Small resorts miss £110m tide of investment in water quality

Many of Yorkshire's favourite seaside haunts look likely to miss out on a £110m package announced yesterday to turn the region's bathing waters into the best in Europe – with spending targeted at the bigger resorts.

Yorkshire Water and its partners in a powerful new alliance of local authorities and public bodies are staking 14,000 tourism jobs on a five-year vision unveiled yesterday for the Scarborough and Bridlington areas to put the rest of the world to shame in smashing water quality targets.

But while millions are to be lavished improving sewage treatment and waste water storage in Scarborough, Filey, and Bridlington, smaller resorts – where locals have complained about alleged sewage problems for years – are being fobbed off with the promise of more sophisticated research.

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All the other resorts – including Whitby, and "Britain's Worst Beach" at Staithes – have been lumped together as areas where "Yorkshire Water's assets are not believed to impact on water quality".

The strategy's catch-all way forward for all the smaller resorts is that investigations continue into what other factors may be impacting on water quality.

But the approach did not wash with Euro MP Tim Kirkhope, leader of the Conservatives in the European Parliament, who has been fighting for a clean-up at Staithes for five years.

He said: "These grand plans are fine. But you can't just include selectively two or three places and dump all the rest. The press release talks about the whole coast. It does not mention Staithes. But then it does not mention a lot of other places either."

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Staithes is one of Britain's top surfing beaches and poster shot for Yorkshire tourism marketing. But it repeatedly fails seasonal testing for bacteria, for reasons which have baffled experts for years

Mr. Kirkhope continued: "Research is all very well. But in the meantime it runs the risk of Staithes being undesignated as a bathing beach and that would be a disaster as far as I am concerned because it is so important for Yorkshire tourism.

"Putting money into Scarborough is all very well. But Whitby needs money too if it to benefit from the enormous wealth which could be coming its way from the offshore wind industry."

The new investment package, announced to an audience of VIPs at Scarborough Spa is designed to ensure Yorkshire can fly all its Blue Flags despite the EU dramatically raising the bar on water quality from 2015.

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Chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire Gary Verity, introducing the strategy yesterday, said: "Our aspiration is to see Blue Flags flying along our entire coastline.

"This would give us a higher concentration of Blue Flags than the likes of Portugal, a country widely regarded as having some of the finest beaches and bathing waters in Europe."

Because Blue Flags will only be awarded to beaches with "excellent" water quality, a standard twice as tough as the current pristine guideline rating, the main thrust of the strategy is to improve and expand treatment at Scarborough, Bridlington and Filey sewage works.

Because waivers on bad results during exceptionally wet weather are being done away with, the other main priority will be improved management of the system during heavy storms.

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But during yesterday's meeting questions were asked by sceptical audience members about whether enough resources were being targeted at the other resorts, as well as Hornsea and Withernsea – which officials see as needing little investment to achieve excellent standards.

Graham Dixon, Yorkshire Water's production director, argued that the programme would enable much more sophisticated research into the cause of the problems. The company has always maintained that many of the bad results are due to rain washing dirt from farmland into streams which discharge into the sea.

Scarborough and Whitby Tory MP Robert Goodwill argued that if this was the problem tinkering with the sewage system could cost millions without actually solving anything.