Business of the House

Kris Hopkins Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

I have to say to the right hon. Gentleman that if we had not implemented the Wright Committee’s recommendations, he might well have been one of the first to criticise us for going back on a clear election commitment. The fact of the matter is that the Government have given some of the power and patronage they used to have away. We have given it to the Backbench Business Committee, which gets roughly one day a week, and it is up to that Committee to decide what it does with that time. One set of debates that was handed over to that Committee, along with the defence debates, was the pre-European Council debates. The Committee has chosen not to have such a debate. That is a consequence of setting up the Backbench Business Committee and transferring the days to it.

[Kris Hopkins (Keighley) (Con)]

The Leader of the House may be aware that Welcome to Yorkshire, the official tourism agency for Yorkshire, is due to lose its public funding in April 2012. May we have an urgent statement from the Minister for Tourism and Heritage, my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose), setting out what the Government might do to bridge this funding gap in the next financial year, in order to protect the Yorkshire tourism industry from potentially catastrophic circumstances?

[Sir George Young]

As my hon. Friend will have discovered, other Members in the House think that their own county deserves generous support on funding tourism. Yorkshire was the county that received more cash than any other area of the country, and it is having to go through the same process as everyone else in adjusting to the new regime. It has an advantage, in that Yorkshire received £10 million of regional development agency funding for the financial year 2011-12, because of a three-year agreement between Welcome to Yorkshire and Yorkshire Forward, which other regions did not get. I can say to him only that there may be other sources of funding—the regional growth fund, the European regional development fund and the rural development programme for England—to which he may turn for assistance.