There is already a shortage of care workers to look after this ageing population, and levels of unpaid care in Lincolnshire are among the highest in the country. Yet despite that need, coastal towns have proportionately fewer health professionals; recruitment and retention is obviously challenging in these run-down seaside towns.

The reality is that this stretch of Lincolnshire coast is facing some of the great social challenges of our time — an ageing society and abrupt economic change — with little government support. In the wider story of regional inequality and the Levelling Up agenda, the unique characteristics of coastal deprivation are repeatedly ignored or overlooked.

Perhaps it is fitting that the most famous son of the Lincolnshire coastline, Alfred Tennyson, abandoned the county of his birth, as many young people have today. He is more commonly associated with the Isle of Wight, where he went to live as a celebrated Victorian poet. Still, in one poem, he fondly remembers the bleak coastline of his childhood: “Yet though perchance no tract of earth have more/Unlikeness to the fair Ionian plain/I love the place that I have loved before.” As with Tennyson, perhaps the English can find a way to love Skegness again — before it is caught up in a tide of irreparable decay.

From her bench facing the sea, one elderly lady rearranged her sleeping bag and sat up to light her first cigarette of the day; another rough sleeper was angry as he stumbled, yelling into the waves: “Yer English, yer oughter to be ashamed of yersain.”

He has a point. Britain’s biggest seaside resort is home to a sharp and uncomfortable paradox: while it accommodates millions of visitors every year, several of its wards are among the most deprived in the country and with the worst life expectancy. This is a place which, for all its beauty and associations with pleasure and fun, results in shortened lives blighted by debt, ill health and substance abuse.

When William Beveridge set out to eradicate five “Giant Evils” from Britain, “want” was first on his list. In the early Forties, as the social reformer gathered his data and prepared his plans, this priority seemed straightforward: people needed basics such as food, shelter, warmth and clothing. His plans for a social security system “from cradle to grave” would ensure that no one would go short. But 80 years on, Blackpool provides a grim example of deprivation not seen since the Thirties. Food banks report a 54% increase in the need for food parcels in the last year, dependence on charity has become normal for hundreds of families in the town, and the rise in energy prices brings particular hardship in a place with poor housing stock, well-known for its bitter winds and rain sweeping in off the sea.

Further up the coast, in Morecambe, a similar story is playing out. The North Lancashire Citizen Advice Bureau (CAB) has seen a massive rise in clients desperate for help — in some places, a staggering 566% increase in the last year. The most common issue is struggling with utility bills, followed closely by problems with debt. Households get caught in a pattern of borrowing and relying on charity because levels of benefit are not sufficient, suggests Joanna Young, the CAB’s head of research for North Lancashire. She adds that their clients talk of how one “mini-crisis” — it can be as routine as the need for a new pair of school shoes — can set a family back for months. Precarity has become a way of life.

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What would Beveridge make of places such as Blackpool and Morecambe? No doubt he would view his dream as a failure, despite a huge increase in the country’s GDP in the intervening 80 years. But what would also have surprised Beveridge are the causes of that poverty, and the fact that at least some can be traced right back to gaps and mistakes in his original plans.

Beveridge was no socialist, and he believed that work was the true solution to poverty (after all, he listed “idleness” as one of the other five Giants). But, as Professor Jonathan Bradshaw has noted, he overlooked the issue of low pay. Roughly 40% of the CAB’s clients in North Lancashire are in work — and this figure is supported by nationwide data, such as research by Joseph Rowntree Foundation which found that three out of four children living in poverty have a working parent. Chronic low pay particularly affects coastal resorts because so much of their employment is in the worst-affected sectors such as care and hospitality; the average wage in Blackpool is a third below the national figure. The result is a coastal pattern of some of the lowest average wages, highest levels of indebtedness and insolvencies. And this was already getting worse well before the devastating economic damage of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.

But Blackpool and Morecambe do not just illustrate the failure of Beveridge’s ambition; they also demonstrate forms of “want” that he never envisaged. Beveridge’s interpretation of poverty was strictly material, but in the 21st century the relevance and importance of another form of poverty has become starkly apparent. Blackpool and Morecambe are just two of the dozens of seaside resorts struggling with what are known as the “diseases of despair”.

Seaside towns have been left to cope with a disproportionate number of the most troubled in society. When relationships break down, when prisoners are released, when people with substance abuse issues want a new start, the childhood memories of a seaside resort can appear to offer hope, and every year thousands arrive on the coast looking for a new start. A major driver is housing costs: as they have soared out of affordable reach in most cities, many of the poorest and most vulnerable are effectively forced out. They get on a train to the end of the line. In the South-East, this includes towns such as Clacton (where the neighbouring resort of Jaywick has held the designation of the poorest place in the UK since 2010), Hastings, and the Thanet resorts of Margate and Ramsgate. Similarly, rising prices in Manchester and Preston ensure that people end up drifting to Blackpool and Morecambe. And this holds for countless other resort towns, from Scarborough to Skegness, Ilfracombe to Weston-Super-Mare and Rhyl in North Wales.

When I visited Blackpool in September, I spoke to Ian Treasure, who has worked on a number of local projects for rough sleepers. As we passed along the streets adjoining the promenade, he pointed out the tell-tale signs of “Houses in Multiple Occupation” which dominate the area. Long lines of door bells and rows of bins mark out the bedsits created out of the former hotels. The cheap housing stock is often bought up by absentee landlords and divided up into accommodation which can be rented for a fraction of the cost. This is what draws the approximately 8,000 people who arrive in Blackpool every year; a large proportion of whom are on benefits and are disproportionately male and single. They bring with them many of their demons, lack of trust and relationship. What ties they may have had – family or friends – are left behind, making this type of coastal poverty often lonely and unsupported.

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These forms of emotional and relationship poverty were not something Beveridge grasped in the Forties, but with them comes poor mental health, and in the case of Blackpool, some of the highest suicide and self-harm rates in the country. Four Blackpool wards have the lowest life expectancy in the country at 66.6 years, compared to a UK average of 82.3 years. As the Chief Medical Officer’s annual 2021 report on seaside towns makes clear, Blackpool has “the single most vulnerable population in the country in the most inappropriate accommodation”.

Yet the growth of this desperate poverty has only accelerated in recent years; during the pandemic, the buy-to-let market in Blackpool boomed, encouraged by the relaxation on stamp duty and promises of high investment yields from tenants on housing benefits. Elsewhere, Beveridge would have been appalled by the misuse of public funds; his central argument in support of the welfare state was that it would make the population healthier and better educated in order to underpin economic growth. In contrast, Blackpool (and many other coastal towns) has resulted in the opposite; a system of farming the most vulnerable in society at government expense, with the profits sucked out by landlords who do not live in the area.

As if this were not enough, many seaside towns also face another of the great social challenges of our time — one which Beveridge did not envisage, and which is, in many ways, the result of his great achievement, the founding of the NHS. That is, the fact that we are living longer, and that many choose to spend their retirement years in coastal towns; Minehead in West Somerset and Skegness and its neighbouring Lincolnshire coast resorts have some of the most elderly populations in the UK. This will be the great test of the NHS over the coming decades; our longer lives require the management of complex chronic health conditions, leading to greater demands for health and social care. Yet vacancies for doctors and nurses are higher on such poorly connected coasts, while the ratio of elderly to people of working age is worsening, raising concerns over who will care for the growing number of octogenarians by the end of this decade.

The big picture here is the power of geography to determine lives. The British economy is driven by the vitality of cities and this has shaped infrastructure investment (disproportionately concentrated in London). Meanwhile, the periphery is neglected, only useful as a form of cheap investment or a zone to dump those whose needs are no longer accommodated elsewhere. The challenges for the coasts’ overstretched councils and health authorities are Sisyphean, with little recognition of their unique nature in Westminster or Whitehall. The Levelling Up agenda of recent years may have dominated the headlines, yet it has showed scant insight into these areas’ plight given its preoccupation with driving up productivity — always a challenge in care and hospitality. Eighty years on, the entire of Britain needs another Beveridge. But perhaps more than anywhere else, its forgotten seaside towns need a Beveridge who can actually get the job done.

Five years ago, when I told people I’d started to research a book on care, the most common response was polite bewilderment. Yes, the subject was important, some conceded, but dull. Social care was a national scandal, the recommendations of commissions piled up, but the politicians seemed caught in a loop of warm words and ineffectual policy. What more was there to say?

Wind the clock forward to March 2020, and I was hastily adding a new preface before rushing to my doorstep to clap for “our carers”. Every page of my book had taken on new significance.

My project started with a simple question: what is care? It’s a short word, and widely used, but people never seem to stop and ask what, exactly, it means. I have criss-crossed the country interviewing parents, charity support workers and social care workers; I’ve shadowed nurses and GPs. And I have been humbled by their insight: how they hold steady to a set of values which receive little wider social affirmation — indeed can be at complete odds with a consumer society fixated on image and pleasure. Listening to these care workers, I felt that their understanding of care cast them in the unlikely role of rebels arguing for a basic truth — the importance of relationship.

At times, this role puts these carers in extraordinarily difficult positions. One carer, called Blessing, described an occasion which had happened several years earlier, and as she spoke she found herself crying: “The care agency was all about money; they would tell me who to visit and that was it. I worked on my own most of the time. Once I noticed an old lady in her nineties had bruises on her arms. She told me that her previous carers had been rough. She was very co-operative — I couldn’t see how the bruises could have happened. I was distraught. She asked if I could come back again, and I said I would try my hardest. I called the office and told them about the bruises, and they said they would deal with it. I was crying so I called my mother. I was in so much emotional pain.”

The agency never allocated her the lady again. “On the phone my mother told me: that’s why people need someone like you. She told me that it is the type of work you do with mercy in your heart.” Too often, care workers such as Blessing were drawing deep from their own cultural heritage to support their work; her inspiration was her mother and her background in West Africa. There is no tradition of respect for the elderly in the UK, concluded one sociologist of ageing; that disturbing insight must be part of the explanation as to why this country has repeatedly cut back care services for the elderly, falling behind other European countries’ expenditure.

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At one point I shadowed a senior community nurse who was tasked with the job of explaining to six NHS care workers that the patient they looked after in shifts would most likely die of the disease he suffered from. The carers had come to know this brave patient and his wife well, and I watched their faces as they struggled to hold back tears. Afterwards the nurse admitted to me that he felt so bad for them: they didn’t have his training or professional support to cope with the trauma. The emotional labour of their work was immense, yet they would have been paid more on a supermarket checkout till.

As I listened to stories of caring lives — of men who had taken on care jobs late in life and loved the work, of women who had spent decades in the sector — I felt I had stumbled on a vast aquifer of knowledge and experience: one that is usually hidden, but on which the wellbeing of millions depends.

This is one of the paradoxes of care: the action can be small, but the impact and significance immense. A smile or a squeeze of a hand, at a moment of acute vulnerability, can mean so much. It’s part of what makes care so hard to measure in a health and social system obsessed with measurement and regulation. Care is often about spontaneity, and yet it also requires protocols, and competence; care cannot be easily summed up, because it straddles many of the dualisms we use: it is head, heart and hand.

A long history lies behind the invisibility of care, and one witty book title says it all: Who Cooked Adam Smith’s dinner? While the great political scientist wrote his tomes on capitalist theory, his mother ensured he was fed. The great man took for granted the care work of women — raising the next generation to work the factories; supporting the sick, elderly and dying; conducting the basic social processes of sustaining human lives.

The nursing profession has been dogged by this history. Florence Nightingale was a brilliantly clever strategist and she devised the first independent career for women — but it came at the cost of depicting the job as the work of the self-sacrificial hand maiden of the medical establishment. If women were to deal with vulnerable sick bodies — of men and women — they must be paragons of Christian virtue; they must not be assertive; they should not make claims for authority, recognition or decent reward.

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Since it has traditionally been expected to be unpaid (in the family) or badly-paid (as servants, governesses, companions to the elderly), the expectation persists that carers do the work out of the goodness of their hearts. Private sector domiciliary care providers promise that their staff “will go the extra mile” for their clients but as my interviewees explained that entails going over their allotted time, and racing to the next appointment. While the carers are expected to offer emotional labour — to be always cheerful and warm-hearted — their working conditions can entail long, split shifts and sometimes hours spent sitting in their cars between calls, as coffee shops are too expensive.

Nowadays care is either idealised — as the work of angels — or belittled as simply about having the right instincts. In my interviews, I was interested to find people who discovered very unexpectedly their capacity to care — such as a 23-year-old Oxbridge graduate in need of a job, or a female senior IT consultant who had always had a horror of doing the “caring clucky thing” and yet came to see her years of supporting her partner as the greatest achievement of her life.

In the last few decades, senior nurses have made determined and valiant efforts to shake off the narratives and histories that have cast a long shadow over the profession. Professor Anne Marie Rafferty, now president of the Royal College of Nursing, explained that her aim is to acquire authority as graduate nurses. Her cause has dominated her career since she joined the first nursing degree in Edinburgh in the seventies.

But success, admitted one director of nursing in an interview, has often required nurses to emphasise clinical competence over the care dimension of their relationships with clients —touch, presence and time. She described a recent incident where “when visiting a ward, I saw a nurse who was sitting on the bed, and she jumped up and said, ‘Sorry I was just talking.’ She felt she had to apologise. Perhaps we don’t value relationship enough, socially and culturally.”

We urgently need a paradigm shift in our understanding of care: a reimagining of care as a vital human activity which spans our lives either as giver or recipient, from birth to death. It urgently needs to be recognised and valued, and the starting point has to be curiosity. Instead of assuming we know what care is, we have to look again and look deeply. Professor Rafferty describes care as “dark matter”: vital and immensely complex.

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When I listened on my doorstep in April 2020 to a cacophony of drums and clapping in honour of carers, that paradigm shift really seemed possible. But there is also a very real danger that yet again, we idealise those who do care work as heroes and saints, and thus reduce the subject to a matter of individual character. As a professor of nursing, Alison Leary, said to me, we don’t assess airline pilots in that way, so why do we apply that criteria to an inherently risky endeavour such as care?

Time and again, I was told by wise old hands that good care is not rocket science: it emerges from people having enough time to do their job, decent pay and working conditions, and a supportive team around them. Carers cannot work alone — not without feeling overwhelmed and ultimately burning out, which means their clients are at risk of neglect or abuse.

We have paid a bitter price in the UK for our indifference to and ignorance of care in the last six months of pandemic: we have one of the highest death tolls in the world of care homes residents (19,000), as well as of health and social care workers. Surely this must spur to us to reckon with care workers’ historic legacy of invisibility? Surely, now, we can invest the necessary resources, imagination and inspiration to build systems of care that put relationship at their heart? That is the care people want at times of vulnerability; to provide it is an enriching and meaningful form of labour.

One never imagined that local authorities in major resorts such as Blackpool, Scarborough and Skegness would beg visitors to stay away; people whose careers have been dedicated to urging the English to discover the delights of the homegrown seaside on their doorstep, have been forced into a volte face. Coastal resorts are likely to lose £7.9bn in revenue, according to evidence presented to the parliamentary select committee of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in mid-May. That represents both revenue already lost because of the lockdown, and projected losses as businesses implement social distancing measures. The capacity of hotels and restaurants will have to be slashed; and the numbers of visitors to beaches, piers, promenades will have to be controlled.

For many coastal towns who welcome millions of visitors every year, this will be a summer like no other; the usual crowds in need of ice creams, fish and chips and fun will have to be marshalled in an unprecedented public order operation.

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With the chances of a foreign holiday this summer slim, seaside resorts could face the tricky dilemma of unprecedented demand overwhelming reduced capacity. Already councils have had a taste of this. After the Prime Minister slightly eased lockdown in mid-May, telling people they could drive as far as they liked and even visit beaches, councils had to scramble to put in place social distancing measures. Headlines a couple of days later reported packed beaches in Southend and Bournemouth basking in the unusual May heat.

In Southend, councillor Kevin Robinson admitted that the minute Boris Johnson said the word ‘beaches’, every councillor’s heart sank; they had 48 hours to widen the promenade and hire marshals to ensure they could cope safely. Despite the volume of visitors, Robinson maintains that people kept to the rules; the photos of crowded beaches depended on the angle of the camera, and pictures from drones showed that people were spread out. Southend has a seven-mile long seafront, so they can cope better than some resorts, even if they attract thousands of London day trippers keen to escape the capital.

But that doesn’t reassure many local residents, anxious about higher infection rates in London and elsewhere; they lobbied councillors to keep the visitors out by shutting the sea front and beaches — which was physically as well as legally impossible. Southend was not the only place facing this balancing act; many coastal towns have an aged demographic, higher than average levels of chronic ill health and a large care home sector, placing them at increased risk from Covid-19.

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Few people can be watching the R value more closely than the council leaders of England’s coastal towns. If reopening of socially distanced hospitality and hotels doesn’t go ahead on 4 July as currently suggested, some coastal resorts will be economically crippled with lasting impacts. The normal pattern is that July and August are the key months, clocking up a sizeable proportion of the towns’ annual turnover, with a third of the year’s visitors. While some coastal resorts have made strenuous efforts in the past couple of decades to diversify, others are effectively one-industry towns with over half of all employment tied up in tourism. The millions of pounds of visitor revenue that arrive every summer are the lifeblood of places like Skegness, Blackpool and Whitby.

In mid-March, just days before lockdown, I visited Skegness, and the town was gearing itself up for the season; decorators and maintenance workers were hard at work. The headlines were already alarming — on the seafront I took a panicked call from my daughter who feared she was infected with Covid — and it felt particularly ominous in a town obviously struggling already and which was utterly dependent on those visitors from Midland cities.

Already the early indicators are that coastal towns are likely to be the hardest hit economically of anywhere in the country. As unemployment soared across the country in March and early April, analysis by the Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion found that of the ten areas with the largest increases in unemployment benefit claims, nine were coastal: Blackpool, Torbay, Thanet, Scarborough, Cornwall, North Devon, Tendring and Torridge. There have been predictions that 20-25% of hotels and bed and breakfasts will be forced to close. A quarter of businesses fear they won’t survive even if the season does go ahead in July.

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The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Covid-19 is sharply exposing the deep seated economic precariousness of seaside resorts. Their plight represents a major failure of the political system. By a wide range of measures, they are among some of the most challenged communities in the country; pockets of deep deprivation have been overlooked for decades, argues Gordon Marsden who lost his Blackpool South seat in 2019 to the Tories. Since he became a parliamentary candidate in 1990, he has lobbied for seaside resorts to win in Whitehall the cross-departmental attention needed.

Studies in August 2019 found that five of the ten areas in the UK with the lowest average pay are coastal, and they also clock up the highest levels of personal debt. Jobs are poor quality, and often seasonal, with little opportunities for career development, and many seaside towns wrestle with above-average unemployment rates. Transient populations living crammed into houses which have been subdivided lead to high levels of problems such as crime, drug addiction and domestic violence. They have a disproportionate number of people on benefits, as well as with mental health issues, drug addiction and chronic ill health, according to the last census in 2011.

Two of the three local authorities with the highest prescription rates for antidepressants last year were seaside resorts: East Lindsey (which includes Skegness) and Blackpool. With this profile, comes some of the lowest levels of educational achievement; a report in 2016 argued that the distribution had shifted from inner cities to coastal and rural areas. Local authorities, particularly in south coast resorts and Blackpool have long argued that social services departments in big cities such as London and Manchester have used the cheap housing in coastal areas to relocate their cases. Torbay for example had one of the highest number of looked after children in the country in 2019; Weston Super Mare has the largest number of drug rehabilitation centres.

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Stoke, the city that Britain forgot

By John Lichfield

In the Eighties, concern was mobilised around the plight of inner cities, and deindustrialised regions; what got left out was the longer term, gradual decline of coastal resorts. When attention finally arrived 20 or so years later, many projects focused on culture — such as Margate’s Turner centre and Folkestone’s creative quarter — but gentrification could only ever be a part of the solution, and the investment was never comparable to inner-city regeneration projects; the results were fragile. Gentrification could work in places within easy reach of major cities but not in Great Yarmouth, Skegness, Minehead or Scarborough. In such places, peripherality proved a steep cost, with poor railway and road links. The success stories of Brighton and Bournemouth, which used higher education as a part of their regeneration strategy, dominated the narrative.

Seaside resorts, always as much rivals as allies, were keen to celebrate their successes; they wanted badly to change the public perception of rundown neglect, but perhaps that has contributed to how their plight has not attracted sufficient public attention and thus effective political engagement. A generation of marginalisation paid bitter results at the ballot box last December as many Labour coastal strongholds fell to the Conservatives.

Covid-19 is exposing all the fault-lines of British society. Rightly, much concern has been raised by the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on the BAME population, and alongside that, I would argue that there should be a comparable attention on coastal communities. Beyond this year’s immediate crisis, the question is whether with the right support they could finally look to a more secure future; could anxiety about foreign travel bring a rise in holidays at home? After millions have experienced homeworking in lockdown, could it prompt a change in lifestyle, moving away from expensive cities to the coast in search of homeworking beside golden sands and fresh sea air? The paradox is that these resorts are much loved; Blackpool has a staggering 19 million visits annually. The challenge is to translate that popularity and affection into flourishing local economies.

Last week, the quietness of Margate was all the more poignant because in recent years it seemed that the pretty historic town with its Turner Gallery had finally turned the corner and had launched in a new chapter of its long history: now its hard won recovery is thrown once more into question.