We'll move now to today's short debate, and I call on Gareth Davies to speak on the topic he has chosen. 

If you're leaving the Chamber, please do so quietly so the Member can actually make his contribution. 

Thank you very much, Llywydd. I've agreed to give a minute of my time to Janet Finch-Saunders, Tom Giffard and Darren Millar.

Deputy Llywydd, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to debate this topic, which is close to my heart. Our seaside towns need help. We have presided over their decline for far too long. Many of our seaside towns were formed during the nineteenth century, and enjoyed their heyday during the reign of Queen Victoria, right through to the 1970s and the 1980s. That certainly is the case for the biggest such town in my constituency, which is Rhyl. 

My connection to the town is a long one. Not only did I grow up in Rhyl, but my family lived there from before it was a town. Williams Street off Vale Road is named after my great-great-grandmother's family, who occupied that area in the 1800s. Their cottages formed the row that later became Williams Street. My grandfather was born in a terraced house on Vale Road in 1927. My family have owned and operated numerous businesses in the town, and have been active members of the community. 

I'm still a proud member of Rhyl rotary club, which upholds a proud tradition as one of the oldest rotary clubs in Wales, having been granted its charter in 1926. It's safe to say my family have witnessed the birth, life and, sadly, the decline of Rhyl. But I won't sit idly by and watch the death of a town that is part of my blood, my heritage—Rhyl, or should I say, 'sunny Rhyl', as the brochures describe the town, quite rightly. It's believed to be named after the manor house, Tŷ'n Rhyl, on Vale Road, which in turn derived from Tŷ'n yr Haul, or 'house of sunshine'—hence 'sunny Rhyl'. It's probably a lot of belief, but that's what I choose to believe, anyway.

The town grew in the 1800s thanks to its 3 miles of sandy beaches and the Victorian belief in the curative properties of sea air. In fact, it was this belief that saw the famous Victorian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, sent to Rhyl for five days for the good of his health. Hopkins, who was also a Jesuit priest, had spent three years at St Beuno's College in Tremeirchion during the late 1870s. It was during his sojourn in Rhyl that he penned the poem 'The Sea and the Skylark'.

It was the arrival of the railway in 1848 that accelerated the town's popularity and growth. It became home to Wales's first seaside pier in 1867, a magnificent structure that cost £15,000 to build at the time. It was 2,335 ft long and stood 11 ft above high tide. It initially included a pier railway and offered steamer excursions to other Welsh resorts and to Liverpool. 

Other attractions, which included restaurants, tea rooms, a bandstand, shops and private baths, proved to be quite a draw for Victorian holidaymakers from, mostly, the north-west of England. Tragically, the pier was beset by a series of disasters. In December 1883, the schooner, Lady Stuart, caused extensive damage, which resulted in 183 ft of the pier being lost. In 1891, 50 people had to be rescued when the steamer Fawn collided with the pier. In 1901, a fire destroyed the pavilion and part of the structure was closed. A succession of storms in 1909 caused the collapse of a further section of the pier. By 1913, the pier had become unsafe and was closed, unfortunately. It remained derelict until Rhyl council acquired it in the 1920s. The seaward end was demolished but the shoreward end was redeveloped and included the building of an amphitheatre. The pier reopened in 1930 and remained so until 1966, when it was again closed on safety grounds. By then it measured a mere 330 ft. Sadly, the pier was demolished on safety grounds long before I was born, and the fate of the pier was seen as symbolic of the decline of the town, alongside the demolition of the original Pavilion Theatre in 1974. 

Cheaper foreign travel is believed to have contributed to declining visitor numbers, which accelerated during the 1970s and the 1980s. Declining visitors resulted in a decline in fortunes for the town. Many local businesses, my family's included, ceased trading. Since 2007, the number of vacant units in Rhyl town centre has doubled, and the town has lost a number of major retailers. It's little wonder, then, that Rhyl is now home to some of the poorest wards in Wales, if not the UK, but Rhyl is still a popular holiday destination despite this, attracting visitors from across the UK. But we cannot compete with cheap foreign holidays. Benidorm might not have Rhyl's charm or excellent scenery, but it does have the advantage of near-constant sunshine and warm waters. It doesn't hurt that you can get a return flight from Manchester to Alicante cheaper than you can get a train to Rhyl. Transport for Wales might need to answer that problem. With more and more budget airlines springing up offering flights to far-flung destinations for peanuts, how can our seaside towns possibly hope to compete? 

The decline I've witnessed in Rhyl has also been echoed in other towns across the Welsh coastline, and, unfortunately, Governments at all levels have not taken sufficient action to halt this decline. The title of this debate poses a question: is restoring our seaside towns to their former glory a necessary task or an impossible ask? I don't believe it's impossible. It certainly won't be easy, but if we all work together—local government, Welsh Government and the UK Government, alongside the leisure and travel industry—then we can compete with foreign travel. We can put seaside towns like Rhyl back on the destinations map. We just need to think creatively, work collectively and collaboratively to sell the benefits of our seaside towns worldwide, and work to help to create a year-round offer and work to innovate and diversify our seaside towns.

Our seaside towns are on the shores of some of the world's best scenery. Rhyl, for example, is just a stone's throw away from the Clwydian range, which, as we speak, are seeking to become an international dark sky park. We can attract visitors from across the globe to not only marvel at our beaches, our hillsides, our rivers and valleys, but also our unrivalled views of the heavens. We have some of the best natural beauty in the world. We are a nation steeped in history, abound with fantastic folklore and deep mythology, but we're absolutely terrible at selling it, and that's the problem. Our own citizens are not aware of the treasures on their doorstep, so how can we expect people from further afield to be clued up?

We might not be able to recreate the Victorian demand for the seaside air—I'm not deluded and time does move on—but we can and must sell the benefits of our seaside towns. We have to integrate and innovate our leisure and tourism markets, promote our outstanding food and drink. We can't do cheaper but we can do better. [Interruption.] And the Denbigh plum while we're at it—why not? It did come as a disappointment to some Members that I didn't mention that in the speech, so there we go. I hope this Welsh Government will take leadership on this, and help rejuvenate and revitalise our seaside towns, from Rhyl to Rhoose, Porthcawl to Prestatyn. Diolch yn fawr. 

Now, I'm very proud to represent a constituency with a number of seaside towns—Llanfairfechan, Penmaenmawr, Conwy, Deganwy, Llandudno and Penrhyn Bay—and Llandudno is known across Wales as the queen of Welsh resorts, and I put this down to our fantastic tourism and hospitality businesses. We've managed, as a town, to keep our Victorian qualities, thanks to the help and preservation by Mostyn Estates. But I've been amazed by the determination throughout the pandemic of our businesses and their investment in our town. The historic Llandudno pier, the longest in Wales, has seen an explosion of new businesses, activities and colour, with a nation-crossing Ferris wheel being installed. And they've also had a very successful series on ITV Wales that's gone national.

Many hotels now have their fronts repainted, ready to welcome the new season of holidaymakers, and we've now got national chains like Travelodge and Premier Inn that have also established venues in the town. Our high street is welcoming new shops, pubs and restaurants. This incredible investment by the private sector highlights that they are already working to restore our seaside towns to their former glory, having gone through all that they've gone through with the pandemic. So, my question to you, Deputy Minister: what will you be doing as a Welsh Government to support them in this mission? Diolch. 

I thank Gareth Davies for bringing forward this really important short debate, and I'm not sure that our coastal communities always get the attention that they deserve. So, thank you for bringing this debate forward today. One minute is simply not enough time, I think, to reflect on the great diversity of our coastal communities across my region of South Wales West. But, as the shadow Minister for the Welsh Conservatives for tourism, I feel that it would be remiss of me not to mention the single clearest threat to these communities in my region—

Member of the Senedd:

The Welsh Government [Laughter.]

The Welsh Government's tourism tax would be simply devastating for the tourism offer in communities like Gower, Mumbles and Porthcawl in my region. After an incredibly difficult few years, instead of encouraging more visitors to come to our coastal communities, the Welsh Government's priority seems to be to tax them instead.

After I raised this issue in First Minister's questions yesterday, it's clear from the First Minister's answer now that, because of the limitations of that tax, these same communities could be burdened with taxing their visitors and then not see any additional money being spent in that community at all. The usual Labour-Plaid attack line of, 'It works for Venice so why wouldn't it work for Porthcawl?' now has a really clear answer, Dirprwy Lywydd: Venice sees a financial benefit from their tourism tax; Porthcawl might not. 

I thank Gareth Davies for introducing this debate. He's taken us already on an excursion to Rhyl, and we've been also on an excursion to Aberconwy and the wonderful resorts there. But I want to take you to visit places in my own constituency: Colwyn Bay, Rhos-on-Sea, Towyn and Kinmel Bay—wonderful resorts, many of them competitors to Rhyl and Prestatyn down the road.

But all of these resorts, as has already been said, have their fortunes closely aligned with the tourism industry, and those price-sensitive tourists who come to get their kiss-me-quick experience in Towyn and Kinmel Bay will be choosing to go elsewhere, frankly, if there's a price differential between the beautiful places on the north Wales coast that people can visit versus elsewhere. So, we must do what we can to overturn this dreadful proposal for a tourism tax here in Wales.

Just one other point: I think the fortunes of our seaside towns can be revived and reversed. We already heard from Janet Finch-Saunders about her experience in Llandudno. Well, Colwyn Bay has turned a corner as well. It has seen some significant investment from the Welsh Government in terms of its coastal defences, which has improved the coast a great deal and created a new beach. But, on top of that, it has reinvented itself in recent years. It has had a renaissance as the events and sporting capital of north Wales. And it's because it has hung its hat on that particular idea that I believe it has been a success. All of the tourism towns, the seaside resorts, that we have spoken of today, can only really turn their fortunes around by looking for a niche that they can hang their hat on. So, I wish Rhyl, Prestatyn and all of those other seaside towns that we've mentioned today every success in following the success of Colwyn Bay.  

I call on the Deputy Minister for Climate Change to reply to the debate—Lee Waters.

Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I'm sorry I'm not in the Chamber with you; you sound like you're all having a very jolly time there.

The way that we use towns and our reasons to visit them have changed and our town centres are adapting to a new set of demands. Past reliance on retail has been undermined by the growth of online shopping. The trends were clear even pre pandemic, and COVID has accelerated that movement. We know that we need better jobs and services in town centres, where people can access them without needing to get in the car. We need to think differently about our towns. We need to focus on them as places where we meet, work and spend leisure time. If we can diversify what is offered in town centres, we will attract people back into them. So, the focus must be on rejuvenating, place-building and reinvention. And, of course, these challenges are especially difficult in some of our coastal towns, playing the dual role of the local centre alongside a dependence on tourism. Coastal locations rely heavily on tourism for jobs. In Conwy, Pembrokeshire and Anglesey around 22 per cent of employment is in tourism. Seasonality of work reduces the effect of local spend, resulting in under-employment, poverty and a lack of social well-being.

Research has shown how the pandemic is having a negative impact on the economies of coastal towns. Gareth Davies mentioned in an offhand way, in Darren Millar's phrase, 'the price-sensitive tourists', about the effect of pricing and flying to Alicante from Manchester versus catching a train to Rhyl. The way that we have allowed the price of public transport to go up relative to other forms of transport is a real problem, but that is a problem that lies at the door of successive UK Governments who've not sufficiently invested in public transport, and, as we noted in the debate last week, Wales is underfunded by £5 billion from the HS2 intervention, and, if we were to have our £5 billion, we could make a significant impact on both the price and reliability of train services across the north Wales coast, and I repeat again my plea that we work together to try and get the UK Government to change its mind on that.

We also need to maximise the potential of our natural coastline assets, whilst protecting local housing markets, local services, communities and the Welsh language. Dirprwy Lywydd, the UK Government stopped the coastal communities fund, but here in Wales we have continued specific support for coastal towns, investing a further £6 million last March, supporting 27 projects focused on job creation, protection, and high-street rejuvenation in coastal town centres. Our Transforming Towns programme provides a package of support for town centres worth £136 million, and this investment in supporting our town centres, delivering major capital projects to repurpose empty properties and land in town centres across Wales, is fundamentally based around enabling places to evolve and diversify. A great project I visited last September myself is Costigan's co-working space in Rhyl, where we have supported the transformation of a semi-derelict pub near the town's railway station, a prominent spot in the town, now into a high-quality business space for co-working—a great project.

Our 'town centre first' principle, embedded in Wales's national development plan, 'Future Wales', ensures that town and city centres should be the first consideration for all decisions on the location of workplaces and services, and we've recently published a set of reports looking at the future of our town centres: one by Audit Wales and another I commissioned from Manchester University's Professor Karel Williams, 'Small Towns, Big Issues'. Both reports highlight the need to work with communities to turn things around in town centres and to end car dependency. And we're doing just that. I've set up a group of external stakeholders to provide input and challenge and work through what is needed to enable change, incentivising town-centre development, but also disincentivising any out-of-town development that is inconsistent with that aim. So, I welcome this debate as an opportunity to look at ways to support and revitalise our towns and cities, understanding that the challenges and opportunities are dynamic and complex, and this includes our coastal communities. Diolch.

Thank you, Deputy Minister. That brings today's proceedings to a close.

The meeting ended at 17:53.