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So Charlie is launching this today (30/10) at the Water Sports Centre @ 13.00 with Dame Vera. I may well poodle along for a gawp!
'MP calls on Big Society to run Dover
By Robert Wright, Transport Correspondent
Published: October 29 2010 22:55 | Last updated: October 29 2010 22:55
The Conservative party's free-market ideals and its latest intellectual big idea promise to clash this weekend when Dover's Tory MP launches a campaign to block the privatisation of the town's port.
Instead of being sold to private sector investors, Europe's busiest ferry port should transfer to a company owned by Dover's townspeople, Charlie Elphicke will argue. The plan accords with the prime minister's Big Society rhetoric, he says. "We believe it's a model that can point the way to a new form of governance structure," Mr Elphicke told the Financial Times in September.
Dame Vera Lynn, best known for her sentimental second world war-era hits, will join supporters of Mr Elphicke's "People's Port" plan on Saturday. Her presence will highlight campaigners' claims that only their plan can guarantee that Britain's main maritime gateway to the Continent stays in British hands.
The campaigners have the port's main customers on their side. P&O Ferries, SeaFrance and DFDS, which are angry at their treatment by the port's current management, will back their proposals.
However, the Department for Transport looks likely to follow the lead of the last Conservative-led government and privatise the port to a conventional, probably non-British, private sector investor.
The argument is pitting the party's free-market and big-society tendencies against each other, according to Douglas McNeill, transport analyst at Charles Stanley and a former economics adviser to the Conservative party. "It highlights the contrast between these two strands of conservatism in quite a neat way - better than anything we've seen since the election," he says.
The port needs to finance around £400m in construction work on a new ferry terminal on the site of Dover's derelict western docks. Growing traffic and larger ferries are likely to exhaust capacity at the existing terminal within a decade.
The Dover Harbour Board, a charity-like trust that has run the port since 1606, is barred from borrowing to finance the work. Its directors have asked the DfT to let it sell a majority stake in a new operating company to a private investor, with minority stakes going to employees and a charitable trust to benefit the local community.
Mr Elphicke is expected to outline at Saturday's launch details for the financing of his rival plan, under which Dover area residents would be invited to pay £10 each to buy shares in a new company, the Dover People's Port Trust. He was unavailable to discuss the plans on Friday, but in September said City institutions would be prepared to lend to the new company.
"There would be a long-term contract with the ferry companies and long-term finance in the company," Mr Elphicke said. The People's Port idea was compatible with traditional Conservative enthusiasm for free enterprise, he insisted. "One has a group of people come together in association and run it as a commercial enterprise," he said.
However, Mr McNeill said the People's Port plan was likely to be higher-risk than a traditional privatisation. Others involved doubt the new trust would be able to raise as much cash to buy the port as mainstream financial institutions.
"I honestly don't think the People's Port idea is going to stack up," one person involved said. "We're talking quite serious money here."
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. '