Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 258)
TUESDAY 18 DECEMBER 2007
MARTIN SINGFIELD
AND CRAIG
BEAUMONT
Q240 Paul Farrelly: You have just
described how closely you work together with other economic development
agencies in London but the Olympic Games has not only been promoted
as a games for London but a games for all our nations and regions.
I would suggest that London's vested economic interests are totally
at odds with the economic interests of VisitBritain, VisitScotland,
VisitWales, Visit WestMidlands or Visit Staffordshire in trying
to get a slice of the Olympic pie. How are you co-operating with
the other "Visit" organisations to make sure that it
is not just London that wants all of the pie and so that there
is a clearer message?
Mr Beaumont: I think we have a
different take on this. For every pound you invest in London,
we believe that adds to Britain's visitor economy, not only because
people go elsewhere but because you are generating new business.
If someone comes to London and likes it, they may come back and
visit somewhere else as well. We will work very closely with all
the bodies that are working on the Olympics. You are right that
London will benefit the most, if it all works, which is that we
estimate the UK-wide benefit economically at about £2.09
billion, which I think is our latest figure for new tourism spend,
and £1.47 billion of that is in London. So, yes, London benefits
the most but 25% is for the rest of the UK. Organisations like
VisitScotland have been very well engaged with the process of
the Olympics throughout. It is up to every destination and organisation
to work out how they can contribute and how they can become involved.
None of these benefits are automatic. When the tourism organisations
in the south-east of England and elsewhere become involved, then
we will talk to them very closely.
Q241 Paul Farrelly: That is a different
level of co-ordination from what you were talking about with the
London agencies because you work closely with them in co-ordinating
meetings. Now you are saying it is for them to work it out. Your
message is "Visit London and stay". Theirs is "Visit
London and move out and see the rest of this".
Mr Beaumont: We have to co-operate
across the mayoral remit in London. In terms of operation, I suppose
that is a different way of working from working with all the other
"Visits" across England and Britain. The Olympic presence
is a mayoral priority and it is being led by a group called London
Unlimited. That is a distinct entity which works to promote Visit
London, Think London, London Higher and London Film. It is co-ordinated
from the outset. You are right that we need to communicate that
further out to the other "Visits" but not everyone can
become involved in the project at that level. There will be a
"Britain" presence in Beijing as well and they will
be working out how that operates with London, how big it is, and
how all the "Visits" are involved. We need to communicate
what we are doing and we need to talk and we need to listen, but
there is a different operational level.
Q242 Paul Farrelly: Going back briefly
to figures, I do not have the figures for your funding for the
three years that we have been talking about and the rest. Can
you give us that?
Mr Singfield: Yes. This year our
grant would be approximately £16 million. That is for the
Visit London activities. There is a separate project called London
Unlimited which is designing a holistic brand and that is a further
£6 million from the London Development Agency.
Q243 Paul Farrelly: Does that rise
and fall over the next two or three years?
Mr Singfield: The core funding
for our tourism activities rises by about 2.5% per year. We have
a four-year business plan. This is currently the second year of
that business plan, so we have guaranteed funding for the next
two years and I believe London Unlimited rises from £6.4
million this year to £6.8 million next year, the year of
the Beijing Olympics, and then falls back to £6.4 million
the year afterwards.
Chairman: The figures the Government
has given us show that the LDA spends £22 million on tourism.
Does that mean some of that money goes elsewhere?
Q244 Paul Farrelly: Is that £16
million plus £6 million?
Mr Beaumont: In the government
figures, is there a separate line under "London Unlimited"
that you have?
Q245 Chairman: There is £22
million of the LDA and another £6 million for London Unlimited.
Mr Beaumont: There is a £16
million grant for us. The £1.5 million in addition to that
that is our gateway role. I think we are going to have to get
back to you on this.
Mr Singfield: I am not sure how
the LDA spends the other part.
Mr Beaumont: To explain to the
Committee how London works, the Mayor has a statutory responsibility
to develop tourism. He has a 10-year vision, which sets out what
everybody should do and within that you have action-plans covering
three-year periods. There will be three or four action-plans.
The LDA leads on tourism. Basically that is to do with things
like the tourism product such as quality, skills, welcome, accessibility,
sustainability. We are not a full-service national tourist board
in the way that the Committee has heard before with VisitBritain.
We do not cover those areas. We are a marketing agency. We are
a company and we do marketing and PR. It is a different set-up.
That extra money will presumably go towards developing those areas
I mentioned—skills, access, sustainability, welcome.
Q246 Chairman: If you are able to
let us have a breakdown of your funding and where the money goes
and also how that fits in with the LDA, that would be helpful.
Mr Beaumont: Yes.[2]
Q247 Mr Evans: You talk about what
people think about the brand, whether it is London or the UK but
more specifically London. I do not tend to hear fog or bowler
hats from people, What I do hear is that they think it is hellishly
expensive, from the Tubes, which if you pay in cash is £4
a go, to taxis which people think are expensive; they think some
of the hotels are horrendously expensive. London is one of the
most expensive capitals in the world. Is that not the perception
people have about London?
Mr Beaumont: It is one perception.
It is one of the things we do tackle currently in our marketing
activity. There are ways to do London that mean that London is
not as expensive. We promote thinks like the royal parks, and
the activities held here; they are a key partner of ours. Obviously
we have the national museums and galleries that are free. There
are ways to get your transport costs down using a visitor Oyster
card. We have launched lots of two-for-one offers based on the
visitor Oyster card so that you can get into non-free museums
and attractions for much less than you would otherwise pay. The
budget sector in our hotels is the fastest growing sector. For
example, Travelodge are pushing massive new hotel developments
coming up in the next 10 or 15 years. We do help with lots of
events that are organised around London in Trafalgar Square and
elsewhere that are free. There are lots of free things going on.
We need to communicate those better to potential consumers so
that when people do come, they realise that it is not necessarily
expensive to be in London.
Q248 Mr Evans: Another perception
is this. When people come in, they come in via Heathrow. What
do you think Heathrow contributes towards the perception of people
visiting London, without loading the question too much?
Mr Beaumont: T5 for us is a major
step forward, and so are very excited about the T5 launch and
how visitors will perceive that as they come in to the country.
Lots of the policy issues around Heathrow are generating negative
PR and we do not like it. We do hear feedback from visitors about
Heathrow but we also see media coverage in our key markets, and
in the US for example. That threatens business travel to a business
airport and we are very concerned about that. However, we are
very impressed with the plans that link to Heathrow. I think BAA
are spending £6.2 billion over the next few years. I think
terminals 1 and 2 of the five terminals are being replaced by
Heathrow East; terminals 3 and 4 will both be refurbished; and
then there is the new T5. Although we are not terribly happy with
the current situation, that airport is still a success in terms
of its passengers. We have to keep that. While we are not happy
with the current situation, there are things on the horizon that
we like.
Q249 Mr Evans: Do you think that
Heathrow deters people from coming to London?
Mr Beaumont: No, clearly not;
it is very successful with 67 million passengers for an airport
designed for 40 million. We are worried that, long-term, that
will have an impact. We are seeing business travel, for example,
threatened. Anecdotally, we do hear about people transferring
via a different airport and that must be stopped, and we are hoping
that T5 in March will be the start of the change.
Q250 Mr Evans: People poo-poo transit
passengers, people coming in via London to go off somewhere else.
Is there any economic impact to transit passengers at all in your
estimation?
Mr Beaumont: Could we go away
and think about that? I am not sure we have an answer on transit
passengers.
Q251 Mr Evans: I would be interested
to know. Some people seem to dismiss it and they do not care if
people go from India to the United States via Frankfurt or Charles
de Gaulle as if it does not really matter if they come to touch
down for a few hours in London. I would be interested to know
what the economic impact of that is.
Mr Beaumont: The part about business
travel is working on business extenders, people who are here for
business but will stay around. Part of that effort will be that
if someone is planning their flight to, say, India and they can
go via London, we would like them to remember the branding in
an advert or some PR coverage and feel: "I could add a couple
of days to my trips and stay in London for this". Transit
in that sense is an opportunity for us that we need to promote.
Q252 Mr Evans: Finally on visas for
people coming in to the UK: do you have any view as to the impact
on tourism into the UK of either visa costs or the difficulties
in getting visas?
Mr Beaumont: The Times
report yesterday about changes to visas does concern us. We sit
on the UK Visitor Visas Taskforce and we would like to use our
membership within that to push how we would like to see visas
changed. The differential in price for the Schengen visa is a
real issue when you talk to the travel trade. One new visa being
discussed at the moment is a Schengen add-on group visa. That
visa would mean that a visitor as part of a group would be allowed
multiple entries to London over a period of four to five weeks.
That would be great because you would have someone on a European
trip paying much less to have Britain added on to that European
trip. At the moment they would get one visa for all the Schengen
countries and they would have to get another visa to stick on
for Britain which is twice as expensive. We hear from the trade
that that is an issue, so we would like to see it made easier
for a group that has Schengen entry to get entry to Britain on
that basis.
Q253 Philip Davies: Can I push you
a bit on the benefits of the Olympics to tourism. The only disagreement
at the moment seems to be how many billions of pounds benefit
there is going to be, but I am not entirely sure how this works.
I can see how when Barcelona had the Olympics some people might
have thought, "Barcelona, I had not really thought about
going to Barcelona". What I cannot quite fathom out in my
own mind is how many millions of people there are around the world
watching the Olympics who have contemplated travelling overseas
and are sitting at home watching the Olympics thinking, "London,
no I have never thought about going to London before". Is
there really such a huge market of people out there who have never
even thought about visiting London but, all of a sudden, will
do so just because the Olympics are on?
Mr Beaumont: Yes. China in the
next few years is going to have 100 million outbound travellers,
and these people were not allowed to travel before; you could
not get a leisure visa to visit Britain or to visit London, so
they had not thought about visiting London before and if they
had, they were not allowed, and so they would come under a business
visa or a student visa and naughtily sneak off and be a visitor.
Since our new destination status has come in, we have not seen
a massive rise in tourism but we are hoping that in five or six
years' time there will be a real blip at the Olympics because
of China's interest in the Olympics. That is a platform for us.
It is a new platform, and so promoting a new London will generate
new visits. There is an opportunity there. One legacy that has
come about straight away is something called Events for London
whereby we are trying to attract major events here. Those events
are coming because of the Olympics; we actually have that legacy
now. We are already seeing legacy benefits early, five years out
from the games. There are lots of things going on and I think
some of them will generate lots and lots of new visits, yes.
Q254 Philip Davies: I cannot remember
the four things that you said you were trying to demonstrate London
to be while the Olympics was on but the first one was to be modern
I think. We have millions of visitors to the Palace of Westminster
every year. I am not sure many of them come in to see how modern
everything is. I thought that one of the attractions in coming
to London was our history and that people wanted to come and see
not how modern it all was but how marvellous our history was.
Why is it not our great history that you want particularly to
set out to promote rather than how modern we are?
Mr Beaumont: I think it is both.
Every city in the world has a historic core and some people will
always come and visit for that reason. We need to create extra
reasons either for people to come now rather at some stage in
the next five years or for people who have not thought about coming
because they think London is all about heritage. I think it is
"adding to" heritage rather than "not promoting"
heritage. Heritage and culture are still the number one reason
for visiting London and visiting Britain. We need to try to generate
reasons for people to come now—and so for heritage it could
be promoting something new about a heritage attraction. If the
Tower of London is hosting something exciting, and that can be
the ice rink or jousting or anything that is happening at that
time, something new and different about heritage, that counts
as being modern and doing something new as well.
Q255 Philip Davies: Finally, I have
never really understood how you work out "we spend this and
we generate this back in return". How do you differentiate
between those people who have visited London because of what you
have done and those people who would have visited London anyway,
whether you had done anything or not? How do you know that it
is you or what you have spent that has made these people come
to London? Surely lots of these people would have come anyway,
whether you spent the money or not?
Mr Beaumont: Our evaluation is
about our marketing materials only and so if somebody is touched
by our marketing activity, we would then go back to a selection
of those who give us details and find out. Let us say we have
a competition on a radio station in the US, we get their name
and eventually they give us their email address; we will put out
a survey that will ask several questions, such as "Have you
visited London? Did you visit as a result of the campaign? Will
you probably come to London in the future?" All our evaluation
is based on a DCMS Treasury-approved model which is the same one
that VisitBritain has to go through. Evaluation actually misses
out people who do come here because of our activity, so it underestimates,
if anything.
Mr Singfield: We only measure
those who say they definitely visited because of our campaign.
We ignore the other sections.
Paul Farrelly: I cannot see the modern
buildings appealing to those Chinese in Peking who cannot see
for all the pollution there when smog in London is a thing of
the past!
Q256 Adam Price: Many of the key
players in the sector that have given evidence to the Committee
have criticised the paucity and the poor quality of tourism statistics.
Do you share that frustration?
Mr Beaumont: We do to some extent.
There are three sources of data nationally that we have a view
on. The first one is IPS (the International Passenger Survey)
which gives us all of our inbound volume and value stats. The
IPS is brilliant. It is very good data. It is produced at the
right time and our tourism industry partners like to receive that
information. That is run by the National Statistics; it is therefore
led by one organisation. A second level of data is the domestic
data done by the UK Tourism Survey. That data is not as good;
it is not as responsive; it is not as accurate. That is because
it is harder to get data on people's trips to the UK. If an inbound
visitor comes in, they come in through a port of entry and you
have someone there to count them and to interview them. Through
UKTS, domestic visitors have to be contacted and asked what their
domestic trips were over the last three months. There is a time
lag. Also, because the methodology has changed over the years,
it means that some years are not comparable with others. There
have been some improvements—it used to be a phone survey
that was therefore less good than a face-to-face survey. It is
now face-to-face, and the improvements are welcome and over time
hopefully we will see that data improve. That data is run effectively
by the National Tourist Boards together who all fund it: VisitScotland,
VisitWales, VisitEngland. We are very happy with the first survey,
and not so happy with the second but it is getting better. However
the worst survey data for us is on day visits. The day visit survey
was undertaken in 2005 but that was funded through an arrangement
with Defra and the Countryside Commission and was therefore very
focused on rural tourism—it did not cover cities like London,
so we cannot use the results. You then go back to the previous
day visits survey and the last one before that was 2002-03. That
data did not include things like business day trips; it did not
include people coming to London for a meeting for that day. If
somebody is coming to a meeting in London and they are going to
do tourism outside of it, we want that counted. So the best data
we have is five or six years old and even then it is not very
good. We are hoping that all the RDAs now are talking about improving
data and we are pushing for that to be a priority. We want proper
day visit data. For the moment, that is probably the biggest sector
in domestic tourism but we do not know enough about it.
Q257 Adam Price: The work that you
have done on the Local Area Tourism Impact model and the London
Visitor Survey has won some plaudits. Can you say a little bit
about that and some of the lessons that could be shared across
the UK?
Mr Beaumont: In London we have
four London-only research projects. The first is the Hotel Development
Monitor. I will come to LATI at the end if that is all right;
there is more to say about that. The Hotel Development Monitor
looks at the current capacity in London, where hotels are being
built and what is happening. That can help provide a new business
with data on where there is a gap perhaps in the market for a
hotel. Let us say I come in and say that I want to build a hotel,
we can probably tell you where that might be more successful based
on that data. We have an Attractions Monitor which is very quick.
It can get us instant feedback from all the attractions in London
that contribute. That gives us data confidentially that we do
not release—the Tate is doing this, for example—but
we will do a collation and produce that. It can tell you whether
large attractions are doing well or whether small or free or paid
are doing better. The London Visitor Survey is drawn from face-to-face
surveys on the ground, so we get a sample of I think about 5,000
people and every quarter we go through that survey with the LDA.
That goes into a lot of depth. It is a real eye-opener when you
go into some of the results to find out about things we have talked
about here like welcome and how people feel about the transport
and the attractions, whether they feel that London is too expensive,
et cetera. LATI, the Local Area Tourism Impacts model,
is not actually a new survey. It takes all the national data and
improves the quality of it so that it is able to "spew"
it out at borough level. Camden, for example, can look at international
passenger survey data and say: "You tell us about London
but what about in Camden?" Now Camden can have an accurate
breakdown of volume and value stats in that area. The tourism
officer for that borough can then start looking at what they should
be doing for tourism. They can base all their research on that
data and come up with a strategy that promotes tourism in the
borough and uses that to underpin it: "tourism is worth x".
It can also show how people move between boroughs. This is quite
a new project. It is quite exciting for the boroughs. We have
had our first set of data. Our second set is due early next year.
We will be able, for the first time, to track it year-on-year
as well to see how things have fared.
Q258 Adam Price: You are able to
measure economic impact on a borough basis?
Mr Beaumont: Yes, that is right.
This is a project that we think may have application elsewhere,
so we would be very happy for the LDA and us to share that data
with you and our experiences with you as well. If you could have
it as a commitment from your Committee, we would be very happy
to share it with any tourism organisation that is interested.
Chairman: We do not have any more questions
for you. Thank you very much.
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