By Sir Chris Bryant
I’m delighted to be the tourism minister. Mark Twain wrote in 1904 that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” I’m not actually sure about that. Most people are probably looking for something rather less highfalutin than having their prejudices and bigotries removed. A fortnight in the sun perhaps. A chance to chill out. But I have to confess I owe a great deal to travel. One of my father’s first jobs was working in a hotel in Salou on the Costa Brava in the 1950s – which is where he met my mother, when she was, as a BBC makeup artist, on holiday. So, quite literally, I reckon I owe my existence to the tourism industry.
That’s just one of the many reasons that I am delighted to be the tourism minister. And I can already state that the tourism industry has broadened my mind. Just a day at the World Travel Market was enough to impress upon me the breadth and depth of this industry in the UK and around the world, and how much the tourism industry is respected. I know the transformational effect it can have on people’s lives. I’m passionate about how tourism supports other sectors in my portfolio and vice versa. People may come here for the heritage but then stay to immerse themselves in our creative industries. Or they might come here expressly for a concert, a gig or a show. Or to see a major art exhibition. Tourism can also promote opportunity for people – give them a chance to get on in life and make something for themselves. And it can create or rebuild a sense of pride in a place.
Last week, I responded to two debates in parliament on the respective merits of Bedfordshire and Northumberland for the tourism industry. Local MPs queued up to list their local tourist attractions including castles, stately homes, canals, seaside resorts, museums and natural beauty spots. And we all know how important our own local attractions are to our local identity. Equally importantly, tourism is a key driver of economic growth, not only in the traditional hotspots but across the whole of the UK. The UK has always been a great destination for tourism. Canterbury was one of the greatest attractions for pilgrims who wanted to visit the site of the murder of Thomas Becket in the Middle Ages, as was the tomb of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. As we know from the poet Chaucer, pilgrims were not necessarily saints, but they certainly had money to spend.
Modern pilgrimages include King’s Cross station for Harry Potter’s Platform 9¾, or Highclere Castle – the setting for Downton Abbey, or Framlingham Castle for Ed Sheeran’s Castle on the Hill, or Paddington for… Paddington. We need to make far more of these connections. Of course we want to boast of our great heritage. But we can’t rest on our laurels. Because the danger is that foreign visitors who have the world to choose from could all too easily say: “The UK never changes. It’ll still be there next year. Let’s go somewhere else this time.” But we want people to think the UK’s the place to go this year, today, now. And when they get here we want them to have such a fabulous time that they come again and again.
However, we have to be honest about the challenges we face. Covid and Brexit have had significant effects on the sector, some of them predictable and some of them completely unpredictable. Staffing and skills shortages make growth a challenge. And inbound tourism is still not back at 2019 levels. Lots of us make day trips but don’t stay the night either because finances are tight or because they just can’t find the right kind of accommodation. Equally worrying is the fact that UK holidaymakers spend more overseas than at home. I know from speaking to the sector that the costs of running a business remain high and have risen sharply in recent years – especially when it comes to staffing and materials.
I am proud that we managed to prevent the cliff edge on business rates relief that people had feared was coming in April by introducing the 40 percent rate in the Budget, but I recognise that costs are still high, margins are phenomenally tight and many are concerned about National Insurance Contributions. I am also conscious that skills and vacancies remain a challenge and that tourism jobs are sometimes viewed as something you have to do rather than a career you can have pride in. I want to support balanced careers and good wages to attract talent into the sector – and I will say more about that later on. It will take time to solve some of those issues. But that is no reason to shy away from having ambition for the sector.
But here’s the thing. Our new government is determined to grow the UK economy. It’s our central mission. Everything else depends on it. So we must bring tourism back to the top table. After all, few sectors can compete with it. Listen to this: the global travel and tourism sector represented more than 9 percent of the world’s economy in 2023, and is forecast to grow 5.5 percent year on year for the next decade. I want the UK to be far more ambitious for growth. That means we in government need to do everything in our power to help the tourism industry grow and the industry, working with us, needs to do far more to attract overseas and domestic visitors with visits and holidays that are really best in class for value-for-money, for high-quality service, for end-to-end and wall-to wall-enjoyment. I am passionate about making the UK a top visitor destination that truly rivals our European counterparts.
We are one of the most visited countries in the world – I want us to stay that way. We had 41 million visitors before the pandemic, 38 million last year – I want to reach 50 million by 2030. But we can only do that if we work together. We need a true partnership between the government and the sector to deliver such growth. Too many of my predecessors have seen tourism as a nice thing to have and not a priority. I don’t. I see it as an essential part of our economy, worth £74 billion and 4 percent of GVA with a huge potential for growth. We are good at this in the UK and can be even better if we work together. I want us to have a holistic approach to tourism where we look at every element from a visitor’s arrival at the airport to buying a ticket for a music gig or finding a restaurant or catching a train to say York or Newcastle.
Two points here. First, I defy anyone arriving at Gatwick Airport to work out which is the right train to catch to get swiftly to central London. It’s impossible. I’ve tried many times. Let alone do it with the right ticket before the train leaves the platform. Let’s get that sorted, so that people’s first experience of the UK isn’t a sense of chaotic confusion.
And secondly, why on earth is it so difficult to get to Stratford upon Avon? Shakespeare is one of our icons. His birthplace and Anne Hathaway’s house are magnets for tourists, as is the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Yet the train service to Stratford is shockingly terrible. That’s something we need to put right. There’s a specific reason why the UK should make far more of tourism. We have a lot to offer.
We are one of only two countries in the world who are net exporters of music and our bands are known around the world. I recently met the French Tourism Minister at the World Travel Market, who told me that her favourite band is The Cure and she really wanted to see them live in the UK. Is there any way I could help?
My Italian counterpart wanted tickets for Oasis and when I spoke to my Saudi counterpart he was looking forward to a classical concert at the Wigmore Hall. Of course, lots of people come to Liverpool specifically to see the home of the Beatles or to sample some of the great new music coming out of the city. But the same is true of our film and TV sets. We also do theatre better than anyone. The variety of what’s on offer every single night is extraordinary. There’s something for every taste. In London this month you can see David Tennant and Cush Jumbo in Macbeth, Sigourney Weaver in The Tempest, or John Simm in A Christmas Carol. Or at least two dozen musicals, if not more.
It’s not just London. Reverberation is at the Bristol Old Vic and The Little Mermaid is coming. Leeds has & Juliet. Manchester has Wicked and Tina. And often it’s much better value here in the UK than on Broadway or anywhere else in the world.
The same is true of our phenomenal museums and galleries. Only in the UK can you see a collection that includes works by Titian, Raphael, Monet, Van Gogh and Goya entirely for free. Or see the greatest collection of major ancient Roman, Assyrian and Egyptian artefacts entirely for free at the British Museum. And then there’s the stately homes. Blenheim, Chatsworth, Petworth, Burleigh. And the castles, varying from Alnwick to Caerphilly, the one dripping in antiquities, the other shrouded in mist. We have more stately homes per square mile than any other country in the world.
Which is to say nothing of the Lake District, the Cairngorms or the Jurassic Coastline. And let’s talk about food. Some of the world’s greatest chefs are British. British wines are winning prizes. But all too often we are a bit hesitant about our culinary offer.
But answer me this. What other country in the world has the variety of puddings that we do? Sticky toffee pudding, Eton mess, treacle tart, Sussex pond pudding, Eve’s pudding, rhubarb crumble, Queen of puddings, summer pudding, Bakewell tart, jam roly-poly and, of course, spotted dick. I mean, the USA hasn’t even discovered that apple pie is ten times better with the introduction of the humble blackberry.
And I would gently suggest that British cheeses beat every other country in the world including the French.
The truth is that when it comes to tourism, we’ve got it all – and we’ve got it now. So my ambition is to get far more people to visit us and to spend more when they’re here. We can only do that if we enable or encourage visitors beyond London and the South East. We all know that London is great – one of the best cities in the world. If not the greatest city, as recently voted for the tenth year in a row. But too many visitors only go to London – in fact when asked by VisitBritain, 57 percent of visitors could not imagine what there was in the UK outside of London. Some might make it to Oxford or Bath, maybe Edinburgh.
I want Manchester to rival LA. Both cities have incredible sports, media and creative sectors, and although the weather might be slightly more temperate in Los Angeles, Manchester definitely saw the best of David Beckham. I want Newcastle to be a place where you can see world-class art, dine in a top restaurant, and explore the beautiful surrounding countryside of Northumberland. We need to complement London and Edinburgh with stronger regional destinations – where people visit in their own right and stay and spend money because they know about the full range of attractions at those destinations. Yes, the heritage, but also the arts, the music, the pubs and the restaurants.
I made this point in a debate last week but I will say it again: Framlingham Castle is now more famous for being the ‘Castle on the Hill’ in the Ed Sheeran song than it is for being the place that Queen Mary discovered she was about to be queen. I would argue less aspic, more spice. The Local Visitor Economy Partnerships have been doing some great work and I’d like to roll them out further. We can build on the Destination Development Pilots too. But we also need to make sure local people feel the benefits of tourism too, which is why we will be implementing a registration scheme for short-term lets as soon as possible, so that at least we know what is out there, and on how we could use data from the scheme to best effect to try to get the benefits of tourism without the downsides.
We also need to up our skills and career structure in tourism and hospitality. We need to become a nation that really values its hospitality industry, that respects those who work in it and who boast of it around the world. Because for far too long we have thought of a job serving in a bar or restaurant or working in a hotel as a bit of a dead end – the kind of job you do when you’re just filling in.
Other countries see this completely differently. They see a career in hospitality as fulfilling and immensely respectable. They have colleges, academies and universities that are devoted to the industry. They aspire to be the best in the world. That’s what I want us to do.
That requires a mindset change. We have to enable the industry to work with the government to develop more career pathways. I want tourism to be more prominent in the Industrial Strategy that we are developing. We also have to reform the apprenticeship levy so that it works for small businesses and the creative industries in general. We are determined to do that. I want to work with the new organisation Skills England to address skills and vacancy challenges and change perceptions of tourism careers. I want us to showcase opportunities for young people, part-time workers, and those who are economically inactive.
For example, you might remember the story of Maryna, a single mother who fled the war in Ukraine and found a job working in an Ibis hotel in Edinburgh, all because of an industry training programme. Or another example is an excellent project that DWP are doing in Plymouth, working with the Local Visitor Economy Partnership to match the economically inactive with the tourism sector, with excellent results for both sides. I am proud of these successes in the sector but completely acknowledge more work needs to be done to make tourism a respected, lifelong career. As I said earlier, lots of Britons go abroad for their holiday. It’s great that people are able to immerse themselves in the culture and heritage of other countries, but not only that, the outbound sector is worth a lot to our economy here in the UK.
According to ABTA, the outbound industry has a direct contribution of £15.9 billion to the UK economy annually, and outbound tourism directly sustains 221,000 jobs in the UK. My predecessors perhaps often overlooked outbound tourism, and the end-to-end experience for travellers has suffered a bit in recent years. Brexit has meant longer waiting times for UK nationals at passport queues. There are some further challenges on the horizon with the rollout of the EU’s Entry-Exit system, their new electronic travel authorisation system ETIAS, and the ongoing problems we have in accessing eGates in overseas airports.
I want to do something about that, as well as recognising the considerable footprint UK nationals leave on certain destinations. I want to work hand in glove with my European counterparts to make things work more smoothly, and to support them in managing the number of tourists they get. It is early days in the new government, but I am particularly happy that we have secured a permanent business rates relief at 40 percent for many businesses in the tourism sector.
We are also working at pace on introducing a registration scheme for short-term lets, crucial for high-quality stays across the country but also to flexibly meet increased demand for accommodation during events like the Commonwealth Games. We will continue to support business events, a crucial part of the sector – less seasonal than leisure travellers and more dispersed outside London and the South East. That too contributed £33.6 billion in 2023 to the UK economy, with visitors spending more than double per night compared to leisure tourists. And the North East Destination Development Partnership aims to double the regional visitor economy through regenerative tourism. I want to see this replicated across the whole of the UK.
The government cannot do this alone. We need collaboration to make this vision happen, hence the new Visitor Economy Advisory Council we are setting up.
Today I am delighted to announce the launch of that new Visitor Economy Advisory Council, co-designing and delivering a growth strategy. I want the new council to have an inclusive membership to represent the whole visitor economy and visitor journey while also keeping it outcomes-focused. I’m less interested in endless meetings and more interested in immediate results.
As part of the Visitor Economy Advisory Council I want there to be a series of working groups with clear deliverables, and annual collective planning to keep us accountable and to respond to the evolving needs of the sector. This is a shared journey, and we can only achieve success by working together. I want to encourage collaboration across the sector to achieve our ambitious goals.
I want to focus on continued partnership and support in the journey ahead. Thank you for your commitment to this industry, and thank you for being here today. I know these have been tough years over the last few years, and we want to make sure economic growth comes to this industry. And finally, I want to express my gratitude to all of you for your dedication. I am brimming with optimism for the future of the UK’s visitor economy and the positive changes on the horizon.
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