Tourism: UK Economy

Baroness Rawlings Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lee of Trafford]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In doing so, I declare an interest as chairman of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

Tourism has huge potential for growth. It supports 1.5 million jobs with visitor spend of nearly £90 billion each year. Deloitte estimates a direct and indirect value to the UK economy of £115 billion and suggests that tourism could be the fourth fastest growing sector over the next 10 years, indirectly and directly supporting a total of nearly 3 million jobs by 2020.

[Lord Lee of Trafford]

I thank my noble friend for her Answer and welcome her to her first tourism Question. In a speech recently the Prime Minister said:

“Tourism presents a huge economic opportunity. Not just bringing business to Britain but right across Britain driving growth in the regions and helping to deliver the rebalancing of our national economy that is so desperately needed”.

That is all very laudable, but does my noble friend realise that tourism faces a double whammy? First, there is a 34 per cent reduction in the funding to our national tourist board, VisitBritain, and then—this has been referred to earlier—the abolition of the regional development agencies, which significantly supported many tourism projects in the regions, often on a match funding basis, and also supported the destination management organisations? There is no way that local enterprise partnerships will have the coverage or the resource to replicate this.