Examination of Witnesses (Questions 419
- 429)
TUESDAY 29 JANUARY 2008
PROFESSOR JOHN
FLETCHER AND
PROFESSOR VICTOR
MIDDLETON OBE
Chairman: We now move on to a brief session
discussing tourism statistics. Can I welcome Professor John Fletcher
from Bournemouth University, and Professor Victor Middleton, who
is a former member of the DCMS Steering Group for the Allnutt
Review. Adrian Sanders is going to begin.
Q419 Mr Sanders: I think we heard
in the earlier session, one of the observations of Travelodge
was the lack of statistics, and it has certainly been a recurring
theme throughout this inquiry. Can you set out for the Committee
your assessment of the quantity and quality of data on the UK
tourism industry?
Professor Middleton: Yes, if I
may start. Thank you for inviting us to give this evidence. In
a way what Grant Hearn said about a visitor strategy that works
is going to be based on better information than we have got today,
otherwise it will not be a cost-effective strategy, and it was
also said that we do not even know the size of the industry, which
is true, depending on the way you define it, but could I briefly
highlight a couple of points. What are tourism statistics for
and why are they a priority issue? We believe it is absolutely
fundamental that you cannot manage what you cannot measure, and
at the present time we cannot measure tourism, and we will justify
that in responses if you wish, because if you are going to have
a cost-effective policy for government at all levels, national,
regional and local, and also statistics that an industry can respond
to in the way that we heard a few minutes ago, then you have to
have a basis for marketing, planning and sustainable development
and, indeed, for a return on government spending, which you can
demonstrate. The reason why tourism is so low on any agenda is
that almost any argument can be countermanded by another or somebody
says, "Well, I do not believe your statistics", and
there the argument ends.
Professor Fletcher: In terms of
the statistics that we have at present, they are highly variable,
they are quite reliable in some instances at national level, but
when you look at the industry, which is dominated by small and
medium-size enterprises, most of the business decisions are made
at local and sub-regional level, and if you take the statistics
down to those levels, then they are woefully inadequate, they
are poor, and if you compare different parts of the UK it is very
difficult to do so because the data are in different formats,
different structures, different sampling sizes and you cannot
rely on them.
Q420 Mr Sanders: How does the UK
compare with other countries and their use of statistics?
Professor Fletcher: To some extent
it is a bit of a red herring, in the sense that whether France
or Germany or Spain have got better statistics does not help us
in terms of managing the businesses here. If you look at France,
for instance, they are fairly robust at national and at regional
level, and they have the same problems that we do at local level
for making business decisions. Spain has very good statistics,
because it is recognised as a major industry there, far more so
than it is here. Canada and New Zealand are probably two of the
better examples of tourism statistics, where not only do they
have national and regional level statistics but they also have
municipal levels of statistics, which helps towns and cities plan
and develop their tourism industry in an optimal fashion. The
tourism industry has shown itself to be very resilient in spite
of natural disasters and terrorism and all the other things that
have worked against it. We do not make enough of it. There is
enormous potential there to develop the industry in a way which
is good for employment and good for England, but you need to understand
which forms of tourism attract the most economic benefits whilst
minimising environment and socio-cultural impacts which are negative.
To do that you need to be able to segment our tourism markets
to look at different types of tourists to see what they bring
in, what the net benefit is, and we just cannot do that.
Professor Middleton: Can I just
add, there is a chicken and egg here. If the political will moves
tourism up the agenda, it will force attention on the data. If
the political will is not to move tourism up the agenda, the data
will fall off the end of the agenda anyway.
Q421 Mr Sanders: The argument is
not that the data is not there.[2]
Is the argument then about agreeing the terms in which that data
should be interpreted? You give the example of Canada being good.
Is there a way in which Canada interprets that data that is different
from the UK, where it is not so good?
Professor Middleton: I will just
comment briefly. You cannot interpret if you have got a totally
inadequate base, and that is the fundamental issue.
Q422 Mr Sanders: This is very important.
It comes up time and again how the difficulty of tourism is the
fact that we do not have the data. It is not like the motor industry
where you know how many cars are produced, how many people employed,
what the value is to the local economy. You cannot do that with
tourism, but you are telling us that in Canada they are able to
do this, so what is it that they do in Canada that we do not do?
Professor Fletcher: They spend
more money collecting data and they disseminate it much better
than we do. We cannot do it because we do not have the sampling
level that would enable us to do that below a national level.
We cannot do it because we do not spend the money looking at things
like economic impact. In different parts of England, for instance
in Scotland, we do not do it in a way that allows us to plan across
the country to look at where tourism is performing well, to look
at how we can make the best of what we have got as a tourism product.
Q423 Mr Sanders: Canada, again, may
not be a bad example from the UK tourism perspective in that they
have a tourism tax, which presumably goes some way towards paying
for the data collection and analysis. What actually needs to happen
in this country? Is it simply a question of funding for the data
collection and analysis or is it actually just having tourism
up the political agenda and then expecting everything to flow
from that?
Professor Fletcher: It is both.
You need both of those things to drive it forward. If you look
at things like economic impact (and I focused on that because
that is my field), I undertook the Scottish Tourism Multiplier
Study in 1991, which is probably one of the benchmarks for studies
that have taken place in the UK on tourism. People are still using
the results of that to plan for tourism in 2007-08, and that is
just crazy. There are not consistent studies that will allow us
to build that picture across England, and that is what is missing.
The reason that there are not is that tourism does not get that
profile it needs as an industry, it still suffers this image that
it is not a serious industry, and it is a major industry.
Professor Middleton: Could we
slightly broaden that one because of a point we have made in our
submission. Increasingly people talk of the "visitor economy",
and the key thing about the visitor economy is that it is actually
wider than the traditional ideas of the tourist industry. Personally,
I would ban the word industry if I could, because I think it creates
some wrong impressions. Visitor economy means all the things that
engage people outside their normal environments of work and social
living and so forth, so it includes people staying overnight,
it includes day visits, it also includes a lot of what residents
at any destination do when they are following their normal leisure
activities, and the visitor economy at the moment is bigger than
what we know of the tourist industry, but we cannot assess it
and there is not yet an agreed definition of what it means. If
you are going to have priorities, you do start there and there
is now a mechanism, which John is involved in, which is going
to explore exactly those points.
Professor Fletcher: The English
Tourism Intelligence Panel has been set up to look at the tourism
statistics in England and to see what is needed to make them more
robust, what is needed from a user point of view, and how that
information can be (a) more timely, because most of the tourism
statistics are historical and not very helpful for going forward,
and how they can give better access to the people that need to
use them.
Q424 Chairman: The evidence that
we have received before suggested that in terms of what needs
to be done, it is actually all contained in the Allnutt Report,
which you, Professor Middleton, were involved in. Can you, first
of all, tell us how much of that report has been implemented?
Professor Middleton: Allnutt made
14 major recommendations and spent something like 12 months, it
might have been longer, in the gestation period, and he interviewed
a great many people in the industry and in government and elsewhere
to get the best view at that time—so that was work done
in 2003, published in 2004—and of those 14 recommendations
I think it is fair to say that not one of them has been fully
implemented. There have been some changes, for example to the
UKTS measurement of domestic tourism, but if you wanted to measure
domestic tourism between, say, 1995 and 2005 you cannot do it
because the definitions have changed, and there is no comparability.
We are talking of something which may be, in parts of the UK,
a quarter or more of the private sector (i.e. the non-government
economy), in other words the visitor economy, which simply is
not being measured. So it is a sad, direct answer on Allnutt,
it is still work to be done, but events have moved on and I think
there is a far greater emphasis now on local measurement and on
destination management than was recognised when Allnutt produced
his report, because there is only one page on local statistics
and that is really not enough for something which is now a fundamental
issue.
Q425 Chairman: So more would need
to be done on top of the Allnutt recommendations, but you would
say that the Allnutt recommendations are still relevant today?
Professor Middleton: I would say
they are a very good place to start and see what is relevant,
see what can be taken forward, and I hope this new intelligence
partnership will do just that, and if your Committee sees fit
to endorse that work, I think it would be very helpful.
Q426 Chairman: The DCMS told us that
the UK Tourism Survey is now much improved. Would you endorse
that?
Professor Middleton: No.
Professor Fletcher: It is much
improved over a period not very long ago when it actually went
down enormously. There was a period where they resorted to telephone
interviews where the whole system collapsed and it gave statistics
that were just not comparable with the previous statistics, so
we had this gap in information. It is now back to where it was
before that, but it still has a long way to go to be called improved.
Q427 Chairman: In terms of priorities,
given that it does not seem likely that the Government is going
to spend a huge amount of money in this area, particularly as
it is cutting the funding in tourism, what do you think is the
most important thing that needs to be done?
Professor Fletcher: There needs
to be some consistency in the way in which data is collected at
local level so that we can make use of local statistics on a broader
footing. We need to review the way in which the statistics are
being collected, we certainly need to review the way in which
they are being disseminated. We heard this morning, just before
us in terms of the research that Travelodge has been doing, most
of the businesses in tourism do not have those resources and cannot
do that sort of analysis. We need a way in which the data that
is available can be made more accessible to the people that need
it.
Professor Middleton: I would only
add to that, I think an absolute priority, recognising, as we
have in our submission, that large funds are suddenly not going
to become available in the real world, is that if focus is put
on getting agreed definitions, agreed terms which then can be
used both between the industry and all levels of government, that
in itself will make a major step forward and probably ease the
process to make the spending more cost-effective when it happens
anyway.
Q428 Chairman: The report suggested
that, whilst to implement it in full might cost some eight million
pounds or more, in actual fact, just with the expenditure of £100,000,
you could make some good progress. Would you say that is still
the case?
Professor Middleton: Any sum is
better, if it is additional, than where we are at the present
time, but if you think of £85 billion being generated, and
that is by no means the sum but we do not know what the full total
would be if it could be calculated, then the amount that is actually
spent on the management information which guides this industry
is less than .001% of that sort of turnover. I think a better
indicator might be to look at what the London Development Agency
has spent on visitor research over the last three or four years
and perhaps take that as a marker. Why have they spent it? Because
they thought they needed it, they were willing to will the resources,
and that might be a much better indicator for the level of expenditure,
at least an indicator of the direction to go once the methodology
aspects are agreed, and it would be better to start with them
because that must be the first priority.
Professor Fletcher: If you look
at the research and development that goes into most industries
and then compare that to tourism, and then if you look at the
statistics as being a fundamental part of that research and development,
it is a fraction, it is a miniscule amount that is spent on the
statistics. If you understand the industry better than you do
now, you can make it far more powerful. You will certainly get
the returns on the investment.
Q429 Chairman: But if the industry
all believe that to obtain this information is going to strengthen
their power of argument as to why tourism should be supported,
and if it is a relatively small amount money we are talking about,
why does not the industry invest in it?
Professor Middleton: I can comment
on that. The big players, and Travelodge is one of them, generate
their own data for their own marketing and planning purposes,
they can set their strategic goals, they can monitor their achievement,
so can the airlines, so can the other major hotel brands and the
big players, but, as my colleague said earlier on, the vast majority—we
do not know the figure, but it is over 100,000 businesses involved
somewhere in the visitor economy—are actually very small
players. They cannot generate their own statistics; they have
no means to do so; they need the support of government at different
levels, but I think there is a case for engaging the industry,
where it is possible, certainly in monitors of more timely statistics,
but, in the end, the big business are effectively getting their
own information from their own operations and it would be quite
a task but it should be possible to help them to share some of
that more than they do at the present time.
Professor Fletcher: Even if you
bring it up a level and look at the local authority level, each
local authority, where it spends money on adult studies to try
and get statistics so they can help their own destination, if
there was a more consistent approach certainly from the demand
side and from the supply side in terms of the accommodation stock,
then that element would already be in place and would certainly
be a more efficient way of collecting data than allowing different
local authorities to undertake adult studies.
Chairman: I am afraid we are going to
have to move on to our next session, but thank you very much.
2 Note by witness: (Professor Middleton) Our
argument is that in significant ways that data that sheds light
on the visitor economy is not there. Back
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