Memorandum submitted by The British Resorts
And Destinations Association (BRADA)
1. THE BRITISH
RESORTS AND
DESTINATIONS ASSOCIATION
(BRADA)
1.1 BRADA represents 60 local authorities
all with one or more significant resort town and/or rural destination
within their boundaries. The common thread is that tourism or,
as it is now frequently referred to, the visitor economy, is one
of, if not the most important single social and economic driver
in their geographic area. We also have five tourist board and
16 commercial associate, members. This submission has been written
primarily from a local government standpoint.
1.2 Before answering the questions posed
directly we wish to give an overview of where we see public sector
sponsored tourism support sitting today and why. We also wish
to highlight why it is that local authorities should continue
to be intimately involved in the business of destination management,
a critical public sector role which we see as being under serious,
if unintended, threat.
2. AN OVERVIEW;
WHERE WE
ARE AND
WHY
2.1 British tourism has seen another decade
of radical change in terms of:
2.1.1 The product offer and product range,
both here in the UK and abroad.
2.1.2 The market place and, in particular,
in the areas of access to information, routes to market, the nature
and timeframe of the decision and subsequent purchase process,
and the patterns and overall scale of consumption (dramatically
increased).
2.1.3 The support structures put in place
to try and help enable a fragmented, complex industry to protect
and enhance its existing markets and to develop the means to exploit
new opportunities, both here at home and abroad.
2.2 We accept that changing market conditions
(2.1.1. and 2.1.2) have necessitated amendments to the domestic
and inbound industry support structures (2.1.3.). However, we
question whether recent changes have all been founded on:
2.2.1 A proper understanding of the industry's
needs.
2.2.2 A sound analysis of the wider, often
unintended, consequences of all the actions taken.
2.2.3 A coherent implementation plan, working
to some sort of a template that would ensure that the sum of the
whole had greater local, sub regional, regional and national impact
than the often competing efforts of the diverse constituent parts.
2.3 We are particularly concerned that the
traditional core, coordinating and management functions of many
local authorities and/or their well-established partnerships have
been intentionally or unintentionally undermined, in some instances
terminally.
2.4 The role is being undermined, not because
local authorities are no longer the appropriate vehicle, but rather
because of the higher-level power struggles surrounding the creation
of a new regional order and, within it, efforts to reposition
where executive authority for non statutory functions like tourism
sits. Non-statutory functions become an early focal point for
change, precisely because they are non-statutory and, therefore,
there are no proscribed solutions or rules of play.
2.5 There are also linked struggles over
industry contributions. Most RDAs looked to some or all of their
local authority's discretionary tourism spending, and to the totality
of the finite, local, private sector contributions. Because of
existing partnerships arrangements, these two streams were very
often all but one in the same. In an industry where the majority
of players are SMEs, more accurately micro businesses, with little
or no discretionary funding to give, that is largely what much
of the private sector makes available. Certainly, there was little
prospect of the smaller, parochial, businesses supporting new
initiatives in addition to existing local partnerships. The fact
that many of the new bodies have a much wider geographical remit
simply adds a further dimension to the difficulty of maintaining
or gaining engagement from SMEs, who largely compete and co-operate
within a constricted area, typically the "resort" or
"destination". Something had to give and, in uncertain
times, the easiest option was often to withdraw entirely from
all joint ventures.
2.6 Those few bigger SMEs and very few larger
businesses capable of giving meaningful contributions are usually
big enough to look after themselves. When they do contribute they
do so tactically, usually for very limited periods and then only
to achieve a coincidental, short term commercial aim. Few join
it for the long haul and, in the face of any difficulty or downturn,
they can and will withdraw at will. Thus, building the business
model for sustainable, robust new tourism support structures on
the assumption of significant, guaranteed, long term private sector
funding is suspect in the extreme.
2.7 The current structural changes in England
started with the ongoing calls from industry for greater public
sector assistance to overcome the private sector element's inherent
problems of fragmentation. In essence, greater strategic promotional
activity was being called for, to add to and support the strategic
and tactical coordinating structures and work programmes that
already existed. This required additional funding. The call was
then taken forward in England largely under a banner of no or
low cost solutions, underpinned by radical change and efficiency
improvements. It was advanced regionally with the aim of removing
perceived public sector duplication, with an emphasis on the alleged
wasteful promotional and administrative duplication at the local
level.
2.8 Local authorities were in effect told
that what they had been doing was wrong. They now had no active
role in tourism beyond the provision and management of basic public
infrastructure (bins, toilets and parking), something, that to
a greater or lesser extent, they all did anyway, regardless of
their status as a destination. The new sub regional/regional business
models were typically predicated on the assumption that local
public sector resource and/or private sector contributions, thus
saved, would be automatically redirected to new sub regional operations.
Meanwhile, in the real world, local authorities either, held firm
and ignored the requests, or they took heed of their apparent
new lack of tourism role and shut up shop, most simply pocketing
the welcome savings for use on statutory services. Given that
Local Government mirrors the divisions and internal resource squabbles
of government elsewhere, the willingness to drop tourism entirely
and the parallel desire to retain the savings made, should have
come as no surprise to anyone. Unfortunately it did come as a
surprise to those who set the train of events in motion. Worse
still, those who could still do something to redress the balance
are reluctant to send out the very strong, high level signals
now needed.
2.9 At the same time, VisitBritain (VB)
was given a purely marketing role. The English Tourism Council
(ETC) was stripped of its highly focused strategic role for English
tourism and the rump of the organisation was reversed into VB,
but again with a new purely marketing remit. The English Regional
Tourist Boards (RTBs) were handed over to the individual RDAs
and most were then changed beyond recognition, and all to very
different templates. A very small tourism team within DCMS was
left (by its own action) without any dedicated national strategic
coordination capacity to call upon and little or no spare internal
capacity, to fill the void itself.
2.10 We believe that it was wrongly assumed
that the RDA would be willing and able to take on the national
strategic role through an ill defined collaborative arrangement
operated between all the RDAs, VB and DCMS. Strategy born out
of consensus among competing organisations is workable but it
is at its weakest where there is a critical divergence of interests,
the very point at which strategy is supposed to give direction.
The ad hoc arrangements that are still under development might
work in a fashion but we question whether it is a proper substitute
for an adequately staffed and funded national strategic organisation,
as the British Tourism Authority (BTA) once was.
2.11 Very recently VB has taken on an increasing
number of elements from within the strategic role. However, they
do not, as yet, have the official stamp of authority to make the
hard decisions necessary, nor do they have the dedicated resources
to do the necessary spadework. It is a major task, it has to be
officially given to someone, that someone needs adequate resources
to do the job properly and, to be a proper job, the process really
does need to be transparent, open to democratic influence and
broadly understood and supported by the industry.
2.12 In our view, the national and regional
arrangements were put in place without the benefit of a pragmatic
understanding of the start state, without a proper feel for the
sheer diversity of the industry and without due regard to the
functioning local and sub regional organisations and the interrelationships
that underpinned them. We have gone from a fairly simple layered
system of local, sub regional/regional and national support structures
to a plethora of different approaches that no one can, as yet,
adequately describe, let alone understand.
2.13 Central Government's increasing interest
in tourism has resulted in 10 or more years of constant structural
change. It has also seen emerge a mind set that tourism can only
be taken seriously if it can be linked directly to the latest
passing Government policy objectives. Focusing only on tourism's
coincidental ability to deliver a particular isolated element
of the latest policy objective produces a compartmentalised approach
(quality, sustainability, skills, etc) and a sequential focus
on relatively few and often fleeting, big ideas. The latest, by
far the biggest and the one that unusually is likely to remain
a focus for some considerable time, is the 2012 Games. We in the
industry have become conditioned to this political football approach.
Worse still many of us have played some part in perpetuating it.
On examination, the policy of hitching tourism to passing political
policy objectives may initially have raised tourism's profile.
But it has since served to constrain the breadth of the strategic
overview, it has restricted blue skies strategic visioning and
it goes a very long way towards explaining the absence of an evolving
and genuinely strategic, national tourism strategy.
2.14 The net result of all of the above
has been:
2.14.1 A loss of national cohesion and strategic
leadership within England.
2.14.2 Greater fragmentation, particularly
at SME and micro business level.
2.14.3 Confused and confusing support structures,
with greater duplication in some regions/areas, and significant
public and private sector disengagement and gaps developing in
other regions/areas.
2.14.4 Limited improvement in larger private
sector organisation's engagement and funding at Regional and National
level, weighed against the loss of SME and micro business engagement
and funding contributions at the local level.
2.14.5 Serious doubts about how much of the
claimed additional public funding for support structures is reaching
the coalface and improving the actual support delivered, once
the additional administration costs are accounted for.
2.14.6 An over emphasis (to the point of
fixation) on the importance of promotion (marketing) and improving
product quality. Rather than a balance of coordination, leadership,
diplomacy, coercion, advocacy, enhancing the environment for product
development and then, where appropriate, promotion of the type
and to an audience that industry cannot reasonably be expected
to reach on their own.
2.14.7 An emphasis on a few worthy policy
objectives, a loss of true strategic vision and a lack of a truly
strategic strategy.
3. BACKGROUND
TO LOCAL
AUTHORITY TOURISM
MANAGEMENT
3.1 Where the relative importance, or the
sheer scale have warranted it, local authorities have long played
a part in the coordination of a fragmented, multi sector, multi
disciplined, predominantly SME and micro business, based tourism
industry. Tourism and leisure is a discretionary activity that
takes place specifically in a locality away from the normal place
of residency. Tourism is a process that delivers a mix of goods
and services, but to be tourism they cannot be bought and taken,
or ordered and delivered to your door like a new bed, an insurance
policy or a pizza. It may sound flippant but it is a fundamental
observation. An observation that helps explain why all levels
of the public sector have an unavoidable part to play in many
aspects of the delivery, funding and the coordination of the joint
efforts of a conglomeration of otherwise commercial activity that,
loosely combined, become "tourism".
3.2 Customers in the visitor economy have
to voluntarily deliver themselves to the product. The journey
to the point of consumption, the quality, ambiance, the nature
of the people and everything else that goes into shaping, or indeed
breaking the wider sense of place around it, all play as much
a part in the purchase decision as the actual quality and the
value of the individual products; be it a burger or a week's hotel
accommodation, a five star Michelin meal or a tent pitch for the
night. Good product will always be harder to sell in a relatively
poor place, while a poor product may sell but generally detracts
from, devalue and, if left unchecked, will destroy an otherwise
good place. Public realm, in all its guises, plays an indivisible
part in the visitor experience and public realm remains largely
the stock-in-trade of the public sector.
3.3 Much of what sets the tone of a place,
from the provision and maintenance of public realm, to the setting
of local policies and interpretation and implementation of national
public policy falls in the first instance to the local authorities.
Other successively higher levels of government also have a profound
influence on critical elements, for example public and private
transport policy and funding. They also have enormous power to
limit what local authorities can achieve in all of their many
and various areas of activity, primarily through allocation of
resources and framing the public policies that sets the parameters
and conditions for any given local action.
3.4 Managing a combination of diverse public
and private sector products, sufficiently in range and large enough
in scale to form a recognisable "destination" is almost
always best done by a local organisation. Being local it operates
at the point of consumption, where it is has some ability to influence
the total product, often in the face of the competitive demands
of the individual products that contribute to it. To be effective
the management organisation needs to have evident ownership of
the locality and a genuine ability to influence the combined product
and the place where it sits (the destination). It also needs proper
accountability to both the industry and the wider community, whose
interests will be affected by the visitors or, indeed, on occasion,
by the lack of them. Since, ultimately, tourism is a commercial
activity, the managing body also has to be seen to be scrupulously
fair and largely non-partisan in its commercial approach, otherwise
commercial rivalry will shatter the fragile cooperative peace.
This effectively constrains the partnership's commercial conduct
and, by default, makes destination management more likely to be
public sector lead and publicly subsidised activity.
3.5 Traditionally the role of destination
management has fallen to local authorities, not because they necessarily
wanted it, but because they are the only ones who fit the criteria.
They have also seen the obvious advantage of taking it on; in
order to manage an industry that can seriously distort the physical,
social and economic environment. Visitors also create significant
direct and indirect public sector service demands that ebb and
flow dramatically day to day, week, season and year to year, and
all at the unpredictable whim of a fashion, media and weather
conscious public. Better, therefore, for local authorities to
direct the industry from the outset, rather than quite literally
following on behind cleaning up the mess when visitors do come
and cleaning up the even bigger and much wider social and economic
mess when they don't.
3.6 Once involved in managing the locality
as a destination, it is a small step from there to promoting it.
Indeed, there is a very strong argument that to manage a destination
properly, you must also control its promotion. Promotion enables
the management to influence both the potential customer and the
disparate stakeholder businesses; businesses that inevitably seek
some tangible, commercial reward for their compliance with some
of the inevitably unpalatable rules of partnership working. Beyond
the local level, groups of destinations will also then need a
mechanism to come together to appropriately promote a recognisable
sub region, region and so on.
3.7 Attempts to short-circuit the process
by cutting out the true local destination and only marketing much
larger new destinations, brands or product groups from the outset
are doomed to failure. The organisations that promote larger geographic
entities do not have any true influence over, responsibility for,
or accountability to the individual products, or to the localities
that they promote. Thus their services become a purely commercial
exchange. Meanwhile who is actually left on the ground managing
the destination and, without the local marketing stick and carrot,
what influence can they really exert over the private sector to
galvanise them to function together as a proper destination?
3.8 That is not to say that there are no
roles for sub regional, regional or national bodies. On the contrary
there are very specific roles and a significant need for a strengthened
version of the old layered approach we once had. Unfortunately,
the more layers there are the more expensive it will be and the
more room there will be for (useful) overlap and limited (wasteful?)
duplication. The new RDA provision is now working at its best
where early attempts to disengage local authorities were resisted
and then abandoned. The new replacement organisations unintentionally
became that additional layer. This has been possible only where
RDA funding is at its most generous. If you accept that RDA funding
is a reducing asset and that an SME dominated private sector will
always struggle to pay the lion's share of the cost of the necessary
supporting structures, how sustainable is this? To our mind this
simply reinforces the need to ensure that the basic local building
block is in place. When the chips are down the local authority
tourism support structure needs to be in place, adequately funded
and functioning.
3.9 The problem we have right now is that,
like oil tankers, local authorities are slow to change direction.
Instructions and intended or unintended encouragement, to disengage
from tourism, issued three or more years ago are only now having
full effect. Dozens of authorities have pulled out of tourism
support altogether since 2003 and many more are somewhere in the
processes of doing so. There has been some positive, almost frantic
signalling, at national and regional level in the last year but,
by the time the message reaches the helm, it may be too late for
those already abandoning ship. Once lost, non-statutory services
of this type are not easily, if ever, regained. We need a clear,
unambiguous message issued to local authorities from a very senior,
preferably Central Government, level. Local Authorities should
be reminded that they all play a vital role in the provision of
basic tourism infrastructure and that, where tourism is truly
important, they go on to have a critical and all but unavoidable
role to play in the wider destination management.
4. THE INQUIRY
QUESTIONS
4.1 We have seen and concur with the submissions
by the Tourism Alliance and our public sector strategic partner
organisations, including the Tourism Management Institute and
Destination Performance UK. Rather than restating their comments,
we are concentrating on a few additional observations. The overview
above should also serve to answer some of the key questions on
current structures and organisational effectiveness.
5. OPPORTUNITIES
AND CHALLENGES
5.1 Discretionary leisure spending displays
extraordinary elasticity; the more disposable income we have the
greater proportion of it is spent on leisure. Although UK residents
are drawn abroad in ever increasing numbers, the exponential growth
in leisure taking means that the UK market place, once dominated
by a single long, sharp summer season holiday and the odd Bank
Holiday, has changed spectacularly. What is bizarrely still seen
by many as being the "heyday of domestic tourism", has
been replaced by a much bigger, all year round, dynamic mix of
local leisure taking, day trips, short breaks and first or second
and subsequent long holidays. It is also a mix based not on pure
leisure tourism, but on business, business tourism and visiting
friends and relatives (VFR).
5.2 Scenario Planning. This growth
offers us a range of major opportunities to exploit evolving old
and emerging new markets. It also creates a number of significant
"stratospheric" as opposed to "strategic"
challenges. The biggest is the lingering threat of the impact
of any future economic downturn, either at home or abroad. Discretionary
leisure spend will always be the first thing to feel the pinch,
followed closely by non-essential business expenditure. The bigger
the industry grows and the more economically reliant we as a nation
become on any sector or segment of tourism, the harder, deeper
and longer any potential fall will be.
5.3 DCMS might not feel empowered to do
much about the UK or international economics. Nonetheless who
in Government, if anyone, is giving due thought to the possibilities
of future proofing some or all parts of the international and
domestic markets? It may be that it is simply too big a question.
On the other hand the answer may well translate into something
as simple as "don't put all your eggs in one basket".
If it is something of this nature then would the industry not
benefit from having such a guiding principle defined at the stratospheric
and applied at the strategic planning levels?
5.4 There is a host of other similar very
high level planning issues that no one appears to have taken ownership
of. For example, if, for some reason, the British could not go
abroad in the numbers they do now, could the UK infrastructure
and UK industry actually cope with the predictable numerical demand
on any given day? Who cares? We certainly wouldn't if we had the
comfort of knowing that somewhere, someone was doing the scenario
planning for big what ifs, linked to predictable issues like global
warming or a changing global economy. What and where is the DCMS
input?
5.5 Residual Barriers. Given the
scale of the industry and a background of radical change, it is
inevitable that some of the inherited public infrastructure, some
of the supporting structures and, indeed, the conceptual understanding
of how the industry functions will not have kept pace with the
major changes that have and are still taking place. In particular,
public policy does not necessarily recognise the rump of residual
barriers that are inadvertently left behind by far-reaching alterations
to social and economic patterns. A good illustration of this is
Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs) in coastal resort towns.
5.6 Traditional popular resort towns are
still visited by large numbers, yet accommodation demands have
changed significantly, leaving a dearth of large, outdated hotels,
guest houses and other, typically grand, Victorian and Edwardian
properties. In any other industry these "brown field sites""
would have limited commercial or capital value and most would
have been put to a new productive use that probably complimented
the changed commercial environment. Unfortunately, tourism's brown
field sites are, typically, people's homes, they represent individual
families' entire capital and are all that remains of their livelihoods.
Sold on to absentee landlords, they also retain considerable residual
commercial value, primarily as poor quality HMOs.
5.7 HMOs in any numbers create serious social
pressures on the host town, reducing the local authority's discretionary
spending, most notably in resort towns, on discretionary spend
in support of tourism. HMOs and some of the social and economic
problems that they attract, also directly detract from the tourism
product, the resort's image and, eventually, from the popularity
of the destination. Thus, a failure to address what is essentially
a non tourism related housing/planning/licensing/social service,
policy issue helps create the conditions for the vicious circle
of decline that directly impacts on tourism. Who is championing
the tourism component of this type of difficult multi disciplined
issue with the relevant yet, in tourism terms, poorly informed
and, without the advocacy support, sometimes rather disinterested
Departments and agencies?
5.8 Transport. Other examples of
public policy mismatch include public transport provision and
road improvement policies. The current approach ignores the needs
of a burgeoning day trip and short break market, in favour of
nine to five Monday to Friday business travel and the needs of
commercial distribution. Our raw material is people (customers
and staff) and they need to travel easily all day, every day.
Getting policies right, that then impact on tourism as it is now,
rather than as it once was, represents a significant opportunity.
Failing to do it properly represents a negative challenge of epic
proportions.
5.9 If, in future, we cannot absorb new
growth of the kind that has, to date, saved the bulk of the domestic
industry, it will have to go somewhere. By default, that somewhere
will be abroad and the less able we are to accommodate new types
of growth, the greater the potential that some of the past growth
will be dragged abroad too. The visitor economy is entirely reliant
on visitors and in order to visit you must travel, yet no one
yet seems remotely interested in the massive potential consequences
of internal UK transport policies, or in fighting the cause of
discretionary and, therefore, "frivolous" domestic leisure
travel, particularly travel by car.
5.10 Cheap Flights. Clearly, cheap
flights play a significant part in the travel equation. Relatively
cheap foreign package holidays decimated the mass, long UK holiday
market as once was. Ultimately, people went abroad because it
was different and they now could, not necessarily because it was
markedly better or cheaper. The new generation of low cost flights
simply means that even more people can easily choose to go abroad
and, given the choice, why wouldn't they? Low cost, flight only
services are now helping to do to the foreign mass market package
holiday what the package holiday did to the domestic mass market
in the 1970s and 1980s. The growth in the ability to buy the other
elements of your package direct has also played a parallel and
equally important part. It is simply a matter of choice; you now
do not have to buy a package holiday to go abroad, so not everyone
going abroad does.
5.11 Properly applied, the same freedom
of choice could help the domestic market. The UK also has an opportunity
to make sure that as many people as possible stay and holiday
here because they can (easily) and because they want to (because
it's nice). We cannot change the weather (or at least we didn't
plan to) but we can remove a long list of residual public policy
barriers and we can also work to avoid other parts of Government,
creating new public policy inspired obstacles, from road pricing
to tourism taxes. Many of the issues revolve around public realm,
business and trade support mechanisms and the provision of good
reliable information to both the trade and the customer. By its
nature, much of this activity gravitates towards the public sector
and will have a cost to the public purse.
5.12 One challenge linked to air travel
not often identified is the massive growth in the purchase of
holiday homes abroad. This encourages many to spend the greater
proportion of their discretionary leisure time abroad. It also
results in a vast amount of equity being sucked out of the UK
economy to be invested in property abroad. Like other parts of
the overseas holiday market, the holiday home market has been
driven by the advent of low cost flights. The only glimmer of
hope in all of this is that the environmental impact of discretionary
leisure travel by air will, at some point, be properly recognised
and action taken to redress the balance of the relative cost of
different forms of travel.
5.13 Mixed Messaging. Regrettably,
the financial power and, thus, the lobbying voice currently lies
with the air transport industry who, so far, appear to be winning
the battle to block any fiscal or moral constraints on leisure
air travel. The fact that Government appears to be looking at
fiscal measures as just another tax, rather than a specific environmental
measure linked back to reinvest into sustainable public transportation,
is not helping to win over the public's hearts and minds. There
is also a conflict of interest within the tourism industry itself.
Many of the larger tourism interests have a major stake in the
inbound international market, much of which focuses on London
and a small number of honey pot destinations. They worry that
constraining air travel in the round will damage inbound travel
without necessarily benefiting the domestic market. It is worth
noting that UK domestic activity still accounts for 80% by value
of all tourism in the UK. On this rather crude measure which,
on balance, is more important?
5.14 Whether, on balance, all air travel
is broadly good or broadly bad for tourism in the UK as a whole
is an impossible call. What is needed is a multi layered approach
that acknowledges that some air travel will be hugely beneficial,
some will be hugely damaging and the rest will divide somewhere
in between. Meanwhile, until a robust UK position is taken on
air travel, the domestic industry is left seriously wondering
how the new low cost flights that appear to have contributed to
drawing off a significant proportion of the potential domestic
market can ever be viewed as being a broadly good thing. Day trips,
short breaks and additional holidays combined saved the domestic
industry from the collapse of the main long holiday market. Low
cost flights and the opening up of a huge number of new European
short haul destinations, now poses a considerable and increasing
threat to both the short breaks and additional longer holiday
markets; markets that we cannot afford to see stolen away from
under our noses.
5.16 Leisure Car Travel. In parallel,
the under resourced domestic tourism lobby is in danger of losing
the battle over domestic travel and, in particular, over road
travel before it has even been properly fought. The visitor economy
needs visitors to function. In modern British society the preferred
means of travel is now the car. There are now 33 million licensed
motor vehicles in the UK, 11 million more than in 1980. While
fiscal and moral pressures do not seem to be gaining much ground
in respect of air travel, there seems to be less resistance to
the concept of higher taxation, fuel duty and/or road pricing
being levied on car travel. The public also seem more receptive
to the moral arguments against discretionary leisure car travel.
5.17 The growing threat to car travel is
set against a backdrop of very limited improvements in public
transport provision and then almost none outside the primary city
business network. Many established urban and rural destinations
by their nature lie well off these routes. Public road policy
is also fixed entirely on improving mainstream "business
travel" and commercial distribution. Travel outside the Monday
to Friday commuter peaks has little or no priority, as witnessed
by anyone trying to get home after an evening out or by those
foolish enough to try travelling any distance by public transport
at a weekend or during pubic holidays. Until a viable alternative
means of public leisure transport is in place, the leisure journeys
by car should not be targeted, even during periods of very high
leisure demand. It would be perverse if the UK population were
now encouraged to reduce their leisure generated environmental
impact by abandoning car travel to domestic destinations, only
to then have no real alternative but to choose to drive to an
airport and fly abroad more often.
5.18 Extending the Stay. Resort towns
and traditional rural tourist areas are able to absorb a significant
proportion of the UK leisure demand. Resorts, in particular, are
designed to handle the mass market and have ample capacity in
terms of their public realm to do more. They need investment to
redevelop parts of their product to match the much changed demand.
In future, rather than fixating about the environmental impact
of travelling to a destination (by car), we need to look at the
relatively limited impact once in destination, whether that be
walking or cycling in the Lake District or promenading or taking
the tram in Blackpool. Getting the public and private transport
offer and the messaging right is the precursor to environmental
gains. Much of the actual environmental saving would then lie
in converting day trips to short breaks, short breaks to short
holidays and so on. Converting them in existing resort towns and
established rural destinations where bits of redundant infrastructure
could be recycled and damage to green field sites avoided, would
seem to us to be the most sustainable of sustainable tourism approaches.
5.19 Although these strategic transport
and other issues have been raised with DCMS the reaction is often
to acknowledge the issues and to suggest that we would be better
off speaking to other, more appropriate Departments.
6. DCMS AND ITS
SPONSORED BODIES
6.1 DCMS. What DCMS do for tourism
they do well. If there is an issue, it is about what they do not
do, primarily because they are not resourced to. DCMS is a relatively
small Department within which a very small team work on tourism.
As civil servants, that team has an obligation to service the
administrative and other demands of the parent Department and
other Departments in Whitehall, together with a duty to serve
both Parliament and Ministers. They also understand that they
have certain EU administrative obligations. This means that they
are already fairly busy doing what has to be done, before they
even start considering the task of servicing the needs of the
industry. In terms of the size of the team allocated to do the
job, nothing much has changed in recent years. What has changed
is all the supporting structures around them and, largely, these
changes are at the behest of DCMS. By removing the strategic and
visioning functions from VB and having handed over the RTBs to
the RDA, only to see the majority totally changed, DCMS has created,
almost overnight, a national level strategic policy and delivery
vacuum for itself and for the industry. DCMS are not, in our view,
adequately staffed to fill the gap themselves, nor do the individuals
involved necessarily have the in-depth knowledge of the issues
and the industry much before it is time for them to move on. Nor
do they now have any organisation to fall back on, whose specified
role is to advise them and, critically, which has the staff dedicated
to the task and funded to do the not inconsiderable leg work involved.
6.2 DCMS have helped create an ad hoc voluntary,
strategic policy development arrangement between the national
boards and the English RDAs, that no one, other than those directly
involved, have yet any real faith in. To cope with the workload
involved in coordinating tourism, DCMS appear to have reduced
national tourism strategy down to few extremely worthy causes,
all coincidently framed in terms of current Government policy
objectives. Accepting that this may well be the only way to gain
Government support and funding for tourism, it does, nonetheless,
mean that everything else that falls outside one of a small number
of the defined boxes is either ignored or fended off as being
another Department's concern. It is inevitably true that most
issues are another Department's responsibility, but who is fulfilling
the vital tourism advocacy role and where is the internal Government
tourism input coming from, if it is not from DCMS?
6.3 VisitBritain. VB in its former
guise of the British Tourism Authority (BTA) with the English
Tourist Board (ETB)/English Tourism Council (ETC) used to have
a strategic remit, which it has largely lost and for which it
is now neither formally funded nor staffed. VB and EnjoyEngland
within it, is now a highly focused marketing organisation covering
international marketing for Britain and domestic marketing of
England. It is extremely good at what it does. However, we believe
that there needs to be a body that is resourced and staffed with
the required expertise to carry out the strategic tourism leadership,
coordination and planning roles for international marketing of
Britain and the domestic strategic leadership within England in
addition to the marketing of both. Logic tells us that the role
should revert to an expanded VB, however it needs to be in addition
to, not at the expense of VB's existing marketing roles.
6.4 Having said that, VB are exceptionally
good at their new focused marketing roles, they have become victims
of their own success. Despite being able to prove an impressive
return on investment, particularly in international marketing,
they have been repeatedly starved of additional Government grants
over a period of 10 or more years. They have been able to improve
their outputs by rationalisation, reorganisation and by being
ever more commercially focused. There are, however, only so many
efficiency savings that can be made. In addition, the drive for
commercial contribution means that, to a degree, they can now
only really help those who are already most financially able to
help themselves. To be truly effective and serve the best interests
of the UK and the whole UK industry, VB need additional resources
and/or fewer rigid commercial targets. This would give them back
the ability to do what needs to be done and not just those things
that can be seen to attract private sector contributions and meet
ever more stringent targets for return on investment and for higher
ratios of private sector contributions.
7. STRUCTURES
AND FUNDING
7.1 RDA Tourism Support. It is almost
impossible to give a view on the efficiency of the new RDA support
structures, simply because they are so different to each other.
Between them they form a system so complicated and complex that
we doubt that anyone could currently produce an accurate organisational
chart, or give a global figure for the numbers employed, doing
what, where and for whom. Our natural suspicions are that rather
more resources are going into the process of managing the management
of tourism than there was under the old system but that rather
less as a proportion of the whole is going into managing tourism
delivery. We may be wrong and, even if we are right, what does
it matter as long as globally more money is being spent on tourism
support?
7.2 Unfortunately, it does matter because,
by giving the management of tourism over entirely to each RDA,
each of which has a very different approach to tourism, often
driven by very different resource allocations, Government has
created a wildly distorted internal competitive market, primarily
for domestic tourism. Fortunately, few, if any, RDAs are foolish
enough to venture into international marketing without using VB
as a coordinating body. Even so, some Regions can actively participate
in VB international marketing activities, while others cannot
afford to do so. In the domestic market there is much less restraint.
We now have the English regions in open, if undeclared, war all
trying to grab as big a share of the UK domestic market from each
other as their publicly subsidised marketing and promotional campaigns
can manage. It is no way to run a publicly funded National marketing
campaign which should promote individual regions, both fairly
and equitably within a national promotional campaign framework.
Such a campaign should build up logically from individual product
through destinations/sectors/product group promotions, to sub
regional/county/regional promotions, to Home Country promotion
and eventually to international promotion through VB. Alleged
duplication has been replaced with outright competition.
7.3 VB and EnjoyEngland. Both would
benefit from greater resource allocation, lower gearing ratios
for private sector contribution and less rigid output targets.
Accepting that higher gearing and rigid targets are likely to
be the price demanded for public money there is a point where,
to prove efficiency, VB and EnjoyEngland start denying support
to the majority of SMEs. They also start inadvertently subsidising
the tactical marketing efforts of the few bigger players who can
afford the not inconsiderable threshold contributions. Arguably
in some respects we are already beyond this point.
8. DATA
8.1 DCMS should look again at the Alnutt
Report and, specifically, at the lower cost option that report
put forward. Time has moved on but some basic principles outlined
have not. Greater understanding is needed about the potential
value of Tourism Satellite Accounting (TSA) and, in particular,
the problems of application at the local level. TSA has great
potential at the national level, but it becomes weaker the closer
to the point of delivery you get. The development of TSA is being
used by some as an excuse to delay necessary improvement elsewhere.
We also need some urgent guidance on the future use of the term
visitor economy. What do we mean by it, what does it include and
how is, or how should it be measured? There is a real danger that,
in getting away from the misunderstandings surrounding tourism,
we will simply replace it with a bigger and equally misunderstood
concept. Conversely there may be a real opportunity at this development
stage to define the visitor economy in both meaningful and critically
measurable terms. Arguably there is benefit in defining it now
and, if needs be, defining it purely in terms we know we can measure,
rather than letting it evolve into a concept that we later find
that we cannot quantify.
9. ENVIRONMENTAL
TOURISM
9.1 Environmentally friendly forms of tourism
should be built into every aspect of the industry's operation.
Increasing environmental awareness demands that, what was until
recently a cutting edge approach, like low energy light bulbs
or reducing laundry requirements, should now be the norm. In addition,
many businesses will see potential benefit in catering to their
own particular market's preferences. Whether that is sourcing
more products locally, embracing new low energy technology or
offsetting the business carbon footprint. The more businesses
that do these things the less additional market advantage it imparts.
Overtime these activities become the norm in their own particular
market areas and should then be regarded as being little more
than good practice. There are always going to be parts of the
market who are disinterested in environmental issues or those
individuals who claim interest but pay lip service when it affects
their personal choice of product. Beyond the mass market there
will always be a niche market for the latest cutting edge approach,
together with a niche within a niche for a more basic retro back
to nature approach (soil toilets and drinking the rainwater).
All of these areas are customer lead and, as such, should be left
largely to the industry, the customer and market forces.
9.2 Rather than focusing on the complex
customer lead aspect of mainstream or niche markets, the focus
for DCMS should be on public policy and public policy support.
For example, local authorities concentrate on recycling household
waste but what effort is being put into recycling tourism business
waste and on-street waste stream? The glass or paper output of
the average hotel is significant but it is often sent to landfill
and simply accepted as a business cost, usually because no cost-effective
alternatives are on offer. What incentives are there for retrospective
environmental improvement to business premises, particularly given
that so many of the operators are SMEs and micro businesses, often
operating out of older properties? If it is not cash grants for
physical improvement, then what business advice is being put forward
through existing routes to tourism businesses? Rather than developing
separate green award schemes, should the main National Quality
Assured schemes (NQA) not start treating successive common environmentally
friendly practice as the norm and should more emphasis not be
placed on environmental practice within the business support element
of the inspections process?
10. 2012 GAMES
10.1 BRADA submitted a long and fairly critical
response to the DCMS consultation. A full copy is attached.[1]
Since the consultation DCMS is taking a much more pragmatic approach
to the 2012 Games. However, there are still some residual issues
we would wish to highlight:
10.1.1 To succeed in tourism terms both during
and after the event the games will need to be promoted. It is
still unclear whether VB and Visit London will get the funding
they seek to do this. In the meantime the industry are unclear
what VB and Visit London have planned even if they do get the
funding. We do know that VBs Comprehensive Spending Review bid
is based on the alarmingly high expectation of 50% (£20 million)
private sector contributions.
10.1.2 The vast majority of the industry
operates in the domestic market (80% by value) yet the games engagement
has so far been promoted entirely on the benefit of a £2
billion international tourism legacy. What is in it for the domestic
market and what is going to be done to counter the impact on the
domestic market outside London during the Games?
10.1.3 DCMS seem to believe that it is essential
to engage the bulk of the industry (upwards of 180,000 businesses?)
from an early stage. Without a significant and sustained business
case to encourage them to engage early and stay engaged this is
a tough target and one that will not be easily achieved. Surely
a lower, slower target that achieved full engagement by say 2010,
2011 or even 2012 would be preferable?
11. SUMMARY
11.1 Rather than attempting to summarise
our submission and make it even longer, we simply end by stressing
the critical importance of local government as the foundation
block of tourism support. We would also wish to indicate our willingness
to address some of the specific issues, or to summarise our overall
position in an oral evidence session.
March 2007
1 Not printed. Back
|
