Tourism

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, after nearly 48 years in this House, I wonder why I feel rather nervous today. I think that it is something to do with the word “maiden” or the fact that there are six maiden speakers in a small debate. When you come to this place, often you have many friends who try to advise you. One of these was the ninth Baron Hawke, who came from a great cricketing family and was very kind to me. He was a Lord in Waiting and told me where to sit. To begin with, I did not know where to sit; I sat on the Barons’ Bench, which is the Back Bench over there, because that is what it said in the book. I did not know that when the Government changed you sat on the opposite side of the Chamber. I was only 25. I had no concept that the Liberals would so change sides. This idea of maidens made me think, because when you hear six really good maiden speeches you realise that adding to this House provides quality from time to time. Lord Hawke had six daughters and then, being descended from a great cricketing family, he had a seventh. When asked how he felt, he said, “At least I’ve got a maiden over”. Sandwiched between these maiden speakers, I feel rather like some sort of worn-out grilse with two fresh run salmon on either side.

I should declare an interest in that I have spent much of my life as a business tourist. I like to go to places that I want to go to. I have spoken before on the subject of tourism. I declare first and foremost that I worked for a while with the Midland Bank group. We owned Thomas Cook, the first tour operator. I hate “ism” words. I do not like tourism, fundamentalism or any form of “ism”. The tour was the original thing that Thomas Cook did. He set up a train that went from Leicester to Loughborough. Then another member of the family, Miss Jemima, set up the river boats on the Nile.

I will concentrate today on infrastructure. I went out to see why Thomas Cook was not doing very well on the Nile. I came back to my hotel one night and felt really ill. I realised that I had that classic disease known as gippy tummy, a cousin of Delhi belly. I wondered what the problem was and was told that it was the sewers. I went off and asked if we could rebuild the sewers. The noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, will understand this, because he is a specialist in the doubtful underground tunnelling machinery that I have used in my life. I came back and suggested that we should redo the sewers of Cairo. Before long, I was rather proud to tell my colleagues that I had won a contract to rebuild the sewers, because tourism was fading and it was disease that was killing it. Then in the Times—this was nothing to do with my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft, whom I had not met at the time—I saw the headline, “UK Cashes in on His Lordship’s Stomach”. I was caught. What happened was that if you get the infrastructure right, suddenly things change. I use Egypt as a simple example. Its tourism industry is booming because there is no disease.

One of our problems in the United Kingdom may well be the lack of necessary infrastructure. I declare another interest. For six years I chaired the Greater London and South East Council for Sport and Recreation, responsible for planning sport and recreation in Greater London, Surrey, Sussex and Kent, so help me God. We had a team of 152. The Government thought that the more people one brought together to do things, the better. We had quite a lot of money to spend. However, I realised that we had something like 85 active sports. Now, if you want the British to do something, the best thing that you can do is to get them to enjoy it. We did not worry about trying to stop ILEA closing down playing fields for children. We set out to create fun. We thought that it might be a good idea to create enjoyment on the Thames. To us, it seemed a place that you could attract people to. It was slightly polluted. Noble Lords may remember Tufton Beamish, the great Member of the other place, who offered a 100 guinea prize for the first person to catch a salmon in the Thames. All of us tried. We bought salmon in shops and tied them to a bit of string to see if we could win the prize. Now, suddenly, the Thames is beginning to clean up. Docklands was a dead place. Those of us who went down to help to regenerate Docklands would go past Limehouse Cut every day. We knew that little planning shop in Limehouse, where suddenly politics was going to change.

I turn now to the infrastructure of tourism and the points that have been made so far. In order to attract people to the United Kingdom, we have to make it easy and economic to get here. However, we must not look solely at tourism, because we are looking to attract people to invest and build businesses here. I remember working with Peter Walker and the Welsh Development Agency. We created a wonderful network of new technology that went all the way down to Hereford, the Wye valley and beyond. It was the same with Silicon Glen in Glasgow and Scotland.

Attracting people here is important. It is an attractive place to be. When we were trying to get the Japanese firm Nissan to come here, the most important thing was whether they could be members of a golf club. We even put in a proposal for the creation of a new golf club. If one wants to attract tourists, one should think about the facilities and the infrastructure.

It is pretty pathetic that we had to shut our airports, that we could not keep them open this winter and that we were putting people off coming here. It is also disturbing that, as has been pointed out, the costs of coming to the United Kingdom from parts far away are so high. We have forgotten that there is in this world a kind of heritage. Every Commonwealth country has a heritage relationship with us. We know that when the Australians come they flood into Earls Court, kangaroo country. Others will go to different parts of England. It is those relationships that we need to build on, to make this place an attractive place to come to, a place where people want to work. We can look at the tourism—if we could use that word without the “ism”, I would prefer it—of teaching people the language; we could look at schools, games and sports. There is the boom that may take place as we look towards not only the Olympics but Her Majesty’s Jubilee year. Few of us will forget the time of the last Jubilee, when the whole of the Mall was crowded with the most amazingly mixed-culture group of people that you have ever seen, or the spirit of good will that was in the air.

I have envied the noble Lord, Lord Marks, for a long time. I had to take professional risks in the construction industry when we did not have the benefit of his advice. As he knows, he is in one of the oldest buildings in the world, which may well not conform to some of the high standards that he has been used to in his professional career. I regret that we have lost the Law Lords. We had 107 people to whom we could turn for free advice, but the addition of the noble Lord, Lord Marks, leads me to believe that, as money may not change hands in your Lordships’ House, he will be freely available to be consulted by your Lordships on everything that we can think of. I am grateful to him for what he said today. I am really impressed by my noble friend, whose father I knew well, for having assembled such a remarkable team.