Past Policies and Trade in East Kent: Ports, Energy and Food Supply

East Kent has spent two thousand years as the point where things enter and leave the country, and almost every national argument about trade, energy or food supply has had a local version here first.

The pattern is consistent. A route or a resource becomes valuable, the area organises around it, national policy changes, and the area is left with the infrastructure and without the trade. It has happened with the Cinque Ports, the coalfield, the ferries and the airport, and it is currently in progress with energy.

The Cinque Ports, and the first trade policy

The Cinque Ports confederation is the earliest recognisable trade and defence arrangement on this coast. Towns including Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, Romney and Hastings provided ships and men to the crown and received in return substantial privileges: exemption from certain taxes, self-government, and rights over their own courts and markets.

That was a bargain rather than a gift, and it is worth reading as trade policy. The crown had no standing navy and needed one; the ports had ships and wanted commercial advantage. The exchange produced a set of towns that were unusually wealthy, unusually autonomous, and consequently unusually resistant to interference.

It ended, as everything else here has ended, because the physical conditions changed. Harbours silted, ships grew, and a confederation built on shallow-draught vessels operating from tidal inlets could not adapt. Sandwich, at the end of the Wantsum Channel, went from major port to inland town without anything being decided.

The privileges survived the trade by centuries, which is why the ceremonial residue is more visible locally than the commercial history that produced it.

Cross-Channel trade and the ports

The modern version has been the ferry business, and east Kent has held the short sea crossing since steam made it reliable.

Dover took the great majority of it because it is closest to Calais and has the road connections. Ramsgate ran passenger and freight services to Belgium and France for decades on the margin of that, and Folkestone ran services until they ceased.

The concentration at Dover has been policy as much as geography. Road investment followed the traffic, which reinforced the traffic, which justified further investment. A smaller port that loses a service does not simply have fewer sailings; it loses the road priority, the customs presence and the commercial critical mass that would let it get one back.

That is why the periodic proposals to restore a service from Ramsgate have foundered on more than dredging. The infrastructure of trade concentrates, and reversing concentration is far harder than sustaining it.

Customs and border arrangements after 2020 added a further fixed cost to any cross-Channel operation, which falls disproportionately on a small port handling small consignments.

The coalfield, and energy policy from the other end

For most of the twentieth century east Kent was an energy producer. Four collieries worked deep, difficult seams, and the field survived as long as it did partly because national policy valued domestic coal for reasons that were strategic as well as economic.

When that calculation changed, the field went inside a decade. Chislet closed in 1969, Snowdown and Tilmanstone in the 1980s, and Betteshanger in 1989.

The mining villages are the policy residue. They were built to house a workforce brought in from other coalfields, they had no other economic purpose, and they remain, with housing stock and street plans that make no sense in agricultural country. Three of them still show up in deprivation statistics for reasons that trace directly to a decision made about the coal industry.

Offshore wind, and the coast as an energy landfall

The same coast is now an energy producer again, differently. The Thames estuary and the waters off north Kent host substantial offshore wind capacity, and the cables come ashore here.

Three local consequences follow.

Ramsgate harbour has a working industry again, in crew transfer and maintenance vessels, which is currently its most active commercial use and part of the argument for maintaining the dredging.

Cable landfall and substation infrastructure has to cross the coast and the countryside behind it, which generates planning disputes of a kind the area did not previously have.

And the employment is real but smaller and more skilled than the industries it succeeds. That gap between the scale of the infrastructure and the number of local jobs it produces is the recurring complaint about energy development in the area, and it is largely accurate.

Food, farming and supply

Kent’s description as the Garden of England reflects a real agricultural economy: fruit, hops, cereals, and on Thanet’s light chalk soils market gardening and arable rather than orchards.

The policy arguments here have been about supply and about labour, and both are older than they look.

The hop harvest depended for a century on tens of thousands of Londoners coming down for the season, which was a labour supply arrangement dressed as a working holiday. When it ended, mechanisation and migrant labour replaced it, and the sector’s dependence on seasonal workers from outside the area has been a live issue in every subsequent decade.

Food security as a policy question has moved from the margin to the centre and back more than once. The strategic argument, that a country importing a large share of its food is exposed in a way that is not reflected in the price, has been made periodically and has generally lost to the price. East Kent is where any such exposure would be visible first, because the imports arrive here.

Farming policy after 2020 replaced area-based support with schemes paying for environmental outcomes, which changes the economics of marginal land considerably. On the levels behind Thanet, where drainage is a continuous cost and the ground is grazing rather than arable, that shift matters more than it does on better land.

Consumer policy, and where energy meets the household

The national arguments about energy supply have a household end, and on the isle that end is unusually exposed.

Thanet has an older population, a large proportion of hard-to-heat property, and incomes below the regional average. That combination puts a high share of households in the category where energy cost is a substantial fraction of income rather than a line in a budget.

The policy responses have accumulated in layers rather than as a system: price protection mechanisms, targeted payments to defined groups, obligations on suppliers to fund efficiency measures, and schemes to insulate housing stock. Each was introduced separately and each has its own eligibility test.

Two consequences are visible locally. Take-up is patchy, because a household has to work out which of the overlapping schemes applies to it and apply for each separately. And the housing stock defeats a proportion of the measures: solid-wall Victorian terraces, converted seafront property and flats in subdivided houses are all considerably harder to treat than the cavity-walled semi that most schemes were designed around.

The structural point is that efficiency, not price, is what determines a bill over a decade, and efficiency is a property question rather than a tariff question. In an area with this housing stock that makes the local difficulty a building difficulty.

Smart meters, tariffs and the transition

The shift towards time-of-use pricing depends on households being able to move consumption, and the capacity to do that is unevenly distributed.

A household with an electric vehicle, a heat pump and a battery can benefit substantially from a tariff that charges less at night. A household in a rented flat with an electric heater and a prepayment arrangement cannot move its consumption at all, and a pricing structure that rewards flexibility charges inflexibility more.

That distributional question is not specific to east Kent, but the composition of the housing stock and the tenure pattern here mean the inflexible group is proportionally larger than in most of the county. It is the clearest current example of a national policy whose local effect depends almost entirely on what kind of buildings a place happens to have.

What the pattern suggests

Three observations that hold across all of it.

Infrastructure outlives the trade that built it, and becomes a liability rather than an asset. A refuge harbour, a colliery village, an airport runway and a ferry berth are all in that category locally, and the cost of holding them falls on a district with a weak tax base.

Concentration is one-directional. Once trade, road investment and administrative capacity gather at one point, a smaller competitor does not recover by wanting to.

And the local cost of a national policy change is rarely counted in the decision. Each of these transitions was defensible nationally. Each of them left a specific place with buildings, a workforce and no purpose for either, and the record here is that nothing in the process required anybody to plan for that.

One further observation about how these arguments are conducted. Almost every policy described on this page was argued nationally in terms of aggregate cost and benefit, and experienced locally as a specific set of buildings and a specific set of people. The aggregate case was frequently sound. The local record is that nobody was required to hold both figures at once, and the gap between them is where this coast has spent two centuries.

Frequently asked questions

What were the Cinque Ports?

A confederation of coastal towns, including Sandwich, that supplied ships and men to the crown in exchange for substantial commercial and legal privileges. The arrangement declined as harbours silted and ships grew.

Why does Dover have the ferry traffic rather than Ramsgate?

Proximity to Calais and road connections, reinforced over decades by investment that followed the traffic. A smaller port that loses services also loses the surrounding commercial infrastructure.

When did the Kent coalfield close?

Between 1969 and 1989, with Betteshanger the last colliery to close.

Does offshore wind employ people locally?

Yes, in crew transfer, maintenance and marine services at Ramsgate, though on a smaller and more skilled scale than the industries it follows.

Is Kent still agricultural?

Yes, though the mix has changed and the reliance on seasonal labour from outside the area has been a persistent policy question since the end of the London hop-picking migration.