A legacy of tragedy: What has changed one year on from the Southport killings?

Southport will fall silent for three minutes this week to remember the three girls who were tragically killed in the horrific attack that kicked off a wave of disorder across England and Wales last summer.

The summer of discontent’s fallout still rocks the seaside town.

The trial of the man responsible for the deaths of Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar and Bebe King has been and gone in the last 12 months, but the inquiry into the attack opened earlier in July and is ongoing. Meanwhile, the far-right thuggery that kicked off riots elsewhere put the town at the heart of a swell of anger.

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Like other places hit by the riots, the community has pulled together – Big Issue reported on how people joined forces to clean up damage from the disorder last year.

But even before the riots, Southport was already facing plenty of challenges. Like many other seaside towns and forgotten parts of the north of England, falling footfall and funding pressures have seen some of the architecture from Southport’s Victorian heyday falling into disrepair.

The famous Southport Pier exemplifies this issue. Opened in 1860, the second-longest pier in Great Britain at 1,100 metres has been closed since December 2022 for safety reasons.

Since then, it’s been a thorny political issue locally. The cost of restoring the structure is estimated to be above £13 million.

But even the Sefton Council members were caught out by chancellor Rachel Reeves’s promise to pay for it at the spending review.

In a financial statement crammed with many, many mentions of northern towns, Southport featured prominently. The news that ministers would break the pier deadlock was hailed by the town’s Labour MP Patrick Hurley. 

Hurley said, in a recent letter that was circulated to residents: “After more than two years of closure due to safety concerns, work can now begin on a full restoration. 

“The pier has long been a symbol of Southport’s heritage and identity and this investment ensures it will remain so for future generations.”

While the details are still being figured out, council leader Marion Atkinson said last week that she expected it would take “between 12 and 14 months” to restore the pier to its former glory and strengthen the structure.

Reeves also pledged £5m in funding to refurbish the Town Hall Gardens, matching the £5m put in by Sefton Council and Liverpool City Region.

In the wake of the murders, the site was filled with tributes, teddy bears and flowers as Southport shared its outpouring of grief. The future vision for the space is a tribute to the three girls who lost their lives, developed in step with their families.

The plan was intended to be approved at a council meeting on 10 July. But the meeting was shut down before the matter could even be discussed after it turned heated.

It was a timely reminder of the tensions between leaders and the people they serve that has underpinned Reform UK’s rise above Labour in the polls nationally.

The meeting dissolved into a slanging match between councillors and people sitting on the sidelines after a question over the rollout of 5G masts saw tempers boil over.

A councillor said: “As I understand it, we follow the government rules from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and public health side of things.” Mutters of “Of course they do” could be heard from the public gallery.

Another member of the public then shouted: “That’s a nonsense. We’ve had this many times in here about 5G and there has been no health and safety on it… You want to open your eyes and open your ears. You’re facing a genocide here.”

The UKHSA has said a small increase in overall exposure to radio waves is “possible” when 5G is added to an existing network or new area but assessments concluded “there should be no consequences for public health”.

A person, who had earlier asked a question on immigration about how much the council was spending on “foreigners”, also chipped in with: “Don’t you realise the anger around this borough?” 

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The meeting was adjourned to shouts of “Shame!” and “Cowards!” and later closed completely. Mayor of Sefton June Burns and Marion Atkinson, Labour’s council leader, declined to speak to Big Issue about the meeting.

But another councillor who was there, Gareth Lloyd-Johnson, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Sefton Council, representing the Meols Ward, told us that the incident raised questions over democracy and how to address disillusioned and disenfranchised members of the public.

Southport Lib Dems have called for Sefton Council to urgently reconvene the council meeting, describing the wait until September for the next one as “an insult to democratic processes and transparency”.

“I think you do have to look at this in the light of what happened at Hart Street [the site of the attack]. There is still tension across Sefton but particularly in Southport,” said Lloyd-Johnson.

“We do have communities that are suspicious of politicians and of the council. We know that Reform are stirring as well, let’s be honest about it. There is a sense that things are being hidden; that there is an agenda against the public.

“Cancelling a meeting because people were angrily shouting, and [then] saying, ‘We’re not going to do this for two and a half months’ is a bad look.”

When asked how to address the issue, Lloyd-Johnson said “transparency” is key. He rejected the idea of checking identification at the door of council meetings and said that preserving open access is important.

“It’s not always pretty and it’s not always beautiful, but it is democracy, and it’s an open-door democracy. And the moment we start going down the path of removing that, that becomes very dangerous,” Lloyd-Johnson added.

“While not condoning what the protesters did at all, we are public servants and they do have a right to question. But cancelling the meeting and running out of the room is really not how you deal with these things constructively.”

It is still nice to be beside the seaside in Southport.

But the challenge of regenerating it and working to repair public trust in the traumatised town is an urgent one if it is to escape its recent past as a lightning rod for British unrest.

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