Hadrian’s Wall

Debate between Philip Hollobone and John Penrose

Wednesday 22nd June 2011 Westminster Hall

[John Penrose]

I appreciate what my hon. Friend is saying; he gave a capable exposition of his idea. However, the stumbling block for me is simply this: if we consider other destination management organisations—local tourism bodies of one kind or another—he is absolutely right to say that Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd is unusual in that the collection of tourism assets with which it is dealing happen to be stretched out in a long, thin line that cuts through a variety of different villages, towns, steadings and local authorities.

Apart from that geographical oddity, it is entirely normal that Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd has to interact with a breadth and variety of different types of organisation. There are different owners—public, private and in some cases third sector—and people from the National Trust as well. Any destination management organisation must deal with a variety of local tourism companies. We could be talking about destination management organisations in York, in my constituency of Weston-super-Mare or in Bristol—it does not matter where someone is in the country; they could be in the Cotswolds or anywhere else. Such organisations have to deal with everything from local hotels to local restaurants, attraction owners and everything else in between, plus local councillors and so on. They are all faced with that precise mixture of stakeholders and interests to match up.

The interesting thing is that there is no instance of such organisations expecting to own the assets that they are helping to promote and manage. In fact, their role is subtly different. They are not quite a trade association, but they are an organisation that helps to promote a particular area. The attraction owners, whether they are private, public or third sector, are key members of that organisation. They come in a variety of different legal wrappers—partnerships, companies limited by guarantee or whatever—but in each case, the various different stakeholders are key members of that organisation and if it is well run, they are the people who dictate terms and set the agenda for what the organisation is trying to do.

It is therefore crucial that although the organisation does not have to own the assets that it is working with, it must have an extremely close and effective relationship with the people whom it is seeking to represent. I am talking about a different kind of relationship, which is a bit more flexible. I would suggest anyway—my hon. Friend was right to point this out—that going down the route of trying to transfer ownership is not necessary, because many other examples of a membership model are being pursued successfully throughout the rest of the country. He was also right to say that it would be an extremely long and slow process.

In the case of private sector owners—from what I can see, some 90% of the wall is in private ownership of one kind or another—I suspect that, persuasive, effective and passionate as my hon. Friend is, he would have to go some in order to persuade most of them to give over voluntarily property that may have been in their family for generations. They may have purchased it recently, but either way, it is private property. I am a huge fan of the Government’s philanthropy agenda, but I suspect that that would be philanthropy on a different scale and that, if my hon. Friend managed to do it, he would go down in history as one of the greatest philanthropic persuaders this country has ever seen.

I understand where my hon. Friend is coming from and why he is making that suggestion. What I would suggest in return is that I think there is an alternative way, which may be a little quicker and simpler, of achieving the goals that he and I both share, and that is to make sure that we have some kind of membership-related approach, whatever kind of legal wrapper it may come in. If we can get to that position—I understand that that is where Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd is trying to move—the company will be able to do precisely the kinds of things that my hon. Friend is talking about and attempt to market and promote the entire wall from one coast to the other, and put across and sell the huge benefits that he has rightly and passionately outlined in his speech. That is precisely what needs to be done and, I think, what everybody wants to see happen.

The huge advantage that Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd has is that, after many years of trying, it is managing to stitch together an incredibly disparate range of people, simply because of this geographical oddity. The asset, associated companies, attractions and issues that it is trying to deal with stretch from one coast of the country to another. I do not know how many different local authority areas it goes through, but it is a very large number, and it has proven extremely difficult to co-ordinate it in the past. It has started to do it, but as my hon. Friend rightly points out, it has to make this transition.

My hon. Friend has asked about other kinds of funding sources. It will be partly up to local tourism companies and local attraction owners, be they public, private or third sector, to say whether it is in their commercial interest to be part of a collective marketing scheme. I am not suggesting that this should be a piece of corporate philanthropy, but that it should be a natural part of everybody’s corporate marketing plan to say, “If we contribute to a collective marketing plan for Hadrian’s Wall as a whole, it will help my business and my neighbour’s business as well.” This is, therefore, a piece of self-interest as well as collective action, and I think it will be tremendously positive.

It is also worth saying that local authorities may conclude, as is happening in many other parts of the country, that tourism is such an important part of the local economy—my hon. Friend rightly pointed out that it is very important in Carlisle and Cumbria as a whole—that they want to contribute in some way to some of these collective marketing operations through council tax payers’ money. That is happening, as I have said, in many other parts of the country. It depends on the importance of tourism in the local economy, but as my hon. Friend has pointed out, that is a very easy point to make in his part of the world, because it is such a vital part of local job creation. I encourage him to speak to his local council and fellow MPs in the area, to see whether or not they feel that the local authority’s contribution reflects the importance of this crucial part of the economy to local jobs and employment.

I think that we are speaking a similar language in terms of what we want to achieve and that everybody agrees about the importance of Hadrian’s Wall to the nation’s heritage, the world’s heritage and the local tourism industry. I think that we have slightly different recipes for how the issue might be addressed, but a great deal more can be done and I suspect that my hon. Friend and I will look to work with the local authority and local businesses to ensure that that happens.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

I congratulate and thank the hon. Members for Carlisle (John Stevenson) and for Hendon (Mr Offord) and the Minister for their participation in a most interesting and informative debate.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Philip Hollobone and John Penrose

Thursday 16th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

15. What efficiencies in the administration of his Department he plans to make in the next 12 months.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport (John Penrose)]

Our aim is to reduce the Department’s administrative spend by 50% during the life of this Parliament. We have already reduced the pay bill by £3 million from 2010-11 through a voluntary redundancy scheme, and a programme to deliver further savings is in place.

[Mr Hollobone]

What methods are being engaged to expose yet further efficiencies that have not already been identified?

[John Penrose]

We continually keep everything under review, as would be expected. We have identified a number of particular points that I hope will satisfy my hon. Friend, including Ministers not using the Government car service, which will save about £250,000 a year, reducing hospitality expenditure by about £60,000 a year, and cutting spend on travel by about £30,000 a year. We will continue to scrutinise very carefully to find other such examples.

Holiday Accommodation

Debate between Philip Hollobone and John Penrose

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Westminster Hall

[John Penrose]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point, and I suppose the most reassuring response I can give is that the good news is that the tourism industry, both collectively and individually, is not stupid and understands the importance of common standards. He will understand that all the different existing schemes—I mentioned the AA scheme and the very local example that I saw in the New Forest—take notice of, and in many cases contribute to, a common set of standards, so there is a direct read-across between, for example, the AA scheme and others. That is clearly to the advantage of the entire tourism industry. Handing the English scheme back to the industry is very unlikely to endanger that, because it is clearly to its commercial advantage. I hope that that reassures the hon. Gentleman.

In the couple of minutes I have left, I shall move on to the hon. Gentleman’s point about some of the alternatives. There was a long and impassioned section in the middle of his speech about the evils of TripAdvisor and all the things it gets wrong. For the sake of clarity, I point out that this Department and this Government do not hold a brief for TripAdvisor or anyone else like that at all. It would be entirely wrong of us to pretend that we did, or even to do so. TripAdvisor is the most commonly used such website in this country. It is used by people who are not stupid and who find what it says helpful—although I think many of them take what it says with a pinch of salt, because some of the reviews need to be viewed with a careful eye, for the reasons the hon. Gentleman laid out. However, there are plenty of alternatives, and many of those have very tight—and perhaps in some people’s view, tighter—quality controls on the kinds of postings they allow. For example, many of them allow postings to be made only by people who have genuinely visited and stayed the night in the accommodation in question. Therefore, postings are made only by customers. They cannot be made by the people running the bed and breakfast down the road, who feel like posting something nasty even though they have not stayed in the accommodation. There are different ways of dealing with the quality control angle.

Websites of any kind that provide customer reviews live or die by the trust the British public place in those ratings. If someone visits such a site and thinks it is being spiked or generally misused, they are much less likely to go back to it. Therefore, there is a huge reputational risk for any websites that allow low-quality reviews to become too large a proportion of the total. For example, if, in the hon. Gentleman’s view, TripAdvisor is getting it wrong too often and others are doing a better job, we would logically expect people to transfer their affections very quickly, given the rate at which things move in the digital world, from that website to another one. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that such websites are not perfect, and there are concerns about them, but there is an eminently sensible self-correcting mechanism whereby people can vote with their feet—or, in this case, with their mouse.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

After that five-star debate, we move to a debate on funding for technology innovation in wave power.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Philip Hollobone and John Penrose

Monday 25th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[John Penrose]

I think that that last comment was extraordinarily rich, coming from a member of a party that, within living memory, was going on about cool Britannia and that completely failed to fund heritage in the way that it should have been funded over the past 10 or 15 years. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will know that the entire heritage sector feels that it has been undervalued and underfunded for a very long time, in stark contrast to what is now happening under the new Government. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has pointed out, if we take into account the changes in the lottery, we can see that the total cut to heritage funding is minus 4%, and that is all.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

4. If he will discuss with the Chancellor of the Exchequer the merits of extending the listed places of worship grant scheme beyond 2011.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport (John Penrose)]

I am sure that my hon. Friend will remember that the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced in his comprehensive spending review statement last week that the listed places of worship grant scheme is to continue. I am delighted, as I am sure all hon. Members are, that that is the case. We have had to make some small reductions, and it will now go back to its pre-2006 status, but other than that, it will continue. I hope that my hon. Friend and others will join me in praising that decision.

[Mr Hollobone]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister on doing his bit to save the scheme, which many of my constituents were worried was going to be cut altogether. Will he expand on what “pre-2006” actually means for those churches applying for funds?

[John Penrose]

I would be delighted to. Basically, it means that local community groups raising money to repair the fabric of their church will continue effectively to be able to claim grants equivalent to the value of the VAT on the works that are done. The only difference will be that some categories of work—primarily, professional fees, bells, organs and the like—will be excluded in the way they were before 2006, but everything else will continue to be claimable.