Tourism: Covid-19

Paul Howell Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Paul Howell (Sedgefield) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) for securing this debate. The hon. Member for Angus (Dave Doogan) will be pleased to know that I am going to speak on the same theme. What is tourism? The word “tour” comes from the Old French, meaning “round” or “circuit”. In essence, to tour means to complete a round trip—to visit and then return. Modern tourism, with the traveller in pursuit of recreation, naturally involves a round trip. A round trip needs transport, and transport needs infrastructure and vehicles.

County Durham and Sedgefield include the birthplace of public transport itself, in the form of the first passenger railway in the world. Locomotion No. 1 is the first and oldest passenger train in the world, and it still rightfully resides next to me in Darlington. With County Durham giving birth to rail travel, dare I say that we also gave birth to the possibility of widespread tourism and the great British tradition of the staycation? In the current climate, I encourage all to revisit this tradition and invite you to come and enjoy the wealth of what Sedgefield and County Durham have to offer, including preparations for the bicentenary of the Darlington to Stockton railway, which was the first passenger railway in the world, as I said.

My constituents also like to travel elsewhere and need the means to do that. We need to make a concerted effort to retain and enhance our travel infrastructure and to allow the industry to recover and grow. We need to keep up the momentum that covid has threatened to slow. On this topic, I must mention Ferryhill station, the two words I probably mention most in the Chamber. Rebuilding stations such as Ferryhill will support the sector and, following covid-19, provide much needed momentum for the future, but that is in the medium term.

In the short term, I would like to highlight the problems of coach travel, one of the more immediate fixes that the tourist industry needs. Ninety-eight per cent. of coaches that would normally be on the road this summer were mothballed due to a lack of demand. One coach operator, which carries 40,000 passengers, carried 200. Mr Neville Jones of J&C Coaches, a family-run business in Newton Aycliffe in my constituency, is illustrative of so many coach companies across Britain. It has also suffered because of the closed schools—it provides the same service to them. Coach operators are the glue that holds the tourist industry together. They are vital to the local, national and international tourist markets. They get us to Durham, to Devon, to cruises, to flights—and even to Angus.

The Confederation of Passenger Transport, the trade association for coaches, has made recommendations to potentially buffer the effect on the sector, and I encourage Government action in consideration of the following: extending finance holidays to ensure that no coaches are repossessed; grouping the coach travel sector with the leisure sector to give it better support; and providing protection to those families whose livelihoods rely on coach travel. There needs to be a moratorium on lenders seeking to repossess family homes.

Although I have talked specifically about coach travel in Sedgefield, I am sure that we can agree that it is important to the whole country. Coaches need to be supported to help British tourism. Without coaches, tourism is devastated.