It’s not pleasant having to sell off businesses you’ve spent, in some cases, decades building up. It is also the case, though, that Blackpool has an over-supply of hotel accommodation at some levels these days. And this raises an important question. What do we do with the empty properties? It isn’t really sensible to try and keep them all as hotels, but the

But this raises an important question? The Local Area Plan is extremely restrictive when it comes to ‘change of use’, and makes it very difficult to convert hotels for which there is no longer any demand into housing. This is, I suppose, partly a reaction to the equally over-supplied amount of HMOs, but I would much rather see efforts made to replicate other seaside towns’ experiences where those large properties near the sea front have been converted into large homes or luxury apartments, and have acted as the seed-corns of regeneration. All it would need would be a policy of permitting only conversion into single dwellings. However, we are trapped in the Local Area Plan until 2016 thanks to Labour Government regulations. No change is permitted. In a town such as this which needs flexibility in order to regenerate it isn’t helpful, and we can’t just rely on the areas covered by the ReBlackpool regeneration company.

It isn’t all bad news. Mark & Claire Smith continue their almost single-handed efforts to bring quality hotel accommodation to the Fylde Coast. They already own the Number One Blackpool B&B in South Shore, and this month they are opening Number One South Beach – a slightly larger hotel. More can be found out at http://www.numberoneblackpool.com/ – in itself an object lesson in how to design a commercial website. A few more hotels like this, and a few more that think all you need are “tea and coffee facilities” in every room, and we might start to get somewhere.