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24 Feb 2009 : Column 68WH—continued
Westminster Hall
Wednesday 25 February 2009
[Mr. Edward O'Hara in the Chair]
Inbound Tourism
Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—(Chris Mole.)
9.30 am
Hugh Bayley (City of York) (Lab): Let me begin by thanking Mr. Speaker for granting this important debate. Three weeks ago, in business questions, I called for an advertising campaign to promote inbound tourism to the UK and take advantage of the fall in the pound’s value against other currencies. I called for the launch of an advertising campaign in the eurozone and the United States along the lines, “Come to Britain for your holidays at 30 per cent. off last year’s price.” The Leader of the House encouraged me to apply for a Westminster Hall debate, which I did, and Mr. Speaker granted it immediately—a good thing too.
We need to debate this issue now because the recession that we are going through will be severe, but if we market the UK’s tourist attractions intelligently, tourism could do a lot to reduce its impact. In times of economic downturn, most people become nervous about their job or concerned about the future of their business, but the vast majority do not lose their job or business, and they still go on holiday. A recent VisitBritain survey on the attitudes of the British public on taking holidays in the current economic conditions has found that the majority see a holiday as a necessity, not a luxury. With the exchange rate being what it is, there are opportunities to attract more tourism from people in other countries—I hope that that will be the primary focus of the debate. Changes in the exchange rate have made Britain much cheaper to visit now than it has been in recent years. Similarly, there are also opportunities to persuade more British people to holiday in this country, because holidays in Europe will cost some 30 per cent. more this year.
The recession is not a home-grown one, like those in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ’90s, which were linked to runaway inflation or the lack of competitiveness of British businesses, particularly old-style industry. This is a truly global recession that affects people in all countries, certainly in the developed world. I spent last week, during the parliamentary recess, attending meetings of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly’s economics and security committee, which I chair, so I know that the problems that we face in the UK, and the sort of policy responses that we are developing, are mirrored in north America—in the United States and Canada—and in Europe. Our colleagues in those countries are doing similar things to us, and we all face similar problems. In a downturn, most people, even those who keep their jobs and whose income does not fall, look for ways of economising. That creates opportunities to promote the UK as a tourist destination for people in Europe and north America.
I shall go on to talk about international marketing, but first I should like to talk about my own city, because tourism is about the local tourist experience. When people remember a good holiday or day out, they think
about having attended a football match or a brilliant concert, having gone to a memorable museum, or having visited a fantastic market, book fair or shopping centre. They think about a great pub or restaurant, or a particularly good hotel. Those are the things that people remember. The tourist experience takes place on the streets of my city and in the cities, towns, villages and areas of the countryside represented by other hon. Members.
Mr. Andrew Smith (Oxford, East) (Lab): I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Tourism is certainly as important in Oxford as it is in York. Does he agree that to enhance the experiences he has mentioned, there needs to be continual investment to upgrade facilities? According to the Federation of Small Businesses, both HSBC and Barclays are operating a blanket ban on loans for investment in the hospitality industry. Does he agree that that is disgraceful and that the Minister ought to take this matter up with her colleagues and get something done about it?
Hugh Bayley: That is not only a disgrace, but extremely short-sighted, because, with investment, the hospitality sector can respond quickly to attract more customers and to grow businesses. I should think that those are exactly the sort of businesses that high street retail banks should consider investing in, because they can give a return in the current economic conditions. My right hon. Friend knows what he is talking about not only as a former Treasury Minister—indeed a former Cabinet Minister in the Treasury—but as the representative of one of the great international tourist cities of the world. I know that he is as proud of Oxford as I am of the city of York.
Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): I am not suggesting for one minute that the right hon. Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith) is entirely mistaken. However, in my central London constituency—I hope to catch your eye later, Mr. O’Hara, because tourism is important here in London—I recently had a meeting with the small business bureau of Barclays bank. Its view is that it will continue to promote businesses in hospitality and other industries in central London. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman was referring specifically to new business ideas, rather than to existing businesses. The message that I got from Barclays, at least, was that it is business as usual for its existing customers, and that it is doing its level best to promote customers who have a long-standing record with it and those who have an important part to play in the tourism trade, to which the hon. Member for City of York rightly refers.
Hugh Bayley: That is welcome news up to a point. It is very good that the banks are standing by their existing customers, but I want to make the case for increased investment in and expansion of tourism. I hope that the banks will take serious commercial decisions, as they always do, without closing off opportunities for investment in particular sectors.
Mr. Andrew Smith:
In light of what the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field) has said about different criteria being applied, which may be the case, let me give more detail about the source of my earlier comments. A banking consultant recently told a meeting of the Oxfordshire Economic Partnership
that he had been with Barclays the previous day and had been told that, whatever the Government did, Barclays had no intention of extending credit to businesses in the hospitality sector. I have heard the same about HSBC.
Hugh Bayley: I should like to underline the importance of continuing investment and of having a high-quality product, because the most important marketing opportunity for tourism business is word of mouth. If people have good experiences, they will come back, and they will tell their friends about it. Some 80 per cent. of visitors to the City of York are return visitors. People do not return to places if they have had a poor time there or if they suspect that they would have had a better time elsewhere.
York is a special city, and is one of the great global must-visit destinations. We get 4 million visitors a year, 600,000 of whom come from abroad. Those visitors spend £360 million in the local economy, which is an increase in real terms of 77 per cent. since 1993. Tourism supports more than 10,000 jobs in York and, since 1993, there has been a growth of 27 per cent in that figure. Our top inbound markets are the United States of America and Germany, as well as the Netherlands and Belgium, because in north and east Yorkshire we are particularly well served by direct ferries from the low countries.
It is no coincidence that European countries with low-cost airline flights connecting them to the UK are places in which we market UK tourism; indeed, we need to market breaks in the UK in every region in Europe that is connected to the UK by low-cost airlines. For a long time, we have considered low-cost airlines to be a way in which British people can get a cheap break abroad, but aircraft can, of course, take people in two directions. We need to concentrate on marketing in the cities and regions served by those airlines, and doing so is particularly important to tourism in the regions because, although our scheduled airlines predominantly land in London, low-cost airlines serve regional airports.
Twenty years ago, tourism was not always universally popular in York. The hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway) will know that people sent letters to the local paper in which they would moan that although the state of the streets was wonderful in the city centre and the tourist areas around High Petergate, the Shambles and the Minster, it was dreadful in residential areas. There is much less of that sort of criticism now and there is a better understanding that tourism brings jobs to York and boosts the local economy. Investment in tourism has made it more upmarket and wages have risen, in part because of the minimum wage, but also because of the commitment of employers in tourism to retaining staff whom they have trained.
Tourism is important to York not just because it brings in visitors who bring in the money that creates jobs, but because it improves the amenities that are available to local people. We in York now have better restaurants and pubs than 20 years ago. We have two theatres rather than one, two new cinemas, and more and better shops. Those improvements have been made possible in part because of the number of visitors to the city of York, but they also provide benefits to local people.
Tourism brings investment. I had a debate in Westminster Hall not long ago in which I sought to persuade the Minister’s predecessor, the Minister of State, Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr. Lammy), that we ought to receive some lottery funding to help with the cost of renovating York Minster’s great east window, which is a fabulous mediaeval work of stained glass. It is the biggest mediaeval stained glass window in the world and cost £52 to make 500 years ago—it was going to cost £42, but the craftsman completed the contract within budget and on time and got a £10 bonus. It will cost £30 million to restore, and I am pleased that the lottery provided a £12 million grant, which is one of the biggest grants that it has given in Yorkshire.
That £30 million creates local jobs for stone masons, glaziers, building contractors and scaffolders. Whenever money is invested in the tourist economy, jobs are created not only in the tourism sector, but in the local economy as a whole. Every meeting at York race course brings thousands of visitors to York. When Ascot race course was being redeveloped, York won the competition to host Royal Ascot and that earned an extra £29 million for the region from visitors who came to that event.
When the Minister is listening, I would like to put on the record my thanks to Yorkshire Forward and to the Government, who fund that organisation, for giving the promotion of tourism a particularly high priority. Yorkshire Forward recently decided to invest £30 million in the sector, which it has calculated will generate an additional £300 million increase in visitor spend in the region. My own city of York has benefited directly over the past six years from a number of tourism-related investments made by Yorkshire Forward. The tourism investment fund has paid for lighting schemes in York, interpretation of the bar walls—the city walls—and Patrice Warrener’s lighting of York Minster. Yorkshire Forward has also paid for the new visitor information centre at York station and is contributing to the cost of the new visitor information centre in Museum street in the city centre, which will open later this year. The support of Yorkshire Forward helped York to win the title of European tourism city of the year in 2007, and, of course, that organisation has supported tourism in other cities and parts of the region.
It is important to recognise that, as a tourism destination, Yorkshire as a whole is more important than the sum of its parts. York is a great city—and a great city to visit—but it is also a great base for visiting the north York moors, the Yorkshire coast, the dales or, for example, Pickering, which is represented by the hon. Member for Ryedale.
Mr. John Greenway (Ryedale) (Con): A wonderful place.
Hugh Bayley: It is a wonderful place with a wonderful steam railway that is the best in the country.
People go to York to visit the whole county of Yorkshire, not just the city. Across the county, we receive more than 1.2 million overseas visitors who spend some £6.3 billion. The tourism sector in the region supports almost 250,000 jobs. A couple of weeks ago, I met Clare Morrow, who chairs the Yorkshire tourist board, and Gary Verity, its chief executive. They have ambitious new plans to market Yorkshire as a global brand.
Yorkshire particularly benefits from being England’s biggest county and from having a clear county identity, which is more valuable than simply having a geographical identity as a region of England. There are many Yorkshire brands to promote, such as cricket, Yorkshire pudding and great local cheese—not just Wensleydale, although we should thank Wallace and Gromit for promoting one of the county’s great cheeses. We also have more independent local breweries than any other region in England.
In the past three years, the Yorkshire tourist board has set up a Yorkshire tourism network of six public-private partnerships of which Visit York is one. Its plans have won the support and confidence of Yorkshire Forward, which has increased funding for the tourism sector from about £4 million to £10 million a year. I thank Yorkshire Forward for that vote of confidence in tourism and for recognising the importance that tourism plays in the region’s economy. I also thank the Government for providing the funding for that.
Last year, the regional tourist board’s survey showed that Yorkshire is bucking the economic trend—indeed, the national trend. Although tourism numbers nationally fell at the end of last year, in Yorkshire they are still rising. There was an 11 per cent. increase in the daily spend of visitors in Yorkshire, a 49 per cent. increase in admissions to visitor attractions and a 21 per cent. increase in shopping. Some 96 per cent. of visitors to Yorkshire say that they would recommend it as a tourism destination to a friend. Some 88 per cent. said that they would visit it again within two years.
The Yorkshire tourist board is promoting the region strongly in four countries—Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy—which are important inbound destinations for Yorkshire. In Spain, it is promoting Yorkshire under the slogan, “Are you ready to sin again?” as part of a marketing promotion based on the seven deadly sins. In the past two years, pride and envy have also been used as marketing metaphors in Spain. I am not sure when we will get around to lust, but I hope that it has the effect of continuing to increase the numbers of foreign visitors coming to Yorkshire.
I shall just say a few things to the Minister before I sit down. We are doing the right things in Yorkshire to promote tourism, but the Government could do additional things to help. They have put on the record their support for a third runway at Heathrow, and, as part of the package, they announced plans for investment in a brand-new, high-speed north-south railway line to connect the airport for the capital with the north of England. For us, that is more important than the third runway, and we are keen to see it developed.
We also want additional investment in regional airports. It is wrong for the UK to base its airports policy on a single primary national airport in the south of England. More use needs to be made of regional airports, but for that to happen there needs to be investment in infrastructure that connects the regional airports to the cities and tourist destinations in the regions that they serve.
We need greater investment through the Department for Children, Schools and Families in teaching foreign languages in schools so that it is easier to welcome visitors from abroad in their own language. I would like an even greater focus on promoting the regions as part of the Olympic offer in 2012. And, in the short term, I would like to see an increase in Visit Britain’s advertising
abroad of the UK as a holiday destination. The exchange rate position gives us an opportunity to combat the recession with inbound tourism, and now really is the time for it to put everything that it can from its budget into advertising.
Pubs are going through a particularly difficult time. I have spoken with the Licensed Victuallers Association in York. With its support, I am doing a survey of the trading difficulties faced by pubs and clubs in my constituency, and I intend to write to the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform when I have received the results.
It seems that the attempt made by the previous Government to remove the stranglehold that brewers had over pubs by insisting that they divest their pubs to pub-owning companies has not really solved the problem, because it means that the pub-owning company is in a position to know what the pub landlord’s turnover is. A normal entrepreneur who rents a shop seeks, by improving marketing and the quality of their products, to increase turnover and profit, and if they do well through their entrepreneurialism they have a better income. If a pub landlord improves the food or décor of a pub, the premises landlord knows what his turnover is—that is part of the terms of the lease—and is able to adjust the terms at reviews to claw back whatever gains the pub landlord has made through his own entrepreneurial flair.
That relationship is different from the one between most premises landlords and owners of small businesses. DBERR ought to look at it and find some way of regulating the rents that people pay to ensure that the pub company gets a fair return, of course, but also that the entrepreneur who runs the pub gets a fair return. That is important for those who run pubs and for the tourism offer of a city such as York.
Richard Younger-Ross (Teignbridge) (LD): I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman’s point about the pub industry, but Members should reflect that there was an opportunity to toughen the legislation relating to big pub companies. In the last Parliament, we had a debate on the beer orders that were brought in by the Conservatives to give greater flexibility to pubs, and the response of this Government was not to toughen the legislation but to do away with it, thereby making the situation that the hon. Gentleman describes even worse.
Hugh Bayley: That was a back-handed way for the hon. Gentleman to say that he agrees that it is time for the Government to review the legislation. He said that it was time a few years ago, so certainly he would agree that it is time now, given the current economic conditions.
Hugh Bayley: Let us be positive and work together on this. Given current economic conditions, it is time to look at the regulatory regime surrounding the pub trade. That is important, and if we do not do it, we will continue to lose pubs.
This will be my final point to the Minister, because I know that other hon. Members want to contribute. I understand that she has to fight a battle with the Treasury to gain money for the tourist authorities in the UK, whether national, English, regional or local and
that there are always competing demands for cash. I put this on the record, because I do mean it when I say that I thank the Government. Because of their stewardship, regional development agencies and the policy framework under which they operate were established. The RDAs consider tourism to be an important part of the local economy and are investing more in it.
Because of the change in exchange rates we will have a window of opportunity over the next year to attract more people to the UK and, hopefully, to establish long-term patterns of more people from other countries visiting the UK, and we will miss that opportunity unless Visit England and, in particular, VisitBritain, with its external marketing responsibility, have the resources to exploit it. I hope that the Minister will take a message from me and the others who contribute to this debate to the Treasury, so that when it considers measures to stimulate the economy in difficult circumstances, it will see tourism as a sector that ought to be stimulated.
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