| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
11.10 am
Mr. Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton): The right hon. Member for South Thanet (Mr. Aitken) asked whether the Government were serious about tourism. I shall come to that in a moment. In a week in which the National Heritage Select Committee has published a unanimous report, as all our reports are on tourism, the question that I ask is how serious the country is about tourism. How serious is the House of Commons about tourism? The Secretary of State said that there was a good turnout for the debate. A maximum of 22 hon. Members have been present out of 649. Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National party have been absent from the debate, even though Wales and Scotland are much more amply funded than England in terms of tourism. The Press Gallery is almost empty.
When we launched our Select Committee report on Wednesday, we had an attendance, including a team of three from the BBC, of six journalists. Yet, as the Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for South Thanet and my right hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Dr. Cunningham) pointed out, tourism is the biggest private sector industry in Britain. Before the end of the decade, it will be the biggest industry in Britain. As our report says, it employs more people than agriculture, coal mining, steel making, automobile manufacture, aircraft manufacture, food production and the textile industry put together.
One of the special merits of the tourism industry is that it is labour intensive. In an era in which the expansion of industry is capital intensive rather than labour intensive, the propensity of tourism to employ people is one of its most, though not overwhelmingly its most, important aspect. I say to both the Secretary of State and the right hon. Member for South Thanet that the issue of the minimum wage is an important one.
I am baffled as to why Conservatives, of all people, seem to believe that a statutory minimum wage is not desirable. As the United States presidential election campaign entered its last phases, Congress voted to increase the American statutory minimum wage. The Republicans were falling over themselves to agree with the Democrats that an increase was necessary. I find it difficult to understand why a Government dedicated to capitalist economics cannot understand that the economy in the world most dedicated to capitalist economics, that of the United States, regards a statutory minimum wage as an inherent part of a burgeoning and innovating economy.
The Department of National Heritage is the most undervalued Department in the Government. I believe--I have said it and the Select Committee has said it--that the creation of the Department of National Heritage was an act of great imagination by the Prime Minister. I believe and the Select Committee which I chair believes that the centrality of the Department is not sufficiently recognised. It is responsible for the two most important industries in the country. It is responsible for the electronic and visual communications industry, which is
29 Nov 1996 : Column 597
The right hon. Member for South Thanet said that tourism affected most of our constituencies--perhaps not absolutely all, but most. That is why I intervened in the speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for Copeland with regard to Manchester airport. The airport was voted internationally the best airport in the world. It requires urgently a decision on the second runway. Manchester has been classified as an exceptionally important tourist city. The north-west, including the areas to which the Secretary of State referred, is one of the central areas of tourism.
I agree with the right hon. Member for South Thanet that although no one can deny the central importance of London, there is a whole United Kingdom outside London with enormous attractions for tourists, which we should do a great deal more about. I shall deal with that later. If one is dealing with London, one ought to examine not only the merits of London--who can deny them?--but the fact that there is dissatisfaction among tourists with some aspects of tourism in London. I very much hope that the Secretary of State and her right hon. Friends will tackle some of those matters. For example, tourists are exploited by phoney and exploitative theatrical booking agencies, which rip off tourists by selling tickets which are both overpriced and for badly situated seats.
One of the things that I find most annoying as I come to the House of Commons every day is the passing tourist buses run by two companies--London Pride and Blue Triangle--which have on them notices saying, "Official London Tourist Bus". That is deceptive because there is nothing official about them whatever. They claim some official status, and by doing so seriously deceive tourists. I should like to see tourists and visitors to London from other parts of the United Kingdom protected from such activities.
The Secretary of State and my right hon. Friend the Member for Copeland were both kind enough to refer to the report of the National Heritage Select Committee, which we published on Wednesday. As I say, it is a unanimous report. Although my right hon. Friend has a perfect right to make whatever claims he wishes about any similarities between our report and the Labour party document, it is important for me to point out that we compiled our report without having seen the Labour party document; the Labour party document was not discussed during the compilation of our report. Therefore, if there are resemblances, to which my right hon. Friend has a perfect right to draw attention, they are coincidences which my right hon. Friend may well call happy.
Dr. John Cunningham:
I am happy and pleased to confirm what my right hon. Friend says. Of course there was no collusion between us at all. I am just delighted that an independent Select Committee of the House of Commons, with Conservative Members on it, came broadly to the same conclusions as we in the Labour party did. I am reassured by that.
Mr. Kaufman:
The Select Committee not only has Conservative Members on it but it has a Conservative
29 Nov 1996 : Column 598
I would be the last person to detract from the success and prospects of the tourism industry, which is an extraordinarily important one. If I have a complaint it is that because the industry encompasses entertainment, heritage attractions and the countryside, it is somehow regarded as a peripheral industry rather than one that is central to the prospects of our economy. It employs1.75 million people, attracts vast amounts of foreign currency and has great prospects. Therefore, if the burden of my speech deals with some of the proposals in our Select Committee report which draw attention to shortcomings, that is not because I or anyone on the Select Committee would detract from the success of the tourism industry, but because we wish to see that industry made even more successful.
That is why I have to agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Copeland about the unfortunate cut in funding for the British Tourist Authority. That authority is profoundly underfunded.
When our Select Committee went to the United States, we noted that individual states have more funding for the promotion of tourism within their states than the BTA has to promote Britain. The BTA covers north, south and central America and is centrally run from an office in New York, although there are other offices elsewhere. We regard it as utterly absurd that a potentially extremely lucrative market should be run from New York and that the authority should be so severely underfunded. The BTA has £5.1 million to promote Britain in the whole of the Americas and £750,000 is devoted to advertising Britain throughout the whole of the Americas. Insufficient money is available to establish an office in Dallas, although Texas is regarded as one of the most important growth areas for tourism to Britain.
The Select Committee went to the state of Virginia to visit Colonial Williamsburg. That state spends $1 million overseas from a tourism budget of $17 million. It has a bigger tourism budget than the BTA has for the Americas, and it spends more overseas than the BTA can spend on advertising itself throughout the Americas.
As we said in our Select Committee report:
I accept that the resemblances between the state of Virginia and Britain are not total, and I would not want to make too much of the analogy. Nevertheless, as many people in a year visit Colonial Williamsburg in the state of Virginia as visit the United Kingdom from the United States. I accept that that town is in the same country, although it is a huge continental one, and I do not want to make over-much of that fact, but it is clear that we are not promoting the BTA in the Americas anything like as much as we should be.
"We asked one of the people we visited what he thought of the BTA's marketing efforts, and mentioned their budget; he replied, 'I guess that's why we never see the ads.'"
We attract 750,000 visitors from the United States. That may sound pretty good, but out of a population of more than 250 million it is by no means as good as it should be.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |