Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 10th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con) [V]]

There are many important aspects to cover in this debate, including sport, the creative and performing arts, events, heritage and more, as the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight), said, but in the four minutes I have available, I will talk about one: tourism.

Tourism is very important for my constituency, two thirds of which lies within the South Downs national park and which contains important heritage sites including Jane Austen’s house, the Watercress line and Gilbert White’s house, but it matters to all of us nationally, accounting for close to a tenth of the economy and jobs and being an important driver of export earnings. It is also one of the sectors that has been hit hardest by covid. I welcome all the support that has been set out by others, but now is the time to think boldly about the future and how we build back better.

We have been gifted a beautiful country, incredible cultural assets, and of course the English language, but we need to do more with them. There are multiple aspects to that work. There is a long tradition of building too much capacity at the top of the cycle and too little at the bottom. I would love to hear an update from the Government on plans for 130,000 more hotel rooms, as well as the plans for aviation capacity as markets recover. I would love to hear a national yield management plan that brings together leisure travel and travel for education purposes, business conferences and events, getting more from our cultural assets, extending the season and building shoulder periods.

Secondly, on skills and productivity, I very much welcome the focus in the sector deal on productivity and in particular the development of two T-levels—that central reform of technical and vocational education—in catering and in cultural, heritage and visitor attractions.

But today I want to talk mostly about marketing. I was so pleased to hear of the independent destination management organisation review. Many DMOs have been very hard hit by the pandemic, and those immediate problems must be addressed in this review, but I hope it goes much further. DMOs are, in the best cases, co-operating. They are also generally overlapping and sometimes actually competing with one another. We need to streamline the DMO network and the interaction of all parts of the public sector that have a role in promoting and facilitating tourism.

I very much welcome the success of the GREAT campaign, which has given a consistent message that we project across the world, but there is an issue about the volume of marketing. In a recent Select Committee meeting, we heard from VisitBritain that Australia spends more in China than we do internationally. We are outspent massively in key volume markets and we are not represented at all in some important developing markets. As we start to come out of this pandemic, source markets are going to be more competitive than ever. The term “investment” gets a bit over-used these days, but this really is about investment, with tangible, bankable and quite speedy returns to create jobs and support building back better. I therefore urge the Government to think further and think bigger about how they can invest in the growth of this powerhouse sector.