bristol and the saga of royal portbury: a case study in local politics and municipal enterprise

P~LI’IXXL GEOGRAPHY QUARTERLY, Vol. 3, No. 3, July 1984223-250

Bristol and the saga of Royal Portbury: a case study in local politics

and municipal enterprise

KEITH BASSETT AND ANTHONY HOARE

Department of Geography, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 lSS, England

ABSTRACT. Local authorities have become more and more involved in local economic initiatives over the last decade, in response to economic restructuring and rising unemployment in their local areas. The analysis of local initiatives and

their impacts operrs up an important field in political geography. This paper examines in detail the economic and political problems surrounding a major example of municipal economic enterp~Bristol’s attempt to establish a new port-industrial complex at Portbury on the Sevem estuary. The attempt extends over more than two decades, and the analysis illustrates both the changing nature of the project and the perils of a type of municipal enterprise which is subject to rapidly fluctuating international forces.

The last decade has witnessed a rapid expansion of local authority policies in the field of economic development (see, for example, Young and Mason, 1983). In the 197Os, local authorities responded to rising levels of unemployment and deindustrialization by attempting to stimulate local development through three principal forms of activity: the provision of sites and premises; financial assistance; and promotion, information and advice. In the worsening economic climate of the 1980s an increasing number of Iabour-controlled authorities are attempting to go beyond these traditional approaches by establishing Local Enterprise Boards and other institutional structures as vehicles for more interventionist policies aimed at preserving existing employment and encouraging new investment.

The increasing scale of this intervention in local economies raises a number of important questions concerning the ability of local authorities to evaluate alternative investment strategies and to influence the decisions of private capital to the benefit of a local community at a time of recession and increasing international competition. This paper is concerned with a revealing example of local authority initiative on the grand scale- Bristol’s attempt to establish a new port-industrial complex at the mouth of the Avon on the Sevem estuary. The saga of the Royal Portbury dock extends over two decades, reveals conflicting interests at the local, regional and national level, and culminates in a major financial crisis for the city. It is a revealing illustration of local political processes and the perils of municipal enterprise in a crisis-ridden market economy.

0260-9827/84/03 0223-28 $03.00 @I 1984 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd

224 Bristol and the saga of Royal Portbury

In the first section we outline the history of Bristol’s struggles to build its new port and the political and ideological perspectives that underlay those struggles. In the second and third sections we look at the geographical and economic bases of the crisis facing the city today and examine the conflicts surrounding attempts to find solutions to that crisis. A final section attempts to draw some lessons for local economic strategies in the future.

From vision to reality: the battle for Royal Portbury, 1959-1977

The national stage-a three-act drama

Bristol’s Portbury scheme is but the latest phase in a long history of civic endeavour to enhance the city’s sea-borne trade (Walker, 1972). In the 1 lth century the Augustinian friars diverted the course of the river Frome to extend the city’s quay frontage, while Jessop’s 1809 floating ha&our scheme served the same end of bolstering maritime trade for the city centre docks (Figure 1). But increasing ship size ultimately forced Bristol to establish new docks downstream at Portishead (1879) and Avonmouth (1877) for the ever larger vessels for whom navigation of the tortuous River Avon was no longer possible. By the 195Os, though, these ‘new’ ventures were showing their age in the face of the continued growth of ship size and improvements of cargo-handling hardware. The chance to revitalize the now commercially redundant city centre docks through an imaginative planning venture involving offices, housing and leisure facilities was no consolation to the city of Cabot and the Merchant Venturers, once the second port in the land.

3 K,,, _--- N r-----3t.MI .R

i -I

FIGURE 1. Bristol’s docks and the Portbury schemes.

KEITH BASSETT AND ANTHONY HOARE 225

Plans for a new major dock investment on Severnside were first floated in the 195Os, and in 1959 the city-controlled Port of Bristol Authority (the PBA) bought poor-quality agricultural land lying between the existing Avonmouth and Portishead docks. These ideas passed from the local to the national political arena in 1964, when Bristol submitted its

Portbury plans (a in Figure 1) to the Ministry of Transport, as the first such major docks project scrutinized by the Government under Section 9 of the Harbours Act of the same year. Two years earlier, the Government’s Rochdale Committee report on Britain’s seaports had underlined the need nationally for investment in new deep-water berths, although it had been lukewarm to what it knew of the specifics of Portbury. Bristol’s Docks Committee had been unimpressed by this caution, and Rochdale’s recommendation that Portbury be assessed in the light of a new Bristol-Newport port authority was regarded as something of a challenge to Bristol’s proudly independent maritime tradition (Port of Bristol Authority, 1963). The scheme now presented was an ambitious one designed to exploit the city’s excellent motorway connections and make Bristol the third-ranking international port in Britain. The first stage involved the construction of nine berths at a cost of f27 million, but the second phase of construction would raise the total of berths to 25. In the event, the National Ports Committee (NPC) backed Portbury in its hmerim Ports Plan of July 1965, while noting ‘there is very little experience in assessing the merit of a major port investment scheme of this nature’ (Ministry of Transport, 1966b 19).

Whitehall disagreed. In its 1966 command paper ‘Transport Policy’ (Ministry of Transport, 1966a) the Wilson Government’s Minister of Transport, Barbara Castle, refused to back Portbury, a decision ‘justified’ later in the most detailed analysis of a port investment brief undertaken then or since (Ministry of Transport, 1966bhereafter ‘The White Paper’). This argued against Portbury on two grounds. First, it preferred to concentrate container-age investment in existing ports (London and Liverpool) rather than developing virgin sites, and, second, it considered it most unlikely that Portbury could attract sufficient traffic, especially export traffic, to reach commercial viability. Certainly, Portbury was far more expensive on a cost-per-berth basis than other projects in the NPC’s portfolio and also required a much greater expansion of existing trade to attain profitability.

Undeterred, and still convinced of the need to expand its port capacity, the city instructed the PBA to institute a search of ‘all possible and reasonable schemes’ both above and below the Avon confluence. Seven were found to be economically feasible, the pick of the bunch lying on the same side as the original scheme. This new scheme, called West

Dock I and costing some f 15 million, was incorporated in a Bill submitted by the City Corporation to Parliament in 1968 (b in Figure 1). Again, the NPC provided backing as did the South West Economic Planning Council. The Bill successfully navigated the Lords but then ran into stormier waters. The Ministry of Transport turned it down flat and its sponsors faced serried ranks of Labour Government members under a three-line whip when trying to overturn this decision in the Commons on 8 July 1968. In an attempt to pull the financial carpet from under the feet of Portbury’s opponents the Member for Bristol West, moving the Bill, asserted the city’s willingness to meet the full cost, without any central government grant (of 20 per cent) as previously sought. The tactic was not successful. Richard Marsh (the then Minister of Transport) countered Bristol’s cry that it would die without its port with the comment that growth rates in the subregion had been higher than other parts of the country even though port traffic had increased less than average over the period 1961-1966.

Partly because of its doubtful financial prospects and its absorption of construction resources better spent elsewhere (i.e. in other Members’ constituencies) the Bill was thrown out on a second reading by 166 votes to 66.


Bristol was unrepentant, and even more adamant about the need for some new port scheme as the salvation of the city’s economy. Thus the PBA argued once more that:

. . calculations show that Bristol’s only hope for a healthy economy in the future lies in a major modemisation of its port to cater for increases in cargo volumes and variations in the type of vessels requiring docking facilities. . . .

What these ‘calculations’ were was not revealed, but the PBA continued undeterred:

. . . any increase in Bristol’s attraction for export and import bulk and general cargo traffic serves not only to boost its own volume of trade but to draw new business to the Sevemside area (PBA, n.d.).

Thus a third scheme, West Dock II (c in Figure 1 ), was brought forward with similar backing to its predecessors. The city’s consultants reported in March 1970 on its overall viability and the NPC added its seal of approval in the subsequent November. Though a pale shadow of its 1964 forebear, it could still handle six ships of 70 000 tons (three times the

size of those able to use Avonmouth) with ample space ashore for modem handling equip ment. The crucial difference was the emphasisfrom the outset on Bristol’s meeting all the

costs involved through the money market. The Lords again approved the city’s revitalized Private Bill, and the now-Conservative Commons followed suit on 1 July 1971, by 128 votes to 18.

Work began in 1974 and was completed in 1977. By the time the Royal Yacht Britannia sailed in for Her Majesty to rename the scheme the Royal Portbury Dock at the official opening the initial cost estimate of f 12 million had tripled, and Bristol had put its money where its municipal mouth had been for over a decade. Its ability subsequently to recoup this massive municipal commitment was to depend upon its ability to withstand the sea change taking place in the internal and external geography of Britain’s overseas trade.

The regional dimension-Bristol versus the Welsh

The Bristol Channel is well endowed with ports, most of them relics of the coal export trade

on the Welsh side. Given that there was clearly excess port capacity even in the 1960s it was not surprising that South Wales’ interests regarded Bristol’s schemes as major threats and they mounted vigorous opposition at every opportunity. The Industrial Association of Wales and Monmouthshire published a critical study of the first scheme in 1965 and the Newport and Monmouthshire Chamber of Commerce condemned the scheme as unneces- sary and grandiose, and a menace to South Wales (Evening Post, 25 May and 16 October 1965).

Regional conflicts were strongly represented in the 1968 and 1971 Parliamentary Debates on the Bills. In the first, a succession of South Wales MPs stood up to attack the Bill and a succession of South West MPs rose to defend it (Figure 2a). Thus the Labour member for Cardiff North argued that the scheme ‘put city against city and region against region . . . [leading to] . . . cut-throat competition and a slanging match between one side of the Bristol channel and the other’, while Peter Walker (Conservative, Worcester) regretted the ‘Bristol v. South Wales’ strait-jacketing of the debate, arguing instead (but in vain) that Portbury was a national issue concerning the excessive concentration of development on London and Liverpool (Hansard, 8 July 1968). The fate of the Bill had, however, been sealed some days before the debate through a more direct intervention by South Wales’ interests at Cabinet level. While recognizing the financial lobby against the scheme from the Board of Trade, Department of Economic Affairs and Ministry of Transport, Crossman comments in his Diaries:


(b

Voting Against . ana

IW Against 0 0 Speaking A&w (not votinal 0

Voting For Voting and Speaking For : ;

Swaklng For (not VotIngI V Constituency boundaries

FIGURE 2. The How of Commons considers Portbury: the geography of the 1968 and 1971 debates.


. . what really tipped the scale was the Welsh block. Callagban barged in as Home Secretary and also as Member for Cardiff stating we couldn’t have a port at Bristol because Newport and Cardiff wouldn’t like it. So Callaghan, Cleclwyn Hughes and George Thomas provided the weight to defeat the Bristol scheme. ‘Ibis is politics at its worst. I don’t think any of them were thinking of this in terms of Government policy or politics, but purely in terms of Welsh regional self-interest (Crossmau, 1977: 118).

The 1971 Bill, as we have seen, was more successful in getting through a Conservative- dominated Commons, but not without a rump of resistance from South Wales (Figure 26).

This interregional hostility has persisted since, and over wider issues than the docks.

The local dimensions--parties, interest groups alad ideologies

Port plans, parties and interest groups. Bristol’s tenacious pursuit of a new dock was based upon an alliance of local interests that began to come apart only in the 1970s. The successive schemes received bipartisan support from the local Labour and Conservative Parties throughout the 1960s. The first scheme was launched by a Conservative council, the second by a Labour one, and the third by a Conservative one. There was a unanimous vote in Council for the first plan in 1964 and another unanimous vote to support the Private Parliamentary Bill in 1967. An ex-chairman of the Docks Committee said, in a 1966 Council debate, that party politics had never entered into docks affairs, and the strength of bipartisan support was used in 1971 as an argument for the finally successful scheme in evidence to the Select Committee of the House of Lords by the then chairman of the Docks Committee. There is also evidence of broad trade union backing in the favourable comments by Regional Secretaries of the Transport and General Workers’ Union in the 1960s.

It is not surprising that some of the most direct expressions of support came from shipping interests in the city who stood to gain most directly from a major new dock. The original scheme was strongly endorsed by the Secretary of the Bristol Steamship Owners’ Association and the President of the Bristol Timber Importers’ Association (Evening Post, 5 May 1964). The Chamber of Commerce Shipowners’ Association was also directly involved in the Port of Bristol Advisory Board set up in 1966 to help publicize the city’s case for a new dock. In some cases the links between the parties and shipping interests were close. The Vice-President of the Steamship Owners’ Association in 1965 was a former Lord Mayor and the Managing Director of a local tug-boat company.

Outside the circle of shipping interests general support was also offered by the Chamber of Commerce and the Bristol and West of England Manufacturers’ Association representing a wider business viewpoint, but there is little evidence of great interest or pressure from specific industrial sectors. The Appendix to the 1966 White Paper noted that ICI were interested in the possibility of a bulk chemical line from the new dock to their existing Sevemside site, an unidentified oil company in an oil product export terminal, ‘firm interest’ had been expressed by six shipping companies, and ‘marked interest’ by four shipping companies and five industrial. The peripheral nature of the project for the majority of firms was confirmed by the 1967 Sevemside Industrial Survey. Only old- established firms already located close to Avonmouth docks and importing through them cited a local port as ‘fairly important’ for their supplies of raw materials. More than 80 per cent of the imports went to Sevemside firms, though the report concluded they ‘have not tended to show any significant growth over recent years’ (Edwards, n.d.: 77). The Chairman of the Docks Committee confirmed the general picture in evidence to the Select


Committee of the House of Lords in 1971 when he denied direct pressure from existing dock customers lay behind the proposals (Select Committee of the House of Lords, 1971).

The ideological bask of support. The campaign for a new dock was also sustained by an ideological framework that enabled widely different interests to come together with a common goal. focal Conservative and Labour leaders often linked the docks scheme to Bristol’s glorious maritime history and the tradition of the Merchant Venturers. Alderman Parish, a Docks Chairman, described Portbury as ‘one of the greatest merchanting ventures since Cabot sailed from this port to discover North America’ (PBA, 1966), and the then Lord Mayor, addressing the visiting National Ports Council in 1965, claimed, in supporting the dock, to be speaking for ‘Bristol, the spirit of Cabot, of the Merchant Venturers, and generations yet unborn’ (Western Daily Press, 11 March 1965).

This almost obsessive concern with perpetuating Bristol’s maritime tradition was a

thread which united diverse interests. At the same time the docks project could also be looked at in a quite different light, attractive to those less enthused by a maritime past closely entwined with the slave trade. Arthur Palmer, a Bristol Labour MP, gave the project a distinctive socialist dimension by describing it as ‘the largest single municipal

trading undertaking in the country’ and noted that ‘in an earlier age it would have been a source of social& delight’ (Hamad, 8 July 1968). A project that could be simultaneously seen as a continuation of a glorious entrepreneurial past and an expression of socialist advance was clearly capable of generating widespread support!

The other side to this distinctive image of Bristol’s place in the maritime world was an almost paranoid sensitivity to outside criticism, especially when linked to competing proposals to develop the Welsh ports. The local press reported in detail the criticism by South Wales organizations such as the Industrial Association of Wales and Monmouth- shire and the Newport and Monmouthshire Chamber of Commerce, but special ire was reserved by the press and local politicians for the Welsh MPs, who were seen to constitute a powerful lobby with friends in high places (as we have seen, Crossman’s Diaries confirm the factual basis of this view). Looking back on a decade of struggles in 1973 the Western Daib Press sadly concluded: ‘the Welsh got everything and Bristol got nothing’ (8 June 1973). The bitterness that underlay this comment has persisted down to the present day.

The local press was also quite prepared to find influential enemies elsewhere. Following

the 1966 White Paper decision the Westen Daily Press accused the Chairman of the Transport Docks Board of using his influence to try to protect the special interests of Southampton, and the Director General of the Port of London was singled out for special criticism for his alleged opposition to the Bristol scheme on the grounds that he was an ‘old boy’ of Clifton College and presumably should have known better (Western Da@ Press, 28 July 1966).

The sense of an embattled city fighting tp preserve its maritime greatness was strong enough to resist evidence that suggested that a new port was not essential to Bristol’s future prosperity. The constant cry that Bristol would die without its port was, as we have seen, countered by the Government in the 1968 House of Commons Debate, and later the Sevemside study similarly concluded that ‘generally we do not see the Severnside ports as being major stimulants to the economy of Severnside’ (Central Unit for Environmental Planning, 197 1).

In summary, different local interests came together to support the docks schemes, united by a distinctive image of Bristol’s economic role in the world and its pattern of future growth. The consensus began to come apart in the 1970s.


Doubts and dissent. The unveiling of the West Dock II scheme in 1970 was accompanied

by signs of dissent, fuelled by an awareness that the city, even if it got permission to build, would have to foot a heavy bill. The Managing Director of the Bristol City Line commented that Portbury would have been a good idea if it could have been built at the time it was originally proposed, but he now had serious reservations because of the development of container ports at Southampton and Liverpool in the meantime (Western Daib Press, 10 March 1970). Opposition came more fully into the open at the City Council debate in September 1971, when 12 Labour members refused to endorse the proposals because of the scale of the financial commitment.

Construction nevertheless began in 1972 and, once committed to the project, the Council found itself facing escalating costs. By 1974 costs had risen to f28 million and by 1977 to f37 million. In spite of this, increases in expenditure were voted through Council without major public dissent, but many were uneasy about the future as international economic forces relentlessly eroded the volume of trade that the port could capture. Nevertheless, the Conservative leader seems to have caught the all-Party mood of grim determination when he argued in Council that it was now a matter of ‘S’westers down,

collars up, and straight on into the wind’ (Evening Post, 21 November 1974). In 1976, even before the dock was opened, Bristol had an unfortunate experience in its

first serious attempt to attract industry to the site. Toyota (GB) expressed interest in a f5.5 million facility at Portbury to rationalize its national car import and distribution networks. Whitehall’s refusal of the necessary Industrial Development Certificate and its preference for Liverpool on regional planning grounds led to a full-scale row between Bristol’s Council, Port Authority and MPs on the one hand, and the Department of Industry on the other. The Western Daily Press hotly condemned what it saw as a fl million bribe for the company to go to Liverpool-‘that strike-prone haven of Irish immigrants’ (19 August 1976). Eventually a revised application, smaller than the then IDC threshold by the size of the average dining-room table, was prepared to Bristol’s short- lived delight, only for Toyota to withdraw and concentrate future investment at its existing base at Sheerness. The dock finally opened in 1977 as the recession deepened.

From white hope to white elephant ?-the emergence of the financial crisis and its economic basis

The nature of the crisis

The opening of Royal Portbury coincided with a slump in port trade. The scale of the collapse is starkly evident in the combined figures for Portbury and Avonmouth in Table 1 (separate figures for the two are not available). Total imports fell 26 per cent between 1978 and 1982 and total exports rose just 12 per cent from a very low basis.

By 1982 only two of the seven berths had been developed and these were frequently idle. A large part of the rest of the dock provided an international parking lot for bulk carriers and container ships laid up because of the lack of trade. Apart from a few low sheds, a cold-storage depot and a molasses terminal, the 2000 acres of PBA-owned land surrounding the dock remained largely undeveloped, although 70 acres had been reserved for Garanor’s regional freight terminal.

The financial consequences of this lack of development have been serious. Figure 3 shows that, although operating revenue has been increasing since Royal Portbury was opened, so have financial deficits because expenditure in each year has exceeded revenue. In 1982, far example, operating expenditure exceeded operating revenue by f4.6 million

KEITH BASSETT AND ANTHONY HOARE

TABLE 1. Port statistics for Avor~~~outh and Portbury, 1978-1982

231

Tons x 103 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982

Foreign imports 2406 2522 2685 2042 2016 Coastwise imports 1265 1144 1266 857 686 Total imports 3671 3666 3991 2899 2702 Foreign exports 177 291 201 445 400 Coastwise exports 332 308 369 132 172 Total exports 509 599 570 577 572

Note. 1 ton (2000 lb) = 0.907 tonne, throughout.

20-

15-

I’ /

,-/. ,

#’ ,-’

/ : Q-g Revenue

: :

: :

Financial Deficit

from Revenue

Contribution from General Rate Fund

FIGURE 3. The financial performance of Bristol’s docks, 1978-1982.

(more than 60 per cent of this deficit was attributable to Royal Portbury, the rest to Avon- mouth). When depreciation and interest payments were added the total deficit reached f11.7million.

The increase in the deficit from f3.4million in 1977178 to f11.7million in 1981182 has imposed a massive burden on the city’s finances. The deficit has had to be covered by payments from the PBA’s reserves and the city’s General Rate Fund, but the rapid


exhaustion of reserves has meant that the main burden has increasingly fallen upon the rates. In 1980/81 an average rate payer paid f 5 1 in rates to Bristol and f 230 to Bristol and Avon County Council together. Over 32 per cent of the Bristol figure and 11.4 per

cent of the combined figures simply went to cover the dock deficit. Clearly this has posed a major problem for the city at a time when local government expenditure has been under attack from central government and there has been increasing pressure for resources from other council committees such as Housing. We examine the responses to this crisis in section 3, but it is firstly worth examining in detail the economic forces behind Bristol’s deteriorating position, for this has an important bearing on the options that are open to the

city.

The basis of the crisis-an economic analysis

The Ministry of Transport’s 1966 White Paper provides a useful starting-point. Three separate forecasts of Bristol’s overseas trade for 1980 were provided, by the PBA’s consultants, by the PBA themselves and by the Ministry (see Table 2), each predicting what would happen both with and without a Portbury investment.

The final line of Tab/e 2 shows Bristol’s actual 1980 tonnage throughputs.

Comparisons with the ‘with Portbury’ estimates are unfair as Portbury had only been operating for about three years by 1980, far less than had been hoped for by the PBA in 1964 and, of course, it was a very much smaller Portbury to boot. The actual export figure achieved is straddled by the ‘with Portbury’ estimates of the PBA and their consultants, though being very much closer to the latter’s smaller figure. It is also almost exactly half way between the ‘with’ and ‘without’ estimates emanating from the Ministry, which tolled the death-knell of the initial Portbury initiative. More seriously, though, and totally against the main thrust of the White Paper’s estimates, the import trade is less than half of the PBA’s own ‘without Portbury’ estimate and only about one-fifth of its (non-disputed) ‘with Portbury’ target! Taken together, the total 1980 overseas trade flows are only 59 per cent of the most pessimistic of all the estimates made back in 1966. How has this dismal picture come about? First, what does not seem to be to blame is the level of national imports and exports since this was predicted fairly accurately, albeit with some shortfall, by the White Paper, as we can see below:

1980 Dry cargo imports (‘000 tons): actual 51627; estimated (in White Paper), 68589. 1980 Dry cargo exports (‘000 tons): actual, 26290; estimated (in White Paper), 27244.

It follows that Bristol’s failure to meet the White Paper’s target figures is largely to be

attributed to its suffering a loss in its share of that national trade.

TABLE 2. Three forecasts of Bristol’s overseas non-fuel trade 1980 (tons X 103)

Source ofprediction (in 1966 Wbite Paper)

ImpoYts Exports

Without With Without With Po?-tbuYy Portbury Portbury Portbury

PBA 5400 11725 PBA’s consultants 4621 7271 Ministry of Transport 4949 (no estimate) Achievement 2272

B Maximum estimate under best possible scenario for Portbury.

358 2743 215 465 262 10908

603


Comparing Bristol with the performance of the other ‘White Paper’ ports shows that over the period 1964-1978 its rank in non-fuel exports improved marginally from 15th to 13th, while slipping from the nation’s fifth non-fuel importer in 1964 to its ninth in 1980.’

Figure 4 shows the same depressing tale, based this time on value rather than weight. It includes aII trade commodities (including fuels) and a wider range of individual seaports, as detailed in the annual ‘Statistics of Trade through UK Ports’. Imports show the same decline, while Bristol’s export performance also now shows a faU from what was an insignificant role in the first place.

Bristol’s experience has been but one element in a general reshuffling of the pecking order of Britain’s seaports. Between 1964 and 1978, for example, Felixstowe’s share of national non-fuels imports rocketed from 0.22 to 5.4 per cent and for exports from 0.32 to 8.1 per cent, while the combined trades of London and Liverpool collapsed correspondingly from 49 to 28 per cent (imports) and from 60 to 22 per cent (exports). In ‘league table’ terms the average shifts among the 23 ‘White Paper’ ports were 5.2 and 5.9 rank places for imports and exports respectively (Figure .S ).

Yet the White Paper, for all its apparent technicaI sophistication in other respects, made the naive assumption that the share of trade among British ports calculated for 1964 through its gravity modelhng routine would remain unchanged 16 years later-see Heggie (1969), Mills (197 l), and Senior (1983) for a critique of this and other aspects of the White Paper. In fact, this ‘constant share’ assumption could be undermined from three directions, and the net effect of these ‘on the ground’ has been to Bristol’s disadvantage.

(i) The changing geography within Britain of export origins and import destinations. This would alter the number of trade sources and sinks lying within the inland catchments of particular ports. Testing this in the imports case is complicated by problems of identifying what is the true destination of cargoes that may pass to intermediate inland depots for breaking up and finaI redistribution. However, two surveys ahow trends in the origins of

IMPORTS EXPORTS

FIGURE 4. Bristol’s place in United Kingdom overseas trade, by value, 1967-1980. -,UKvalue(%)-----, rank among recorded UK 3eaport3.


7 NON-FUEL TRADE 1964-1978

IMPORTS

Rank position kwt of 231

NON-FUELS TRADE 1964-1078

EXPORTS

FIGURE 5. The shifting geography of non-fuel trading ports, 1964- 1978.

Britain’s exports to be examined over the period of the Portbury debate with reasonable

accuracy. The first, the Mar-tech survey of 1964 (Martech Consultants Ltd, 1964) had provided the basic data used by the Ministry against Portbury in 1966, and the second was a similar though not identical exercise of some 14 years later (Department of Transport, 1980). Together the two enable comparisons to be made between export generation levels at the regiomd level over time (Figure 6). When due allowance is made for boundary realignments between the two surveys Bristol’s ‘home’ region, the South West (unaffected by these changes), increased its share of the national total.* But neighbouring regions (mostly unaffected too) where the city might have hoped to poach traffic, all declined, and substantially so in the case of the major target, the West Midlands. Unfortunately, too, some 52 per cent of the 1978 South West total is china clay from South Cornwall, the captive traffic of the ports of Par and Fowey.

Yet while these swings and roundabouts of export generation were, on balance, unfavourable to Bristol, they cannot alone explain its exporting performance. Had the port attracted in 1978 the same share of each region’s exports as applied 14 years before, its overall export tonnage level would have been 45 per cent higher than that achieved.

(ii) Increased length of inland haul of overseas trade. Second, the ‘constant share’ assumption could come under threat if the geographically constrained inland trade hinterlands of major ports were substantially to weaken, making them more prey to ‘outside’ competition. Several processes might contribute to this end: increased ship size and capital

KEITH BASSEIT AND ANTHONY HOARE 235

iai

l-l la0

NORTH WEST Ul WEST EAST MIDLANDS

-. MIDLANDS

% of G.B. exports by tonnage originating in region

% of regional exports by tonnage exported through Bristol

FIGURE 6. The regions of origin for exports shipped through Bristol, 1964-1978.

investment in containerization; the growing dominance of a few shipping companies; decasualization of port labour-all encouraging services to given destinations to be concentrated at fewer ports-and the enlarged networks of freight agents and of national motorways-both facilitating longer-distance freight shipments within Britain. Certainly, comparing the 1964 and 1978 surveys shows how the ‘local port-local region’ structure of export traffic has been whittled away over the 14 years (Table 3), underlining The Economist’s gut reaction to the 1966 White Paper that ‘the point about the container revolution . . . [is] . . . that hinterlands no longer matter’ (29 October 1966).

(iii) Differential interport contpetitiveness: ‘Geography is to bhme ’ (PBd Meager, Evening Post, 15 February 1983). By themselves, though, these forces make changes in trade share by port only more likely, not inevitable. Only in the presence of a third force, the dzfferential competitiveness of ports one with another, will this become reality. Bristol’s own export performance shows it has failed to capitalize upon the potential open

236 Bristol arki the saga of RoyaI Portbury

TABLE 3. Decline of ‘local port-local region’ structure of British ports’ expon traffic, 1964-1978

1964 1978 Ejcports using port (%I (%I

1. In same region as origin 63.1 48.1 2. In adjacenta region to origin 27.3 27.4 3. In non-adjacent region to origin 9.6 24.3

100 100

* Sharing common administrative border to region of export origin.

to all ports to extend their inland trade hinterlands. Figure 6 shows that, although the South West increased its share of trade passing through Bristol, in all the other regions crucial to its future the port was losing ground.

We must emphasize again that Portbury can have had little or no part in trends up to 1978 but equally the portents are not favourable for its playing a telling role in the future. Of Britain’s top 23 ports for which separate data are available for 1964 and 1978 only five were more dependent upon their home region as an exports source in 1980 than 1964, and Bristol is one of these, the South West supplying 30 per cent of its tonnage handled in the first year and 57 per cent in the second. Of exports from the two Midlands and South East regions, Bristol’s potential poaching ground, the corresponding figures fell from 50 to 29 per cent, while for the prize target of the West Midlands from 33 to 6 per cent. And Bristol’s home region exporters too were looking further afield for export outlets. Increas- ingly, their shipments were exported via the South East’s ‘young Turks’ of Dover, Southampton and Harwich, whose share of the region’s exports rose from 1 per cent (1964) to over 8 per cent (1978), while East Anglian ports, which did not even figure in the 1964 survey as South West outlets, took 15 per cent in 1978. Hence Bristol’s exports have become more parochially dependent upon a region which is not a major industrial power-house in the first place and which shows a distressing tendency to be wooed by Portbury’s rivals.

Many factors could contribute to Bristol’s lack of competitive edge, but one of the most ‘promising’ is the changing overseas geography of Britain’s trade. Whatever the reasons why a particubsr shipping line chooses a particular port as a base for a particular overseas route, more often than not the outcome is that Britain’s ports serve overseas ports to which they offer short sea crossings: Stranraer to Lame, Harwich to Zeebrugge, Dover to Dunkiik, for example (Garratt, 1980). Since 1964, Britain’s trade has been reoriented internationally in a way foreseen in its general direction but not its extent by the White Paper, as the figures in Table 4 show. The withering of North American inward and outward trade and the boom in exports to the EEC are especially significant. It thus appears perfectly in order for east (especially south-east) coast ports to prosper over those in the west of Britain and the north-east, and especially is this so for exports (Figure 5).

So it seems reasonable to hypothesize that Bristol’s poor showing has come about primarily because, when trying to rationalize the port’s poor showing, in the PBA manager’s words (quoted earlier) ‘geography is to blame’.

A west-coast location, ideal for administering the trade in slaves, tobacco, cocoa and sugar and from the New World, is less so for dealings with the EEC. To the extent that shipping companies cannot switch services quickly there is a degree of inertia in port-to port linkages. The same applies to the commodity profile of particular ports. Handling and

KEITH BASSE?T AM) ANTHONY HOARE 237

TABLE 4. Percentage distribution of Britain’s international trade (1980) by tonnage, actual and forecasted

To/from

Imports EXp0rls

Actual White Paper Actual White Pafer

Irish Republic 1.98 3.29-3.37 4.76 3.12-3.77 EEC 18.82 16.35-20.00 30.01 22.5-24.4 USSR and Eastern Europe 2.88 4.71-5.00 1.03 2.85-3.03 North America 13.52 17.60-23.35 10.05 17.52-19.12

Note. Two different estimates are supplied for each case in the White Paper.

storage facilities suitable for timber are not necessarily suitable for motor cars, and so again some inflexibility will apply over time. This is especially likely in ports oriented heavily to imports (as is Bristol), given the greater difficulty in transferring primary products than manufactured ones to container loads. It follows that any differential growth rates in

national trade with overseas countries and/or traded commodities could translate into differential trade growth rates for particular British ports. Thus Bristol, with a bias in the mid-1960s towards North American export markets and towards imported foodstuffs, could be expected to suffer should these destinations or commodities grow relatively less than Britain’s exports and imports as a whole.

We can run simple extensions of the well-tried technique of shift-share analysis (see, for example, Armstrong and Taylor, 1978) to see whether this does indeed ‘explain’ Bristol’s trade experience. This allows us to distinguish three separate elements in trade change:

1. the share (the overall national pattern of change allocated to each port on a ‘fair share’ basis);

2. the structural s&fit (changes over and above the share that can be attributed to a port’s distinctive trade profile);

3. the differential shift (what’s left unexplained by 1 and 2).3

Shift-share analyses were run separately for the following circumstances:

for imports and exports; for total imports (exports) and non-fuel imports (exports); for 1965-1972 and 1972-1979, representing the periods before and after Britain’s joining the EEC, assuming this to have a major effect both on the types of traded goods and trading partners.

The results, summarized in Figure 7 are rather surprising. No complete consistency emerges among the ‘signs’ of any single shift-share element

over the full suite of analyses, but on balance the ‘structural’ mix by commodity is unfavourable (in six cases out of eight) while, against expectations for a west-coast port, Bristol’s ‘area’ results show a favourable structure as often as not (four out of eight cases). But in both sets of analyses the differential shift is predominantly unfavourable (negative), and swamps the other components, being the largest in 13 out of 16 cases. Proportion- ately, it is more significant in the ‘area’ than the ‘commodity’ cases despite our expecta- tion that Bristol’s poor trade performance would reflect its inability to serve growing short sea destinations on ti near European mainland (suggesting largish negative structural shifts in the ‘area’ analyses).


NON FUEL TRADC

BY COMMODITY BY AREA

1965-72 1972-70 lQS5-72 1972-79

IMPORTS

ALL TRADE

BY COMMODITY BY AREA

19

1

-108

-72 1972-79 195S-72 1972-78

IMPORTS

I Share Structural shift Differential shift

-380 overall change (000’s tons.1

FIGURE 7. Shift-share results for the Port of Bristol, 1966-1979 (see text).

KEITH BA~~ETI AND ANTHONY HOARE 239

Interpretation of this differential shift is a well-known elephant trap of shift-share analysis. Even so, it does appear that Bristol has been handicapped not so much by its initial

trade profiles but in its ability to compete successfully over the following years. (Indeed, in the shift-share literature the differential element is sometimes called the ‘competitive shift’; for example, Smith, 1969). We could thus see Figure 7’s flotilla of negative differential shifts as a massive vote of no confidence in an old port struggling to turn its face to the future. Certainly, it does not take many such decisions as that by Elders and Fyffes (in 1967) to switch their banana import business from Bristol to Southampton to damage seriously a port’s trade balance. As Mills (1971: 137) remarks:

. . the individual port is often affected by abrupt all-or-nothing location decisions by individual shipping lines, some of which are large enough for an individual decision to have considerable impact on the port as a whole.

In sum, then, this brief analysis of Bristol’s trade experience over the period of the Portbury debate raises three worrying conclusions. First, Bristol’s failures in trade growth have been at least as much in the apparently (in 1966) ‘safe’ area of imports as in the ‘hazardous’ one of exports. Second, Bristol has been singularly unsuccessful in extending its trade hinterland within Britain in the way the White Paper considered essential and the city fathers there for the taking, despite a major loosening nationally of the ties between local ports and local regions in terms of export movements. Bristol has been more poached against than poaching. Finally, the major blame for its disappointing performance both on imports and exports cannot be attributed to the items it was handling or the overseas

partnerships it had forged (weaknesses it might have been relatively easy to remedy), but to its inability to compete effectively in the minds of the international shipping industry with other ports in the country where things are shipshape, but decidedly not in a Bristol fashion.

The response to crisis: economic realities and political conflicts

The political context

The Council’s responses to the economic realities outlined in the previous section have been shaped by a number of important political factors. Firstly, although Labour remained the largest party locally, with a comfortable majority from the early 1970s until May 1983, the present Bristol Labour Group is different in composition and outlook from the group that voted through the final scheme. A number of new, younger and more aggres- sively left-wing councillors were elected in 1979, and the group has been split by major political conflicts over opposition to central government strategy and the content of city budgets. While the Left has not publicly opposed the leadership’s overall strategy on Royal Portbury there have emerged, nevertheless, clear differences in emphasis and enthusiasm within the group on the future of Royal Portbury.

Secondly, the cross-party alliance with the Conservatives which sustained the early schemes has been subject to increasing tension. Although the two main parties have not diverged on essentials, the widening gulf between Labour and Conservative on most other issues, and the more aggressive Rightist attacks of Tory spokesmen on traditional Labour policies, have strained this unity. Thirdly, the small Liberal group has increasingly adopted an ‘anti-Portbury’ stance, seeing in this an opportunity of distancing themselves from both major parties and consolidating their image as the only ‘real’ opposition to the majority I&our group in the defence of ratepayers’ interests. In summary, the political context for


responding to the crisis has become much more complicated at the same time as the crisis has deepened.

‘If at first you don ‘t succeed . . . ‘-Btistol ‘s response to crisis

Faced with the worsening financial situation the Labour leadership has tried desperately to attract trade and industrial development to Portbury to reduce the financial burdens on the city. A succession of initiatives has been launched since 1979.

The search for new aid A joint request was made to the Government by the City Council and Chamber of Commerce in 1980 to separate the finances of the dock undertaking from the rates to avoid penalties under the new Block Grant System. In November 1980 the Council’s Labour leader regretfully announced that the request had fallen on deaf ears and that the city had also failed to get anywhere with its proposal for a ‘Sevem Ports Develop ment Area’ which would have given Bristol access to finance on the same favourable terms as the ports in the Development Area of South Wales. Subsequent pleas for central govem- ment assistance have also repeatedly failed, the latest in March 1983 when the Transport Minister told Bristol MPs that it was Government policy for ports to stand on their own feet.

Bristol has also been unsuccessful in its repeated attempts to get aid from the Common Market, in spite of the efforts of Bristol’s Europe MP to claim European aid on the same terms as the South Wales ports.

Approaching ‘the City ’ and wheeling on the consultants. At the same time, approaches have also been made by the leadership to ‘the City’ through the intermediary of Hambro’s merchant bank in an attempt to tap sources of private capital. Hambro’s reported in 1981 that in the present trade recession investment from private, capital would not be available.

Faced by a dead end the leadership took up the suggestion of inviting a team of private consultants to carry out a financial and economic appraisal. Coopers and Lybrand were accordingly appointed in early 1981 to suggest ways of reconstructing dock finances, improving the marketing of the port, and reducing the burden on the rates.

The appointment of a high-powered team of consultants served several functions. Firstly, it provided a hard-headed, independent commercial assessment of the situation. Secondly, it helped the leadership group to establish firmer control over the Docks Committee and its expenditure. It was widely felt in the Labour group that the Docks Committee had greater freedom of action than was accorded to other committees. The Committee could justify a higher level of secrecy because of the commercial nature of much of its work; its Chairman was a skilled politician who had been a powerful and dominating leader of the Labour group in the 1960s; it was backed by the lobbying power of the PBA which was a major local employer. The Coopers and Lybrand report, when published, noted that there had been ‘substantial friction, at both member and officer level, between the City Council and the PBA’ as a result of the institutional arrangement whereby the Docks Committee was both part of the Council and a commercial organization (Coopers and Lybrand Associates, 1981). The commissioning of the consultants’ analysis provided the leadership group with a means of exerting more control over future policies. Finally, the consultants’ report was a convenient way of getting the Labour group as a whole to make certain unpalatable decisions on selling assets and reducing employment that might otherwise have been difficult to get accepted.

The consultants produced their final report in August 198 1 and great efforts were taken


to restrict access to it. Only two copies were made available to members outside of the Resources and Coordination and Docks Committees and these could be used only in the Members’ Library for a two-week period before the Council debate. Some sections contain-

ing commercially sensitive information were cut out. The report first spelled out the employment consequences of complete closure. More

than 6500 jobs would be lost in the docks and in dock-related industries, and the unemployment rate in Avonmouth would rise from 8.7 to 25 per cent. After analysing future trade prospects the report looked at the financial consequences of five different options.

These options were all based on the common assumptions that, firstly, urgent action would be taken on overmanning by reducing employment by 764-824 jobs, and secondly, that an immediate start should be made on the disposal of up to 630 acres of land for industrial and warehouse use by outright sale or through premium value, low rental lease.

The five options analysed on this basis considered: (1) the total closure of both Avonmouth and Portbury; (2) the closure of Avonmouth and the retention of Portbury; (3) the closure of Portbury and the retention of Avonmouth, (4) the retention of Avonmouth and Portbury but in a rationalized form; and (5) a continuation of existing policies. Each option was evaluated in terms of its employment effect and its financial implication for the Council. The cash commitment by the Council over a 20-year period at 1981 prices ranged from a low of f26million to a high of E299million with options 3 and 4 being clearly the best. The consultants expressed a ‘clear preference’ for option 3 (the closure of Portbury) but left a loophole by pointing out that the Council might wish to make its decision on ‘wider issues’.

The Labour group debated the proposals in advance of the Council meeting in October 1981 and an overwhelming majority supported the leadership’s choice of option 4, retaining both Portbury and Avonmouth in a rationalized form. (Coopers and Lybrand had costed this option at f63 million). Confident predictions were made that after a period of difficulty the project would ‘come good in the end’ once international trade picked up. The

group had been seriously divided along Left versus Right lines on a variety of issues since 1979 and ‘rebels’ had been expelled from the group on a previous occasion for opposition to the budget. However, Left opposition was much more muted on the docks issue. The Left’s favoured alternative of nationalization and an integrated national plan for all ports was not a practical possibility in the short term given the attitude of the Conservative Government. Arguments against the continuing employment of scarce resources to the detriment of other committee programmes were tempered by an awareness of the serious unemployment (and political) consequences of closure.

In the event, the only sustained opposition in council to the decision to retain Portbury

was mounted by the Liberal Party. Their discussion paper, published before the Coopers and Lybrand report, had concluded, using a simple economic model, that Portbury would be able to operate all its berths and make aprofit only if it attracted the entire projected increase in UK port traffic in the period up to 1984 (Bolton et al., n.d.). Since this was clearly impossible they had proposed a standstill in new capital investment and the setting of firm performance targets which, if not met, would allow the port to be closed after three years. This proposal was roundly condemned by both Labour and Conservative leaders who argued that any suggestion that the dock might close after three years would have the effect of discouraging potential port users from using the dock or investing any capital in terminal facilities. Now, in the Council debate on the Coopers and Lybrand report, the Liberals complained of the lack of information on the other options, but their move to refer the report back was defeated by the combined Labour and Conservative vote. Option 4 was adopted.

242

The sale of land

Bristol and the saga of Royal Portbury

The disposal of land through sale or long lease was implicit in all the Coopers and Lybrand options. The acceptance of any of these posed embarrassing questions for the Labour group because district Party policy was opposed to the sale of any Council-owned land. The conflict of principles surfaced in 1982 when Bristol was offered a deal it felt it could not refuse.

The Yeovil-based Abbey Hill Group is one of the largest UK vehicle distributors. In 1982 the company approached the Council with a deal to build a car import terminal at Portbury on a 35-acre site with facilities for inspection and rust-proofing. The company made clear that the sale of land was essential to the deal as security for raising loans to carry through the development. The final set of proposals put before the Council were complex, involving a phased development, a guaranteed f600 000 per annum minimum payment to the Council regardless of the numbers of cars imported, and the right of the Council to buy back the site after five years if progress was unsatisfactory. The Chief Executive of the company made plain publicly that without union cooperation and freehold land there would be no deal (Western Daily Press, 8 November 1982).

There was at first some opposition within the Labour group to the terms, not only from the Left. There were questions raised about the viability of a company unable to develop without freehold security to raise funds; about the possible capital gains that might accrue to a private company owning the land after so much public investment had been poured into the site; about the relatively small number of jobs that would result (some 120); and the possible precedent that was being set for future deals with potential users of another 1000 acres. In the event, the leadership carried the day, publicly insisting that the deal was not a prelude to a ‘sale of the century’; the unions gave the scheme strong backing; and doubters within the group and Party confined themselves to muted criticism behind the scenes. The deal received all-Party support in Council.

Hong Kong on Sevem?-enterprise zones and free trade zones

Bristol’s willingness to make a grab for any development opportunity going is shown by its enthusiastic response to the idea of Enterprise Zones and, more recently, to the possibility of Free Trade Zones, even though district Labour Party policy is against both concepts.

In September 1982 a bid for Portbury was entered as one of the Second XI Enterprise Zones being offered by the Department of the Environment to add to those allocated in 1980-l 98 1. This was the more surprising since it could scarcely be said to meet all three broad criteria for selection specified by the DOE to guide applicants (Department of the

Environment, 1982).

(i) Sites of suitable size should be ‘capable of early development ‘. Here, at least, Portbury scored well, being just about the only real choice within the city region. It was in Council ownership, was of the appropriate size (101 ha, compared to the DOE’S guidelines of 80-100 ha), and land was mostly at an advanced stage of site preparation. Only one other site of this size was in municipal ownership (Figure 8). Here, at Avonmouth, drainage problems would make conversion from existing agricultural use a costly and lengthy procedure, and any resultant Enterprise Zone could jeopardize the Council’s 20 ha Phase 2 development on its nearby trading estate at a time of slack commercial demand. Other suitable sites were in the hands of non-municipal owners, like Rio Tinto Zinc, ICI, the Imperial Group, or British Rail.


(ii) ‘There shot& be a demonstrable need for action to redress problems of physical or economic decline. ’ If ‘decline’ implies a retreat from former greatness then Portbury, a ‘never was’ rather than a ‘has been’, was a non-starter. Certainly, the First XI EZs were mostly the industrial flotsam stranded by the turning tide of economic fortune. But, if anything, Portbury suffers from premature physical development, while economically it is far from being the major locus of unemployment in the Bristol region. If the DoE had bothered to map those Bristol blackspots catalogued in its EZ submission, they would have found them predominantly on the opposite side of the city to Portbury (Figure 8). They could also have pointed out that nowhere in the Portbury submission was there any indication of how a ‘successful’ EZ would solve Portbury’s problems of under-used dock space since, despite the emphasis on ‘free trade’ in its formative political days, the EZ concept eventually launched upon the British economy made only minimal play of any attempt to encourage ‘free-port’ activities of the ‘mini Hong Kong’ variety (Norcliffe and Hoare, 1982).

FIGURE 8. Recent economic changes in the Bristol region.

(iii) ‘The localauthority. . . sbouki be willing’? Whether Bristol really was or not we shall never know, as the EZ application was never put to debate in the ruling Labour group or the City Council. The Labour leadership was fortunate in that the Portbury land actually lay outside the formal city boundary in the territory of neighbouring Woodspring District


Council. The leadership, whilst instigating the application, could thus shield themselves behind the argument that it was not Bristol that was putting in the application and therefore it did not need to be formally debated beforehand. This was not at all to the liking of some sections of the Party which were highly critical of the free-market principles inherent in the Enterprise Zone concept. The district Party’s draft policy statement published in November 1981 stated firmly: ‘Labour is utterly opposed to the Tory concept of Enterprise Zones’. Opposition surfaced at a joint meeting of the district Party and the Labour group, when the Iabour leader came in for some critical questioning about the application itself and the way the decision had been arrived at.

Opposition in Bristol was not confined to sections of the Labour Party. The Chamber of Commerce petitioned against the application to the DOE (on 27 October 1982), arguing particularly that such a scheme would merely redistribute existing economic activity within the region rather than creating new employment, and would be an unfair penalty on those operating and owning land just outside its arbitrary boundaries. Even more seriously, the Enterprise Zone idea was criticized by Avon County Council, itself Labour controlled, on the grounds it conflicted with structure plan proposals (Evening Post, 13 November 1982). Perhaps the upper echelon of Bristol’s polity felt the application a risk worth taking, given that it could play a behind-the-scenes puppeteer to Woodspring’s puppet. In the event, the application failed.

The announcement by the Government in early 1983 of its intention to conduct a limited experiment in ‘free-trade zones’, when imported goods could be processed and exported without payment of duty, has provided Bristol with another straw at which to grasp. A vigorous campaign was immediately mounted in the city, involving the Council, local business interests and MPs to get the Royal Portbury site designated as one of these free-trade zones. With no case experience to work upon, the implications of this venture on Bristol’s plight are hard to discern. Suffice it to say that, given Bristol’s steady loss of import trade, any free-port success would involve something of a change of heart by the shipping industry. This might not be forthcoming if free-port facilities were available also at

east-coast locations like Felixstowe, whilst few of Bristol’s remaining primary product imports are obvious candidates for ready processing into high-value exports. Certainly, experience with the free-port concept in the United States shows it to be no universal panacea for the revival of local economic fortune (The Times, 11 May 1983).

Property developers to the rescue?--convention centre and leisure complex

In April 1983 the Heron Corporation unveiled their proposals for a f 500 million convention and leisure centre on 1200 acres of land between Portbury and Port&head docks (Figure 8). The proposed complex would include an international convention centre, a marina and ‘fishing village’, an all-weather 35 000 seater stadium, hotel accommodation, golf and riding facilities, and housing. The site would be linked by an internal monorail system and could guarantee up to 20000 jobs. Heron were reported to be looking for outright purchase of the land at a price that could wipe out a large part of Portbury’s debts (Bristol Trade and Industry, May 1983).

The proposal provoked a mixed response. The Conservative leader of Bristol Council dismissively termed it ‘a Mickey Mouse development’ (Evening Post, 20 April 1983) but Bristol Iabour leaders were reportedly taking it more seriously. A major stumbling-block lies in the fact that much of the land falls within Avon County’s proposed green belt buffer between Portbury and the town of Portishead. Both Avon and Woodspring District Council would argue for the retention of the green belt in any public inquiry that would


have to be set up to consider a scheme of this scale. Such an ambitious project could only offer Bristol a financial lifeline in the longer term and would have to surmount many

obstacles along the way, not least the local Labour Party’s opposition to land sales for

speculative property development. It is not clear either how such an up-market property developer’s dream is compatible with the city’s professed objectives of encouraging industrial development around the port, but the depth of interest among the local leadership is itself indicative of the concern over the financial millstone of Royal Portbury.

Local economic development strategies and Portbury’s contribution to Bristol’s growth

Although a lot of the city’s effort has gone into the Royal Portbury project this is by no means the only component of local economic development. How does Royal Portbury fit into the city’s wider economic development strategy?

The opening of Royal Portbury coincided with the launching of an economic development strategy for the city as a whole. In 1976 an Economic Development Board and an Economic Development Subcommittee were set up and an Economic Development Officer appointed. Significantly, the analysis of Bristol’s economic problem that has been developed since then, and the strategy of development that has been pursued, have shifted attention away from Bristol’s maritime past and the future of its docks. Annual reports of the Economic Development Subcommittee have identified the collapse of the city’s traditional manufacturing sector as the key problem facing the city, with the problem of unemployment becoming particularly acute in the central and southern parts of the city as the result of closures and redundancies by large corporations (Figure 8). In response to these problems the Subcommittee have pursued a strategy of attracting new investment from the US in high-technology industries, encouraging the growth of small firms, and stimulating office development and tourism.

The strategy of building a new high-technology sector in the city has achieved some success to date with the prospect of Hewlett-Packard alone employing more than 4000 jobs in a new factory and the gradual development of the Aztec West ‘science park’ (Figure 8). However, it is clear that Avonmouth, Royal Portbury and its surrounding acres of undeveloped land, do not figure very highly in the locational preferences of incoming high- technology firms. The preference is very much for greenfield sites in pleasant residential surroundings on the northern edge of the city, adjacent to the motorway to London and Heathrow, and close to the existing aerospace complex at Filton which provides a ready pool of highly skilled labour and a possible network of subcontracting firms. In fact, as the Economic Development Officer has made clear, if these preferred sites were not made available then high-technology firms would simply look elsewhere in Britain or Europe. In placing its bets on high-technology industries Bristol is therefore nurturing a locational pattern of employment growth that is not closely related to either the docks or the high unemployment areas of south Bristol.

Bristol’s development strategy is, in a sense, two-faced. One component, embodied in Royal Portbury, is based on a traditional interpretation of Bristol’s maritime role, and faces westward to the Atlantic. The other more recent component, embodied in the high- technology factories on the northern fringe, faces eastwards up ‘the M4 Golden Corridor’ to Swindon, Newbury and Heathrow. The two components are not necessarily incom- patible but neither are they closely interrelated: they represent different perceptions of Bristol’s future, and they sit uneasily together.


‘What about the voters?’ -electoral realities and Party manoeuvrings

With the approach of city-wide council elections in May 1983 the docks issue was pushed more firmly into the public arena, and the local party differences widened ever more, so much so that The Times ’ synthesis of the Bristol campaign for its national readership was headlined ‘Thatcher and docks dominate campaign’ (30 April 1983).

The Liberals redoubled their attacks in the run-up to the 1983 election, calling for the publication of the ‘secret’ Coopers and Lybrand report which, they claimed, was kept under lock and key in the Council House and could be read by councillors only under ‘supervision’. A motion in Council to publish the report was crushed by the combined

Labour and Conservative vote with Liberal councillors being accused of a ‘malicious and malignant campaign’ (Evening Post, 9 March 1983). The Liberals made plain they did not think the dock would ever win enough trade to pay its way, recession or no recession, and was too great a burden on the ratepayers.

The Conservatives responded by clarifying their alternative (Evening Post, 11 March 1983). This involved a target of selling 225 million worth of assets (mainly land) to reduce loan debts, a complete restructuring of the management and committee structure and the establishment of a Port Development Corporation with greater involvement by private enterprise. Perhaps inevitably, their leader publicly called for ‘an Ian MacGregor’ to inject commercial realism into the docks, although such a course could just as likely produce closure as profitability.

Labour was also committed to retaining Portbury on three grounds (Bristol District Labour Party, 1983). Firstly, closure of Portbury would lead to the closure of Avonmouth as well, since ‘the latter is not built or equipped to meet the shipping needs of the future’. Secondly, closure of Portbury and Avonmouth ‘would have a devastating effect on the city; not just in terms of its direct employment but also upon the wider industrial structure and the city’s scope for variety of economic development in the future’. Thirdly, closure would not relieve the city of the financial burden of the docks.

Closure would still leave Bristol with debt charges of f 173 million over the next 20 years (the Coopers and Lybrand figure). Labour’s local election manifesto placed its hopes in rationalization (but without compulsory redundancy) and an upturn in trade, but reaffirmed a belief in a ‘publicly owned, nationally integrated ports system’ in the longer term. Finally, the manifesto reaffirmed the Party’s opposition to the kind of sale of land assets that the Labour group had already embarked upon.

On 5 May the electorate confused things further by returning a ‘hung Council’ with 3 2 Conservatives and 30 Labour councillors, and 6 Liberals holding the balance of power. The future of Royal Portbury is now bound up with the outcome of complex maneouvring and between the Conservatives and the Liberals on the balance of power on committees. A new phase of controversy has &gun in which Royal Portbury will continue to play a prominent role. How it will fare is anybody’s guess.

Conclusions

In retrospect, the Royal Portbury project stands out as an extremely bold strategy for a local authority to undertake. At a time when most authorities were content to engage in orthodox ‘property-led’ initiatives to support the private market, Bristol struck out on a ‘public sector-led’ strategy firmly under local democratic control. We must be cautious about drawing over-grandiose conclusions about municipal enterprise from this one case study, not least because in its concentration on port investment, Bristol (the only British

KEITH BASEIT AND ANTHONY HOARE 247

city to own its docks) is unique. Even so, certain broader implications do suggest themselves.

The Portbury project indicates the danger of local authorities embarking upon high-risk strategies whose success or failure depends so completely upon international forces outside their control. It is hard to think of an investment course less ‘controllable’ by a local authority than an international port which, by its nature, locks a city’s economy more firmly into an unstable and fluctuating system of international trade.

The study also raises the question of the appropriate spatial scale for development decisions of this sort. Arguably, building an international port should be undertaken only in the context of appropriate national and regional plans to link industrial and port investment. The lack of a proper Severnside Regional Plan linking Bristol and South-east Wales has permitted decades of intra-estuarine competition and the waste and duplication of public expenditure, while the absence of a national ports strategy was also noted in the

paper. Then there is the issue of flexibility in local authority development strategy. Bristol

committed itself to putting most of its eggs in one basket over a timescale of decades. Developments such as the high-tech Aztec West campus may, if the right firms are not forthcoming, become a lower-tech warehousing estate, but the Royal Portbury basket is not easily adaptable to other purposes (local suggestions that it could be drained and used as a White Elephant Museum for Concorde have been dismissed as in bad taste).

Linked to this, we can see the importance of reading a city’s locational advantages correctly, and building on those advantages. Whit millions of pounds have been pouring annually into Royal Portbury, to little effect as yet, a modest outlay on industrial promotion and land assembly has been relatively successful in attracting new high-technology firms to other parts of the city. Here the city has built on its obvious advantages as the western end of the M4 ‘corridor of development’. Being within two hours of the City of London and Heathrow by motorway and high-speed train has given Bristol far more locational advantages than its port gains from being closer to Cape Town than is Liverpool in sailing time.

Further, there is the question of objectives. It has not been clear for some time what function Royal Portbury is supposed to perform in the local economy. For example, is it to stimulate the economy as a whole (an ‘industrial policy’) or is it to create jobs (a ‘short- term employment policy’)? A clarification of objectives might well point to much more cost-effective alternatives. If the objective was to preserve and create jobs, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the same volume of expenditure spent on improving labour- intensive local authority services, job retraining, land assembly and direct aid for new industries and workers’ cooperatives, would prove far more effective in the short and medium term. A Royal Portbury strategy could win only (if at all) in the very uncertain long term.

Finally, the Royal Portbury saga illustrates certain political problems for local parties embarking on projects with such a long time-scale. Much of the support for the project is currently being carried forward by councillors in both major parties who were involved in the original decisions and stiIl occupy powerful positions in their own party groups. As time goes on they become fewer in number and the Council is increasingly made up of cohorts of younger councillors who feel in no way responsible for earlier decisions. This provides new sources of tension zuithin parties. The emergence of third party representa- tion also makes a long-term inter-party consensus increasingly difficult to sustain, particularly when there is the ever-present threat of a ratepayers’ revolt. Central government finds it hard enough to convince the electorate of the need for sacrifice now in return for jam

248 Bristol ana’ the saga of Royal Portbury

tomorrow. focal authorities, faced as now in Bristol with annual elections, are likely to find the task even more difficult when the electorate perceives the sacrifice increasing and the rewards receding into the future.

Acknowledgements

The authors are most grateful to the Port of Bristol Authority for their help in furnishing information on the historical development of schemes for the Portbury Dock, including

that used in F&we 1. The Authority is not, of course, responsible for any of the opinions, inferences and conclusions expressed in the paper, which are those of the authors alone.

Notes

1. Aggregated data only are available in 1978 for Leith and Grangemouth, and for Immingham and Grimsby, so the number of separate ‘ports’ which can be compared is reduced by two for the White Paper/Martech list of 25.

2. These calculations exclude: (i) sea-borne exports in the 1978 survey not specifically allocated to any single GB regional

origin-these amount to 7.7 per cent by weight of the GB sea-borne total; (ii) ‘land boundary’ (to the Irish Republic) exports; and (iii) exports originating in Northern Ireland (which are included only in the 1978 survey).

3. Operationalizing these components followed standard analytical procedures. The authors will be

pleased to supply these and accounts of the official data sources used on request.

References

ARMSTRONG, H. W. AND TAYLOR, J. (1978). Regional Economic Policy and Its Analysis. Deddington: Philip

Allan.

BOLTON, C., FOSTER, D. AND HOWELL, R. (not dated). The Fzlture of Royal Portbury. Bristol: Liberal Group

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Note added in proof

This paper was largely completed by June 1983. Since that date there have been sudden and

dramatic developments in the Royal Portbury saga. After the May 1983 elections the Conservatives, as the largest party on the ‘hung’

Council, were allowed to take majority control of the Council committees. They immediately called in a team of consultants to advise them how to dispose of the city’s extensive property assets to raise capital to pay off the docks debt. The underlying financial crisis deepened during the year and came to a head in February 1984 when it was revealed to the Council that rate expenditure on the docks to cover losses for 1984/85 would probably have to rise by 27 % to f 12.7 million. When the need to maintain existing services, cover anticipated losses on the city’s Direct Labour Organisation, and avoid grant penalties was added to this, a total rate increase of between 5 1% and 105 % would be necessary.

After protracted bargaining and debate the Conservatives secured Liberal support for a drastic solution. The city would borrow sufficient new funds (over 255 million) from the London money market to reconstruct the Docks debt, to remove debt charges from the city’s accounts for three years, and avoid grant penalties. At the same time the city would dispose of over f55 million of its property assets over the three year period in order to pay

back the entire debt and any accumulated interest charges. Disposal of property assets would largely take the form of retaining city-owned freeholds (as in the central Broadmead shopping area) but offering new leases with a low ground rent and large initial capital premium. To date (May 1984) over El2 million has been raised in this way with pension funds, insurance and property companies buying up leases on large blocks in the city centre.

The Conservatives have presented this solution as the only means of keeping the docks open and avoiding a level of rate increases and grant penalties that would, in the words of the Conservative leader of the Council, reduce Bristol to ‘a ghost town’. The Liberals agreed on condition that major new investments are not made in the port which, they argued, would generate the same problems all over again after the repayment of the old debt. Labour reluctantly supported the necessity for disposing of some city assets to repay the debt but strongly critic&d the terms and the scale of the asset disposal which would result in longer term financial losses to the city.

The Conservatives also linked their financial proposals to a wider package of measures involving an (optimistic) application for Assisted Area Status for inner and south Bristol, an Enterprise Zone (again) for Portbury, and a ‘Sevem Ports Zone’ to embrace Portbury and the South Wales ports-this would enable Bristol to tap EEC regional funds.


So far the only Government response has been to turn down Bristol’s earlier application for a freeport, rubbing salt into the wound by giving freeport status to Bristol’s rival, Cardiff. The future of Royal Portbury has now become entangled with wider issues of local govem- ment finance and rate capping and debates over regional policy and the use of EEC social and regional funds. Clearly the saga has many more years to run. Watch this space!

bristol and the saga of royal portbury: a case study in local politics and municipal enterprise

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