Yorkshire (Tour de France)

Stuart Andrew Excerpts

Tuesday 18th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Gray. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) for securing the debate and for the work that he and others have done on the bid. I pay tribute, too, to Welcome to Yorkshire, which I believe is the only tourism body in the UK that receives no Government funding. It does a fantastic job for our county and region, promoting them both within the UK and internationally. We have heard in the past few minutes how successfully it has done that.

I want to echo my colleagues’ call for the Government to get behind this race now, because potentially it will have a dramatic impact on the local economy. We certainly need that now. I look forward to welcoming the race, wherever it goes in Yorkshire. However, it would be wrong of me not to extol the virtues of the beautiful East Riding of Yorkshire—and, indeed, north Lincolnshire, as I have, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) said, a foot in both camps. I live, however, in the East Riding of Yorkshire—not that I favour either, of course. We would love a stage of the race to come to the East Riding of Yorkshire, and, indeed, within a few minutes of the announcement, I was e-mailed by people asking whether we could get the race to our area. Councillors John Barrett and Caroline Fox, who represent the Snaith, Airmyn, Rawcliffe and Marshland ward, in my constituency, put to me a detailed plan of how the route could come from Selby via the A19, the A645 or the A1041 down into Snaith.

[Stuart Andrew (Pudsey) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that if the riders went in that direction they would miss the opportunity to come to the Pudsey constituency? Despite the danger of turning the event into the Tour de Yorkshire, I must point out that they would miss the opportunity of seeing the home of real Yorkshire fish and chips, which was of course Harry Ramsden’s based in Guiseley—now run excellently by Wetherby Whaler.

[Andrew Percy]

I think, as we say in Parliament, my hon. Friend has made his point.

As I was saying, I received a detailed proposal about how, coming from Selby, the race could come through Snaith into Goole. We had a fantastic day when the Olympic torch came to Goole. As my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon mentioned, the crowds in Yorkshire were twice the size of those in the rest of the country. On the morning that we welcomed the torch to Goole, I could not believe how many people had come to support the event. The race could come down and across into the beauties of the rest of the East Riding and over the wolds. My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), who cannot be here today because he is chairing the Select Committee on Education, supports that idea. The route could then go across the Humber bridge, which is free to cycles—and £1.50 for cars. It used to be £3, but the Government provided the cash to halve that, following a strong campaign by me and my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes. Then it could go across and round Scunthorpe, and back into south Yorkshire—although my hon. Friend did a wonderful job of trying to steal the entire race for Lincolnshire.

Those are a couple of proposals, but as other hon. Members have said, wherever the route goes in our region, the race will be well supported and a huge success. If it does not come to my constituency or our area, we will get behind it just the same. When we put the press releases out for the petition, several residents contacted me to say they would sign up and get behind the cause. We are all on the same page in our region on the matter. It is a fantastic region and everyone has said how beautiful it is; I do not need to repeat that. I thought that we were going to have a gradient argument earlier, about which area had the biggest. Sadly, I cannot win on gradients, representing as I do the former marshland of Brigg and Goole, but we have a mix of wide open spaces, the coastline, rolling hills and the steep hills of the Pennines. We have got all we need to make the event successful.

I congratulate everyone behind the bid on their work. It is staggering in many ways that it was done by volunteers, and I hope we get Government support. Having made a bid and a pitch for my own patch to be part of the event, I hope that, if not the Tour de France—perhaps it should be the Tour to t’France if it is coming to Yorkshire—future events that we would hope to attract to our region could come to the Brigg and Goole constituency.

I look forward to hearing how the Minister will get behind the event and get full Government support, with perhaps even a bit of cash as well. Being Yorkshire folk, we are a bit tight with our own money, so we would like some from the Government. The event will be fantastic for our region—I think we all agree that its impact on our economy will be pretty big—and I again pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon for securing the debate.