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12.30 pm
Mr. Michael Fabricant (Lichfield): It is a great pleasure to participate in this wide-ranging debate and it is apt that we are debating tourism because, looking at the Gallery and the people walking in and out of it, I see that the House of Commons is a tourist attraction in itself.
Tourism is relevant not only to the coastal regions, to which a number of hon. Members have referred, but to inland parts of the United Kingdom. We have heard from the hon. Member for Lincoln (Gillian Merron), and, before I get on to the main part of my speech, I want to say a little about Lichfield, which is about as far from the sea as it is possible to be in this country, although there is a lot of water in the city because of its many lakes.
People do not realise that Lichfield district has more than 4.5 million visitors each year, despite the fact that we do not have a good rail connection, and they spend about £73 million in the excellent restaurants and facilities in the area. Even though I was once accused by an ignorant journalist of being Member of Parliament for the M6, I can assure that House that neither the M6 nor the M1 nor the M40 come too close to Lichfield. I know that because driving back there on a Friday afternoon or evening takes about four hours.
If I may digress for a moment, I was delighted with the contribution of the hon. Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan), who talked about licensing laws. There are a number of pedestrianised areas in the centre of Lichfield and, on a lovely sunny Sunday, I went to Colley's Yard restaurant to sit outside reading The Sunday Times with a glass of red wine. I was shocked to be told that I would be breaking the licensing laws if I sat outside drinking.
I will not tell the House whether I sat outside and drank the red wine despite that, because that might be admission of guilt, but, as an Englishman, such laws seem absolutely crazy to me. As the hon. Member for Selby said, would they not seem even more crazy to foreign visitors? We have archaic rules which, as the hon. Gentleman said, were introduced in 1916 to prevent munitions workers from blowing themselves up.
I have spoken about those laws with the chairman of the Lichfield licensing Bench, Mr. Bob White, who is a justice of the peace. He would like the legal position to be changed so that it would be acceptable for pubs and restaurants to serve liquor, as the Americans would say, any time at all. The presumption would be that
establishments could open 24 hours a day if they wanted--that should be up to the licensee--but local people could appeal to the licensing magistrates to define a closing time for a particular place that is, for example, next door to an old people's home or a hospital or in a residential area, where the slamming of doors would be a nuisance.
That would be reasonable and modern; after all, we are debating tourism in the new millennium. Good God, as we are entering the new millennium, it is time to wash away the laws that were introduced in 1916. I must pay tribute to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), who was seen pulling a pint in a pub several years ago, when he was Home Secretary. Shame upon shame, horror upon horror--would England fall as a consequence?--he was introducing all-day drinking. Have we seen drunks rolling in the streets as a consequence? Of course not. Indeed, there has been far less drunkenness at lunch time because people do not hurry to finish their drinks. As the hon. Member for Selby said, there are lessons to be learned from Scotland, where people do not have to finish their drinks by 11 o'clock because it is throwing-out time. That seems far more sensible.
It is not just in Lichfield where crowds of people appear on the streets. I see that the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Lepper) is in his place. For a few years in the last decade, I was chairman of the Conservative party in Brighton, Pavilion. I went to Brighton, Hove and Sussex grammar school and took my masters degree at Sussex university. Those are my Brighton credentials. If the hon. Gentleman catches your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I am sure that we shall hear that Brighton, too, would benefit from a more flexible licensing regime.
May I say a few more words about Lichfield? Lichfield enjoys a number of attractions, not only many restaurants. We attract some 5 per cent. of visitors from overseas. Those who come into the Lichfield tourist office are from Australia, the United States, Canada, South Africa and Germany. A significant number come to Lichfield district.
My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait) was telling the House about her brother's aim to link--
Mr. Fabricant:
My hon. Friend's uncle is trying to set up a telecom link between Greenwich in the UK and Greenwich in Connecticut. I am trying to do the same, because Lichfield is twinned, rather oddly in my opinion, with a town in France and one in Germany. I shall be politically incorrect and tell the House how that happened.
The original plan was to twin Lichfield with a cathedral city in Germany, Limburg. That made good sense. However, Limburg is twinned with a French town in the suburbs of Lyon. Residents of Lichfield had not visited that town, so they agreed to twin with the French town as well as with Limburg. They then visited the French town and discovered that it had little similarity with Lichfield because it was an industrial suburb. When they asked Limburg why it was twinned with that French town, they were told that in 1940 a Luftwaffe squadron from the Limburg region had bombed that French town because it was an industrial area. That is why the two towns twinned after the war--and it shows the danger of twinning.
I should like to see Lichfield in the United Kingdom twinned with Litchfield in Connecticut, which is not a million miles away from Greenwich in Connecticut. As I
said earlier, the irony is that, when representatives from Lichfield fly to Lyon, it costs them more than flying to Boston, which is the nearest international airport to Litchfield, Connecticut. That is because the Thatcher Government introduced freedom of the air and real competition between airlines, which is why so many American tourists visit the UK. However, there is no freedom of the air between France and the UK, which is why flights to France are so expensive.
I hope that the Minister will encourage the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions to introduce more deregulation so that there is competition in travel to Europe. There are cheap flights to Spain and Italy, but not to France, which still has a subsidised airline.
I shall mention the interesting sites worth seeing in Lichfield. I claim credit for the fact that I moved to Lichfield. Usually, great men are born in Lichfield and move away. Dr. Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield, but left. David Garrick, the first knight of the theatre--some hon. Members may be members of the Garrick club and some will have gone to the Garrick theatre in London--was born in Lichfield, but left. Elias Ashmole, who founded the Ashmolean museum at Oxford, was born in Lichfield, but left. I want the House to note that Michael Fabricant was born in Rottingdean near Brighton, but moved to Lichfield by choice.
Mr. Grieve:
It is all the more commendable that my hon. Friend moved to what was once one of the prettiest towns in the midlands in view of the destruction wrought on it by the planners between the 1960s and the 1980s. His intervention may be required in the future to preserve the little that is left.
Mr. Fabricant:
I am not sure that that intervention will help tourism in Lichfield, so I shall not thank my hon. Friend for it. Huge areas of historic significance are left in Lichfield, and I invite him to visit the city, as I suspect that he has gone to Wolverhampton and thought that that was Lichfield. I live in a 500-year-old house by a cathedral that is more than 800 years old, although some of the outskirts of Lichfield may have been destroyed not by German bombers but by planners in the 1950s and 1960s. I can assure my hon. Friend and any tourists thinking of visiting Lichfield that there is still much of historic significance and interest to see there.
The Secretary of State's opening speech was filled with self-satisfaction and smugness, as is his nature. It is a shame that he had to leave early--he gave his apologies--to scuttle off to Scotland, no doubt paying a fortune because it is so expensive to travel internally in the United Kingdom. As the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport report pointed out, the problem with the Secretary of State is that, like the Government as a whole to some degree, he is full of good intentions but is highly and wholly ineffective. He introduced the idea of cool Britannia. There is nothing new about the phrase "cool Britannia". For those who are interested in rock music, it was a song in the 1960s by a punk rock band, whose name escapes me at the moment--just as the phrase "new deal" was first introduced by Roosevelt in the 1930s.
Dr. Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test):
It was the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band.
Mr. Fabricant:
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that helpful intervention. It was far more helpful than that of my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve).
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst):
Order. This is a debate on the general topic of tourism. The hon. Gentleman is testing it to its furthest boundaries. It would be helpful if we talked about tourism policy.
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