Kevin Dixon: The past and future of work in Torbay

The following article was written by a real human. This time next year, who knows?

Torquay can be viewed as being a pioneer, albeit inadvertently, as it encounters the challenges and opportunities that all Britain will face in the coming decades. 

Compared to the rest of the nation the Bay has generally lower incomes, an older population, more of the workforce in a part-time job, and more economically inactive residents. 

We’re not alone in these challenges. Back in 2007 a House of Commons committee described seaside towns as one of the least understood of Britain’s ‘problem areas’ due to the mix of economic, social and environmental issues.

The statistics are readily available. Torbay’s annual wage is £27,116, the third lowest in the UK. In contrast, Devon’s best-paid workers are in Exeter, just 24 miles away, where the wage is £33,375; £7,000 higher than it is in the Bay. For the UK the median wage is £37,648.

If we look at the kind of jobs people have across the Bay, we find the largest employment sector is ‘Human health and social work’ (20.5%), followed by ‘Wholesale and retail trade’ (16.5%), ‘Construction’ (10.3%), and ‘Education’ (8.7%).

We may see ourselves as a resort town but ‘Accommodation and food service’ accounts for only 8.6% of local employment, evidencing the shift in the Bay’s employment base away from the holidaymaking industry that fashioned Torquay from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

Over recent years inequalities have been widening. Those in the Bay’s most deprived areas now have a life expectancy over eight years less when compared to the more affluent wards; it’s only a short walk between the £1,000,000 villas and the ‘houses of multiple occupation’. 

Such conditions aren’t inevitable or mere accidents. They are the consequences of wider economic and social change alongside many thousands of individual choices:  to come, to stay, to leave, to invest, what and where to build, to hope, to despair. Many of these decisions appear inconsequential while others generated immediate and long-lasting outcomes for the town.

Those decisions taken often focussed on opportunities for leisure, for pleasure, expectations of profit, access to paid work, or how to employ the efforts of others.

The more far-reaching courses of action were to recreate a faux Mediterranean riviera in an obscure bay in England, to exclude manufacturing and extractive industries in favour of tourism, and to divide that bay into health and leisure resorts centred around social class.

For centuries Torbay was a collection of farming and fishing communities, each hamlet largely self-sufficient with many folk working multiple jobs to piece together a living. But then the Industrial Revolution created a new type of town, the leisure resort. Expressing its novel identity, in 1892 Torquay adopted the motto ‘Salus et Felicitas’ or ‘Health and Happiness’.

Torquay’s fabled seven hills were then able to boast five hundred villas occupied by a wealthy class. Accordingly, the resort always had a large proportion of its population who lived a life of leisure and pleasure, not needing to work to provide for themselves.

These affluent incomers were, in turn, enabled by predominantly female servile workers from surrounding villages and from across the nation.

For all servants this was a hard life with extremely long hours, meagre pay, and often harsh treatment by employers. In contrast to other industrial towns where employees developed their own social and political identity, there was little sign of a protestant work ethic in the resort with few seeing their occupation as a noble vocation. 

In 1848 technology transformed the Bay with the arrival of the railway, moving Torquay on from its origins as a health spa to become a true tourist resort. Paid work then shifted to employment in hotels and into new types of job in the service sector. About half the population would eventually spend a holiday by the sea and Torquay seized the opportunity to become the nation’s niche premier resort. The claim to the accolade as the richest town in the nation followed.

During the latter twentieth century technology would again transform the Bay through car ownership and cheap air transport. This time, however, human innovation would divert holidaymakers to other places rather than delivering paying visitors to the Bay. The tourist base contracted, the season shortened, the visiting clientele changed, and investment diminished, leaving resorts facing a spiral of decline.  Sectors of our towns consequently came to resemble other post-industrial provincial enclaves.

A further aspect of change in our communities is that we are now living longer than we used to. During the nineteenth century only around half of people born made it past their fiftieth birthday. Even during the 1950s life expectancy was only 66 for men and 70 for women.

A boy and girl born in Torbay in the early 2020s now have a life expectancy of 78 and 83 years respectively.

The coastal allure to the retired incomer has given Torbay an older age profile, an average age of 49 years compared to 40 years across the UK. 27% of residents are now aged 65 and over. Within a decade it is predicted that one in three of us will have reached that age; this is already the case in Wellswood, Churston, Galmpton, Furzeham, and Summercombe.

At the same time the local birth rate is falling although the population is still projected to rise from 139,000 now to over 153,000 over the next 20 years. Driving population increase are incomers, often older people from other parts of the UK. And we are already importing workers to support the elderly and infirm, essential health and care staff that will inevitably come from beyond the British Isles accelerating the transition to a multicultural Torbay.

Up to the 1980s a social contract more-or-less held between the state and the individual. In return for hard work and educational attainment, a full-time job would provide a decent standard of living, career progression, a job for life, home ownership, and a comfortable retirement; all underpinned by the welfare state and the National Health Service. Yet, those mutual obligations have only been in place since the end of the Second World War, a short interlude in our history, and are now being eroded.

Across the nation two-thirds (68%) of adults in poverty now live in a household where at least one adult is in work, more than one in five working-age people now claim working-age benefits while over 9 million are economically inactive.

Then there is the coming of Artificial Intelligence.  

The precise nature and speed of this future shock is unclear, though that’s the nature of revolutions. We may even be living through an acceleration of history: the agricultural revolution took 2,000 years, the industrial revolution 200 years and the information revolution 20 years. Though predictions are always unreliable, the AI revolution could take 2 years.

As the income distribution system fragments, the ensuing loss or downgrading of jobs will have significant implications to how we organise society. Wage earning has become crucial to our social and cultural lives. We define ourselves according to the jobs that we and others do, and this may have to change. What could focus our minds this time is that it isn’t lower-skilled jobs that will be most affected, but those of the professional classes.  

Coastal economies such as Torbay prefigure the challenges and opportunities the rest of the nation will face in the coming decades. We’re already living in a post-industrial, low-income, leisure-focussed, employment-deprived or work-free society, increasingly polarised around wealth, age and culture. Using the Bay to pilot innovative solutions seems an opportunity not to be missed.

So, are we nearing the time when we need to recognise the end of lifelong work? How should we respond to ongoing changes in the income distribution system?

This article was written by a real human. This time next year, who knows?