Nuclear Free Local Authorities Press Release, 7th January 2025

The UK/Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities fear the siting of a Geological Disposal Facility in the South Copeland Search Area could lead to irrecoverable damage to the tourist economy and the loss of many local jobs.

Local campaigners in Millom and District against the Nuclear Dump have always been aware of this possibility. One of their first posters in a nod to Fifties tourism flyers urged visitors to ‘Come holiday at Britain’s first nuclear waste dump’, with the tagline ‘Its radiant’.

The most recent statistical analysis published by Cumbria Tourism shows that day trippers and holidaymakers brought in almost £300 million in annual revenue to South-West Cumbrian coastal resorts, helping to sustain over 2,300 full-time jobs.

Industry experts, Global Tourism Solutions, developed the STEAM (Scarborough Tourism Economic Activity Monitor) to collect and contextualise data about the performance and impact of the tourist economy. As the company’s website puts it:

STEAM quantifies the local economic impact of tourism, from both staying and day visitors, through analysis and use of a variety of inputs including visitor attraction numbers, tourist accommodation bed-stock, events attendance, occupancy levels, accommodation tariffs, macroeconomic factors, visitor expenditure levels, transport use levels and tourism-specific economic multipliers.’[i]

GTS was commissioned by Cumbria Tourism to collate and catalogue the data for the local tourism economy in 2023. The findings are summarised for each of the three former District Councils (Allerdale, Carlisle and Copeland), which were subsumed into a new unitary authority, Cumberland Council. Drigg, Haverigg, Kirksanton, and Millom, comprising the South Copeland GDF Search Area, were previously administered by Copeland Council.

The published figures for Copeland estimate that in 2023, tourism generated £296 million in revenue for the local economy sustaining the equivalent of 2,352 FTE jobs.[ii] The number of local people employed in tourist related jobs will however be much higher as many of these posts will be part-time and seasonal. There are also more jobs in-directly sustained by tourism.

Interestingly, 48% of this revenue came from just the 17% of tourists who were ‘staying visitors’, those who stayed at least one night, with the remainder coming from the 83% who are ‘day trippers’. This demonstrates that overnight guests spend much more, making it an imperative to provide attractive holiday accommodation options to maximise revenue in the local economy.

The construction of a Geological Disposal Facility would be a huge civil engineering and mining project that will be massively disruptive to any small community. Construction would take at least ten years, creating a surface site measuring one kilometre square and a labyrinthine complex of tunnels. Completion would be followed by regular shipments of high-level radioactive waste to site. These shipments could last for more than one hundred and fifty years. Waste will be taken below ground and deposited in the tunnels which would extend out beneath the bed of the Irish Sea. It has been estimated that ten million cubic metres of rock will have to excavated during construction to create the tunnels. On the conclusion of operations, the site will be sealed and cleared.

Would tourists really want to come to any seaside town blighted by a project reportedly compared by one Nuclear Waste Services official in a public event as the equivalent of ‘building another Channel Tunnel’, with the subsequent shipments forever associating that town with toxic radioactive waste?

That was the question residents in a seaside town on the East coast of England also under threat from the GDF wanted the answer to, so they carried out a survey to find the answer.

In coastal Lincolnshire, Nuclear Waste Services have established the Theddlethorpe Search Area to investigate the prospects for siting the GDF there, with the radioactive waste stored beneath the North Sea. The Search Area takes in the picturesque seaside town of Mablethorpe, habitually visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.

Activists in the Guardians of the East Coast, a campaign group opposed to the GDF plan, surveyed over 1,000 of these visitors and found that 83% would be deterred from returning if they found they were sunning themselves in a resort that was home to the dump.

If translated into cold hard cash such a downturn in the tourist economy would be devastating, with a prediction that Mablethorpe and neighbouring Skegness could lose £250 million per annum alongside 3,000 jobs.[iii]

Frighteningly, an 83% reduction in tourism in the Copeland area would have a similar effect. £250 million annual income would also be lost and around 2,000 FTE jobs placed in jeopardy.

But hosting a GDF in Haverigg and Millom would land two further blows on the local tourist economy.

The construction of a GDF would require specialist contractors with proven abilities in civil engineering and tunnelling; they in turn will employ their own trusted sub-contractors. Such firms do not exist in small towns such as Haverigg and Millom, and consequently a construction workforce numbering hundreds will be brought on site. Where will they live whilst working on a project lasting a decade? Some will commute from out of area, but it is likely that many will take up places in local tourist accommodation driving away the tourists, whilst other will take up long-term rental properties outpricing local people. Possibly, as has happened in the construction of Hinkley Point C nuclear power project, a local holiday camp might be commandeered for the purpose.

In Somerset, French nuclear power operator EDF Energy acquired the former Brean Sands holiday camp from Pontins. Instead of housing 3,000 holidaymakers’ week on week, the 900 chalets are now occupied by Hinkley Point C construction workers. At the time of the acquisition, EDF expressed aspirations that the workers would spend their money when off-duty in the local economy; however, rather than experiencing a boom time, local tourist operators have instead felt the pinch.

Alan House, head of local tourist association Discover Brean, told local media that surveys of its members had revealed that some local businesses have lost between 30 and 50 per cent of their revenue ‘because of the lack of footfall coming from the Pontins site’. Rather than the trend of holidaymakers to spend money on local attractions and in local shops and pubs, Mr House said that the workers are ‘predominantly staying inside the camp and cooking in their self-catered chalets, bringing their supplies in with them from supermarkets outside the local Brean economy.’[iv]

Hosting a GDF in South Copeland would also be completely illogical as it would negate the benefits that are expected to accrue to the local tourist economy from a £30 million investment in infrastructure that will be made in coming years. For the Millom Town Fund Board secured £20.6 million from the UK Government’s Towns Fund, paired with £8.7 million in match funding [v]. This was preceded by an investment of £500,000 in immediate Covid-19 recovery funding[vi].

This investment of almost £30 million will deliver a variety of key projects including: the Iron Line project to celebrate Millom’s industrial heritage with the creation of a visitor centre; revitalising and repurposing town centre buildings; building new leisure facilities; improving Millom Railway Station and local roads, cycleways, and footpaths; and creating a trail to celebrate the work of local poet Norman Nicholson.

The stated aims of this investment are ‘to help maximise inclusive economic growth and better connectivity for the area while developing a welcoming arts, culture and tourism offer, thriving independent businesses and healthy, active people’.[vii]

In the ‘Destination Management Plan’ published in July 2024 by Cumbria Tourism and its partners, including Cumberland Council, the primary Growth Priority 1A is identified as ‘Continu[ing] to implement the strategy to raise the appeal and awareness of less well-known and visited parts of the county’.

The report says that ‘For many years Cumbria has followed an “attract and disperse” strategy to try and increase visitor activity and increase the share of visitor value and wider benefits in less well-known and visited parts of the county. The DMP is intended to redouble and refocus efforts on this strategy. The focus is about encouraging both day and overnight visitors to discover, visit and spend time and money in less well-known locations as well’.

The West Coast is listed as one of the ‘less well-known and visited’ areas and this is evidenced by the Online Visitor Survey conducted in 2022 by Cumbria Tourism in which less than 2% of the 1,766 respondents said they had visited Millom.[viii]

In Town Fund documentation, it is optimistically estimated that 100,000 additional visitors will be attracted to the area, providing a significant uplift in income for the local community – but how many will come if their enjoyment is inevitably spoilt by sharing a space with the noisy building work, frenetic construction traffic, and the mountainous spoil heap caused by a GDF?

[i]https://www.globaltourismsolutions.co.uk/steam-model/

[ii]  Full Time Equivalent – FTE[iii]https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/almost-250-million-per-year-and-over-3000-jobs-lost-is-this-the-threat-posed-to-tourism-in-east-lincolnshire-by-a-nuclear-waste-dump/[iv]https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/local-news/edf-using-pontins-brean-sands-9012870[v]https://millomtowndeal.org.uk/[vi]https://www.copeland.gov.uk/node/45097[vii]https://www.copeland.gov.uk/towns-fund-millom[viii]https://www.cumbriatourism.org/resources/destination-management-plan/ 

End://..For more information, please contact NFLA Secretary, Richard Outram, by email to richard.outram@manchester.gov.uk