Memorandum submitted by Penwith District
Council
As we represent the most westerly authority
in England (Penwith), and tourism revenue represents upwards of
28% of our economy and supports a similar percentage of total
employment, we would like to make the following observations:
1. Over 90% of our visitors are domestic
(SWT figures).
2. 96% arrive by car (SWT figures).
3. We are situated in a large RDA region
in which it is quicker to reach the Scottish border from its Northern
border than our own District boundary.
4. It is often cheaper to fly to continental
Europe from London than to Newquay.
These basic headline facts highlight some current
issues we face and provide a framework for our response to your
questions. In essence, we broadly agree with the submission provided
by the Tourism Alliance. In relation to your specific lines of
inquiry, we make the following comment:
ON DCMS & VISIT
BRITAIN
For such a globally, nationally and regionally
significant sector, it says much that the lead government department
for tourism; namely the DCMS, does not bare a "T" in
its name. A small but perhaps significant oversight! Yes, we
have Visit Britain and a Tourism Minister, but whereas the Minister
for Culture and the Minister for Sport have a clear home, no such
obvious home exists for the Minister for Tourism. That apart,
our principal concerns lie in three areas:
1. QIT and the AA, the two guardians of
the National Quality Assurance Scheme, have of late been rather
lax in turn-around times for new applications, perhaps this is
because of the number of new applications. Given we have self-assessment
for fire risk assessments, could not the same approach be adopted
for quality ratings, of course subject to random auditing?
2. Whilst intuitively one can see why international
customers may log onto visitbritain.com, the same cannot be said
of UK customers and enjoyengland.co.uk. If this is to change,
far more resource needs to be put behind getting the name out
there, so that it can start really driving domestic bookings.
3. The creation of DMOs makes perfect sense,
however, given the non-statutory status of tourism and the recent
round of unitary awards, much resource is being lost before these
DMOs actually come into being. With little money flowing down
to adequately put them on a sound footing from the outset, one
does question what interest the trade will have in supporting
such entities. Clearly the trade will support marketing initiatives,
but if the rationale is to position marketing as a function of
Destination Management and thereby engage the industry in the
totality of the product on offer, then the issue of proper short-term,
or launch funding of the various DMOs, needs addressing urgently.
If it is not, then we are concerned that the industry will fracture
around the best marketing channels and the quality debate will
be lost for at least a generation, damaging both the industry
and the consumers perspective of our region.
ON TAXATION
Local feeling is strongly opposed to a bed tax,
indeed the main trade body; the Cornwall Commercial Tourism Federation,
made representation to the Lyons enquiry to that effect.
We feel a BIDS style scheme would be a better
route forward, if a collection of towns were enabled to work together.
If not, then given the small scale of many of our towns, administration
would probably outweigh any benefits.
ON DATA
Most tourism data is inadequate. The occupancy
figures used and distributed by SWT can be based on as few as
three businesses responding from an area, yet are often presented
as gospel. We would welcome some reassurance on the robustness
of these figures.
Additionally, last year they issued the statistics
with a health warning that we could not use them to compare with
activity from the previous data set, due to the methodology having
changed. This wipes out one of the primary reasons why we pay
for the data—to do exactly that—to see how the structure
of our tourism economy changes year on year.
Useful data would include the currently collected
data sets, but with more robust numbers participating (to include
both above and below VAT threshold businesses) and a choice made
between either the Cambridge or STEAM models and then the chosen
one consistently used.
September 2007
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