Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-219)
MR COLIN
DAWSON, MR
PHILIP MILLER
MBE, MR MICHAEL
BEDINGFIELD AND
MR STUART
BARROW
11 JULY 2006
Q199 Dr Pugh: So Brighton might not
need another pier?
Mr Dawson: I think Brighton might
not need another pier.
Q200 Dr Pugh: Can I turn to VisitBritain?
I have a question to ask you in relation to the action you think
the Government are making. What more can the Government do to
increase the attraction of English coastal resorts apart from
giving them more money to do it?
Mr Barrow: Obviously, our remit
is to market what is there, and we have to market what we are
presented with rather than actively lobby local government to
produce specific things for us, though we can highlight general
good practice. Take the piers example. Bognor Regis has a pier
which is pretty dilapidated but they have an annual birdman competition
which has sponsorship from Red Bull these days. Rather than have
a unique physical attraction you can have unique events that might
attract visitors.
Q201 Dr Pugh: If the Government give
you money it will be value for money? It will help the coastal
towns?
Mr Barrow: We have a very good
return on investment.
Q202 Dr Pugh: The reason I ask that
is that when we were in Lille I picked up this document which
you may have seen, Le Nord d'Angleterre, which tells you
all about the north and the attractions, and I looked to see what
you were doing for seaside resorts. You mention, I think, about
four on the map—Whitby, Scarborough, Blackpool and Morecambe,
a strange eclectic choice, and you miss out some very good examples.
Obviously, Southport is one I would mention. I poured through
the document thinking, "Is there a mention of Southport in
it?", so I turned to the Liverpool page and you have got
as far as the squirrel reserve just outside Southport but you
did not mention that it was next to Southport, and I looked at
the Lancashire page hoping you might mention Southport so that
people in France, Germany, wherever know it is there, only to
find you did not. You did tell them about Oswaldtwistle, which
I thought was an eccentric choice. Can you explain how that happened
first? This is going out all over Europe and you are promoting
seaside resorts. You are actually promoting four seaside resorts
and missing out one, I would have thought, fairly obvious case.
Mr Bedingfield: The way we put
the brochures together is in consultation with the local tourism
bodies and they give us a flavour of what they would like to promote.
Q203 Dr Pugh: And they did not tell
you Southport was there?
Mr Bedingfield: It might be that
Southport is featured in another one of our brochures.[2]
Q204 Dr Pugh: So far as I know it is
still in the north of England.
Mr Bedingfield: It is.
Q205 Dr Pugh: You have just mentioned
the golf so I looked with some enthusiasm when I saw the picture
on the Merseyside page of golf. I thought this must surely be
the Royal Birkdale which was mentioned, and it is not; it is Hoylake,
the other side of the Wirral, so in a sense you lost the opportunity.
What I am really asking is, have you the skill, the background,
to promote coastal resorts successfully when you—or somebody
in your organisation—do not seem to know that much about
them?
Mr Bedingfield: There are two
things. First, we take the information that is given to us by
the local tourist boards in terms of the regional tourist boards
who want us to promote what they call their attack brands or whatever
they want to promote.
Q206 Dr Pugh: Morecambe is an attack
brand, is it?
Mr Bedingfield: Again, I do not
think I am in a position to comment on the information that we
are given to promote. The second part of my answer is that the
piece of print you have in front of you is designed as an entry
into our website where you will find far more information. What
we have proved now is that it has made people laugh, it has made
conversation, and that is exactly what we want to do to make people
go on to our website.
Q207 Dr Pugh: I do not think they
are laughing about it in France or Germany. They just do not know
about half the seaside resorts in the north of England. I have
not checked out the Le Pays de Galle version of this but
I do not think it is good enough to say that you work on information
given. You are the experts in tourism.
Mr Bedingfield: We are the experts
in tourism. What we use the printed piece of material for is ideally
to make people go on to our website and find out far more information.
What we cannot do is put out pieces of print that are 200-300
pages long which cover every part of our tourism infrastructure.
Q208 Dr Pugh: You are doing a good
job. It would be more reasonable to say there is an omission here
and maybe one should review the reprinting next time round and
make sure you include things that perhaps ought to be included.
Mr Bedingfield: I take it on board.
Q209 Chair: Particularly where members
of the Select Committee represent them, obviously. You said that
your remit is essential to sell Britain abroad, or indeed within
the UK, but not to advise local authorities on how better to develop
the tourism attractions within their areas. Is that right? Whose
job is it to do that?
Mr Barrow: Under the restructuring,
when the British Tourist Authority became VisitBritain policy
went to DCMS and was removed from our organisation, so we are
allowed to advise but we are not allowed to lobby.
Q210 Chair: Who looks at the tourism
offer, so to speak, of UK plc and thinks, "There is a bit
of a lacuna here. We need to develop more golf courses",
or whatever, and takes some sort of initiative? Who would do that?
Mr Barrow: The initiative we have
already started is Partners for England which is going to meet
every six months. The first one was before Christmas. The last
one was in late June. That brings together all the RDAs with Enjoy
England, VisitBritain and local authorities to look at the whole
tourism package and to see what more could be done at a local
level under the initiatives of new localism and regionalisation.
Q211 Chair: And that has not been
done up until now, has it? That is a new initiative, to bring
all those together?
Mr Barrow: Yes. It is the new
reality of RDAs.
Q212 Chair: Do you think part of
the problem is that tourism is too fragmentary, that there are
too many different groups involved? The RDAs are for all economic
development, not just for tourism.
Mr Barrow: There are a lot of
bodies that are involved that are not necessarily networked in
the way that they should be, and one of the challenges for Partners
for England is to network them successfully.
Q213 Mr Betts: What percentage of
overseas visitor nights are spent at the seaside?
Mr Bedingfield: I do not have
that information, sorry.
Q214 Mr Betts: Does anyone have it?
Mr Barrow: I am not sure that
the figures are compiled by ONS in that way. I think they are
done on a regional basis, so for the south west it would not just
have the seaside towns. It would also have places inland, in Wiltshire,
for example.
Q215 Mr Betts: So in each region
they would have a percentage of overseas visit nights which were
spent at the seaside?
Mr Barrow: There are some figures
that are being compiled and I would be happy to send some research
we do have. It is not in the form we would like it in at the moment
but I would be happy to send it.
Q216 Mr Betts: Could you send it
and say how you would like to improve it as well?
Mr Barrow: You mean the way it
has been collated?
Q217 Mr Betts: Yes.
Mr Barrow: Okay.
Chair: That would be very helpful.
Q218 Mr Betts: How do you monitor
how effective you are at getting overseas visitors to go to the
seaside?
Mr Barrow: Obviously, overseas
visitors have their own views of where they would like to come
in the first place and most inquiries will be about London. One
of our challenges is to get people who come to London then to
visit other areas.
Q219 Mr Betts: How do you monitor
how successful you are in doing that?
Mr Bedingfield: My primary remit
is looking at influencing the domestic visitor to holiday in England.
How we do that is that first of all we make sure that we get as
much information on somebody as possible when they inquire for
a brochure, when they go on the website. We take their details.
We have a comprehensive system in place where we have to then
contact those people to find out, on seeing our marketing activity,
how that has influenced their decision to have a holiday in England.
That is part of our remit with the DCMS, to make sure we give
them comprehensive statistics on return on investment.
2 Pleasureland, Southport, is listed as the number
one attraction in the North West in the enjoy England Family fun
map supplied to this Committee with our earlier written evidence. Back
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