Examination of Witnesses(Questions 160-179)
RT HON
TESSA JOWELL,
DR KIM
HOWELLS, MR
BRIAN LEONARD
AND MR
SIMON BROADLEY
TUESDAY 19 NOVEMBER 2002
160. Did that involve a proportionately increased
amount for England to spend on its marketing?
(Tessa Jowell) Yes, it did, and we have identified
a figure of about £10 million over the three years of the
Spending Round in prospect, which is between 2003-04 and 2005-06,
which will be available for marketing, but we want this not just
to be public money into marketing England, but a public-private
partnership budget, building on the success of the Million
Visitor Campaign where public sector money was matched in
cash and in kind by money from the industry. We want to repeat
that model in relation to the marketing budget for England.
161. So is that also Scotland and Wales?
(Tessa Jowell) No, because the marketing budget—I
think it has to be absolutely clear that there is a devolution
settlement that gives Scotland and Wales responsibility for tourism
through the Executive, the Scottish Parliament and the Assembly
in Wales. We are focused on the England marketing budget and we
have not yet got a headline figure as to what the budget will
be. It will not take effect until after April next year when the
new organisation comes into being, but the size of the budget
will depend upon the organisation's success in securing matching
funds from the industry.
162. And what kind of reassurance can you give
the Committee that, under the new body which will come forward
which will be doing both English marketing and GB marketing, there
will be ring-fencing of those two budgets and will we know exactly
where that money has been spent and are you prepared to give us
a guarantee of what the proportions are going to be?
(Tessa Jowell) Yes. If you and anybody else wants
to look at the accounts of the new body, you will see that the
money available for marketing England is quite distinct from the
money that is available for marketing the UK and it will be managed
by what we have described as the "England Marketing Advisory
Board" which will sit within the new organisation. I think
that in order to build confidence, as I was describing earlier,
with the Scots and with the Welsh, that degree of transparency
is absolutely necessary, so yes, you will know exactly how much
is spent out of the total budget of the organisation on marketing
England.
163. I have to say I see it slightly differently.
I see it building confidence with English taxpayers who always
seem to get the rotten end of the deal on all these things where
we get much less money spent on our services in general, including
tourism, albeit the discrepancy is even wider in tourism than
it is in other areas. I see it as building confidence in the product
that we have in England for tourism which seems to get very low
priority from your Department.
(Tessa Jowell) Well, I think that it is simply not
fair to say that it gets low priority from the Department. Kim
has outlined some of the historical reasons as to why the discrepancies
are where they are and marketing is only one part of the action
the industry as a whole needs, and I have outlined the other areas
where we intend to take action. Remember that if you take something
like the Million Visitor Campaign, which was a marketing
campaign led by the BTA, or something like that, 80 per cent of
overseas tourists come to England, so however you look at the
expenditure on marketing, the greatest concentration of traffic
is actually in England rather than in Wales or Scotland.
164. It is fair to say, as Kim just said, that
we would like to see more people coming to England and going out
into the English regions.
(Tessa Jowell) Yes.
165. I wonder do you have any plans to encourage
that diversity?
(Dr Howells) Yes, I think it has got to be one of
our two or three main priorities really. There is a big imbalance
at the moment in the way in which tourism works. There is no doubt
that the great icon, if I can use that bit of jargon, though it
is hideous, I know, but the icon of British tourism is London;
it is Big Ben, the Tower of London and the rest of it. Very often
people do not even understand the title of the country. Mr Wyatt
raised this issue previously. In America people had heard of London,
some had heard of England, but no-one had heard of the United
Kingdom, they thought it was somewhere in the Middle East. It
is very difficult to do that. I think we have got to be realistic
about this. We have had all sorts of organisations and agencies
and, as Mr Wyatt said, even more of them now touting for business
and we believed what we needed was one agency that represents
this country, that uses the great icon of tourism to draw people
in, which is London. We have performed the trick that the best
tourism economies in the world do which is once we get them we
disperse them and that is the difficulty, I think, if we start
advertising each region and each different part of Britain abroad
I do not think we are going to be able to do that.
166. Who does that well, just out of interest?
(Dr Howells) Curiously enough somewhere like Canada
does. Canada draws Americans by their millions into Canada and
then is very good at dispersing them. We saw an example in Calgary
where once they get them to Calgary for the Calgary Stampede,
and it is a city of a million and gets a million visitors for
that Stampede, they work on that million to make sure that if
they want to go whitewater rafting or skiing, they do not just
go to the main very well known centres, like Banff, they say "you
can go to the lake district in the south of Alberta, you can go
right up to the Arctic Circle". It seems that they have got
a very good record and we ought to learn from those.
John Thurso
167. Can I ask one technical question first.
What legal advice have you received as to your powers to undertake
this under the Development of Tourism Act and the various other
legislation that covers it?
(Tessa Jowell) We are satisfied, and this is really
the point that is being made, we have had legal advice and we
have acted on it.
168. That is all within the Department or is
it external?
(Mr Leonard) It is from our own legal advisors, yes.
The powers given to the British Tourist Authority under the 1969
Act are very broad and we believe they are sufficient.
169. So you believe the statement in section
one of the Act that there will be an English Tourist Board and
what you are doing are covered?
(Mr Leonard) The English Marketing Advisory Board
will in fact be legally the English Tourist Board.
170. If you did not have that legal requirement
would you have had that Board at all or would it just be the one
body?
(Tessa Jowell) We would certainly have the Board because
of the reasons that I went through earlier about the importance
of transparency in relation to the discrete function of marketing
England as opposed to the broader range of functions. As Mr Leonard
has said, the statutory functions will be vested in that Board.
No, I do not consider that in the longer term it is necessary
to maintain those statutory powers and if and when a suitable
occasion arose we would seek to repeal them.
171. Thank you. Secretary of State, you said
in your opening remarks "We are where we are with devolution"
and the Minister has made it very clear that perhaps the way tourism
has been devolved and the way in which people would ideally like
to market tourism are in conflict, and I do not think there is
a great deal of doubt about that, but, as you rightly said, we
have a devolution settlement and we have to work within that.
Was it on 5 March that you had the Tourism Summit?
(Tessa Jowell) Yes.
172. Who came from the Scotland Office or the
Scottish Executive of VisitScotland.com?
(Tessa Jowell) Can I write to you about that. I cannot
immediately recall.
173. Could I help you. On the list of attendees—
(Tessa Jowell) I thought this might be the case actually.
174. There was nobody on the list of attendees
and there was nobody in the previous year either.
(Dr Howells) They were invited: Wales turned up; Scotland
did not bother to.
175. Thank you very much. I fully recognise
what you are seeking to do and congratulate you on recognising
that England needs marketing, so this is a committed devolutionist
saying that is absolutely right thing to do. Can I put it to you
that what you are doing actually does not take account of the
devolution settlement. I think it will benefit Scotland, I think
Scotland is going to have many more visitors as a result of this,
and England will suffer. As a principled devolutionist it seems
to me that what you are doing is running away from the devolution
settlement and not empowering England and not having a national
body that can deal evenhandedly with the three nations.
(Dr Howells) I think exactly the opposite, Mr Thurso.
I believe that devolution is a new creature, there is no question
about it, and it is going to be a while yet before the RDAs, the
nations and the regions, begin to work with each other as they
should do. At the moment we are in a curious situation, I think,
where if one talks to either the tourism representatives in Scotland
or in Wales they will tell you a very interesting thing. They
will say that there are certain markets that they believe they
can attack directly, and they may be themed markets, say golf
in Scotland or green holidays in Wales or whatever, and they will
do that and go for those markets where they know people know about
Scotland or Wales already. Very often it might be in the Netherlands
or Germany or wherever. There are other markets which they know
they have to attack via the British Tourism Authority and they
are very clear about that and we are very clear about it. We understand
that what the BTA does has got to accommodate those needs and
aspirations of Wales and Scotland, and I think they will. What
we have inside England and inside Britain in general, however,
is a lack of coherence about a body which represents tourism.
During the Foot and Mouth crisis, and after September 11 when
this great pall fell across tourism in Britain, what the industry
was saying to us and what lots of other people were saying to
us was that there was nobody that they could talk to directly,
there was no organisation that seemed to reflect their views in
the way that Ben Gill and the Farmers' Union reflected the farmers'
views. We realised that what we had to create was a body that
was capable of making those kinds of partnerships and getting
more bangs for our bucks as far as tourism is concerned in this
country. I think it is a very under developed industry in that
sense. It is not an industry that has had a habit of speaking
to government with a single voice. The ETC tried to do it, and
did it very well in some respects. The BTA tries to do it in other
ways. What we needed was one body which would be seen as the voice
of British tourism abroad and would be seen as the voice also
of British tourism, if you like, within England. This is not an
attempt to usurp what it is that Scotland and Wales does, but
it is an attempt to create an edifice within England that is capable
of reflecting all those tensions and all those aspirations within
the country.
Mr Thurso: I know that you and I disagree
because we have corresponded about it fairly frequently. I want
to ask one other question but may I just put this to you first.
Scotland has 90 per cent of its visitors from within the UK, domestic
tourism. It spends 84 per cent I believe, it might be 86 per cent,
of its money marketing in the domestic market, the balance for
overseas is very small. The numbers are less for England because
there are more overseas but it is still a domestic market. The
biggest competitor that Scotland has is now the BTA with its England
hat on. I think that there are seeds in that that will come back
to haunt us, if seeds can come back to haunt us, in years to come.
What I would like to move on to is you have mentioned on several
occasions and in correspondence the consultation that you have
done with the industry and that this is the industry view. The
Tourism Alliance, for example, is the body that very much exists
because I think DCMS felt something like that should exist. I
had a meeting on 20 June with its Chairman, Digby Jones, at which
he was very surprised to learn what was going on and said he was
rushing off to telephone you, Secretary of State, to ask for a
meeting about the changes that you were thinking of. I understand
that as late as 28 October a letter was written to Mr Brian Leonard,
copied to Gareth Maybury, in which the Alliance complains that
"although some members were involved on an individual basis,
the executive group considers that DCMS's failure to involve the
Alliance to any significant extent in the consultation and decision
making rather than the information process is a lost opportunity
to Government". In addition, there is a letter of 9 July
which I believe was to you, Secretary of State, but which was
replied to on behalf of the Minister which, again, was a complaint
from Mr Peter Hampson of the British Resorts Association in which
he complained at some length about the lack of consultation. In
the response that he was given in reply to talking about the Tourism
Alliance—he did it on both counts—the Minister's letter
says "It is up to the Alliance and its members to ensure
that it sufficiently represents the diverse views of the industry".
He felt so strongly about that that he wrote again on 22 October
saying various things but addressing that "the criticism
was not that the Tourism Alliance was failing to represent our
view, but that DCMS were not giving it the opportunity to do so."
On the Friday before your announcement I met with Peter Lederer,
the Chairman of VisitScotland.com, who had not at that stage,
nor his Chief Executive, had any indication or consultation of
any kind. The same day I telephoned the Chairman of the Welsh
Tourist Board who equally knew absolutely nothing about it and
the proposals, although he had heard some rumours he said to me.
There are a legion of others.
Chairman: But do not let us have them.
Mr Thurso: You want them or you do not
want them?
Chairman: No, we do not have the time.
Mr Thurso: I do not have time to go through
the list of other organisations.
Derek Wyatt: You have got time.
John Thurso
176. Incidentally, all of these organisations
have come back and said they are not particularly happy with what
has been done. Is to claim that, (a) they have been consulted
with and (b) you have got their support, just a fraction "economical
with the actualite«"?
(Tessa Jowell) No, I do not believe so. What I would
be very happy to do is to supply the Committee with dates at which
contact was made with different individuals in a representative
or an individual capacity or with people who we would expect would
act for these bodies. I am going to ask Kim to say something about
the process of consultation but let me just say that between the
date of my first announcement about tourism reform, which was
13 May, and the final announcement, which was on 31 October, a
tremendous amount of discussion took place. The most sensitive
was obviously taking soundings, having the necessary meetings
where possible with the relevant ministers in the Scottish Parliament
and the Welsh Assembly. It was also necessary, and I pay tribute
to the work that Kim has done on this, to have extensive discussion
with representatives from both the ETC and from the BTA. We spent
a lot of those months working through what the options were, really
reflecting some of the tensions and the possibilities in the way
in which you have put questions to us this morning. When you are
embarking on something like this you have to take account of a
hierarchy of interests, if you like. Certainly the political reaction
of the Scots and the Welsh was something that we took very seriously
indeed. I had a meeting with the First Minister for Scotland in
the summer and had conversations with Rhodri Morgan, the Welsh
First Minister. Kim will talk about the way in which he conducted
the discussion with the wider stakeholders. I think in any consultation
process it can always be done better by definition because there
will be people who do not feel that they have had enough time
and so forth. I do not think anyone could have doubted the seriousness
of our intention to establish the wish of the industry, the industry's
analysis of the weaknesses in the tourism industry, the views
of those tourism bodies already engaged, and to take stock of
the serious structural weaknesses in the industry that had been
revealed by the combined impact of Foot and Mouth and September
11. Certainly a number of these bodies may find it easier to address
their concerns about the quality of consultation to you but I
do not feel that is reflected in the conversations they have had
with me or with Kim. There is a problem there. I am perfectly
prepared for people to say that we should have consulted more.
I think we consulted systematically. I think we took account of
the need for confidentiality when issues were at their most sensitive,
both in the interests of staff whose jobs were going to be affected
and also in the interests of the seriousness with which we take
the devolution settlement and fitting a new structure within the
facts of that settlement. As I say, Chairman, I am very happy
to furnish the Committee with a note on the extent of consultation
in order to help you with your conclusions.
Chairman: Thank you.
Mr Flook
177. I would just like to know from Mr Broadley
and Mr Leonard how many individuals work in your Department and
what is the full-time equivalent dedicated to promoting England
and Somerset?
(Mr Broadley) There are 31 people in the team and
nine of them are dealing with alcohol licensing policy under the
Bill and two of them will be temporarily with us to see these
changes through. The Department itself does not market tourism.
Under the new arrangements that will be the responsibility of
the new organisation.
178. I appreciate that but for all the things
that you are in charge of, the domestic tourism branch, the Government
and industry branch, international tourism branch, it seems there
are not very many dedicated to work with the English Tourism Council
working with all these wonderful offices around the world. They
seem to be quite thinly spread.
(Mr Broadley) There are four or five people who deal
with the English Tourism Council.
179. For a £9 billion annual spend, as
the Minister reminds us.
(Mr Broadley) Yes, those are the numbers.
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