Oral evidence: Tourism, HC 143

Oral evidence, 13 October 2026.

Witnesses

Chris Haslam and Vicky Philpott.

Chair

Welcome to this meeting of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Today we have the first session of our inquiry into tourism. The first panel is Chris Haslam, the Chief Travel Writer of The Sunday Times, and Vicky Philpott, also known as VickyFlipFlop, who is a travel blogger and content creator. You are both very welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today. Before we begin, I remind members to declare any interests at the point that you ask your questions. I will kick us off, starting with Chris. Do you think that tourists’ expectations and priorities have changed very much in recent years?

Chris Haslam

Generally speaking, all kinds of tourists, globally or just in the UK?

Chair

The UK.

Chris Haslam

Habits have changed. The 14-night holidays are a thing of the past. The average length of a holiday now is about 9.6 days. We are seeing people trading down. Expenditure and duration have been falling away ever since 2021 when tourism peaked post-pandemic. People are trading down—either spending less time in destinations or less time and staying in cheaper properties in destinations. We have seen a move, across Europe and in the UK, from traditional accommodation—hotels, guesthouses, B&Bs—into short-term rentals, known as STRs, the Airbnb type thing. Within a very short time, that has grown to take probably 20% to 25% of the market. Hotels and traditional accommodation is now around 40% to 45%. Let me just look at my notes to see what else has changed in the past few years. I have said about downsizing and shifting away. Funnily enough, something across Europe now that gives you an indication of how tight spending is and how little disposable income people have—it is not just the UK; I heard it in Spain as well—is people self-catering in hotels. Cleaning staff go into hotel rooms and find supermarket bags in the UK, in Spain, and last week I heard about it in Switzerland as well. The general indication is that there is much less money around but the joke is that people, particularly the British, will put the holiday before the kidney replacement. They will always prioritise travel but they are having to cut their cloth to suit their budgets.

Chair

Vicky, what are you seeing? Are you noticing that people’s priorities for their travel are changing? Do they prioritise experiences over destinations? What are people prioritising when they go on their holidays?

Vicky Philpott

I think that as a priority they want a new experience that they can maybe put on their social media and they can talk about, something they have never done before. It is not really going to somewhere known and just lying on the beach. They want to be out doing things, entertaining the children with whatever they can, going to the coolest cafes and more interesting, adventurous travel.

Chair

To what extent do you think the UK destinations have responded to these changing priorities and, to Chris’s point, the changing finances?

Vicky Philpott

A lot of attractions and places are making them more visually interesting and having activations there where you can take Instagram photos and tag them, ways to share the experience easily and things that you have to do when you go to a destination. I think they are trying to add to the experiences there by creating Instagramable-visual things to do there.

Chair

Chris, expanding on what you said earlier about the pressures on finances and the changing patterns of how people are spending their money, how successfully do you think UK destinations have adapted to these changes?

Chris Haslam

I don’t think they have really adapted to it at all. They do not know whether this is a permanent change or a temporary change. Everyone is hoping for the best that people will choose more. Adding to what I said about changing habits, my area of expertise is the British coast, the UK seaside, and overnight stays in the British seaside have dropped by 18% in the past 10 years. Not only that, but the average duration of short breaks has gone from 3.3 days down to 2.9 days. I just wanted to add that in answer to your previous question. On the industry’s preparedness for shorter durations, shorter stays, they are not ready for it, but I want to make clear that this is not uniquely British. This is exactly the same across Europe. There is an article in the Spanish trade press this morning talking about how hotels have been hit by the fact that people are spending so little money in hotels. They are not going to restaurants and spas. They are not buying all those extra things. They are not doing it in the UK either. The problem is if you are going to offer spas and 24-hour dining, you have to have the staff there, so you are not taking the money but you are still spending on the provision.

Chair

That sounds unsustainable in the long term. Good news for you: at least two Committee members represent coastal potential tourist destinations, Bayo and me, so we can liaise with you later. Vicky, quite a lot of what you do talks about how families can still go away even though they might have financial constraints as the cost of living pressures are mounting up on them. What do you see that families prioritise when they are deciding whether a holiday offers good value for money?

Vicky Philpott

I think it is the overall experience and the cost of the overall experience. As Chris said, people are prioritising self-catering because obviously that can save a lot of money. Then there is a whole movement online of travel hacks and money-saving travel hacks, like booking a hotel room and making meals with your hotel kettle, and just ways that people can save on things like that so that they can spend it on experiences and getting out.

Chair

Thank you. Let me turn to my fellow coastal MP.

Mr Bayo Alaba

Good morning to you both. My first question is to both of you. What determines whether UK residents will choose domestic holiday destinations rather than overseas locations?

Chris Haslam

I will tell you what the facts are, what the statistics show. The average British family—and that is husband, wife and two kids—takes about three to four holidays a year. There will be the big summer trip, almost always the southern Med or maybe Florida or the US, but it is generally an overseas trip. They will also take another trip during the year, possibly at half-term, which is either going to be short-haul Europe or the UK coast. They will then take one or two further breaks during the year, which could be a weekend away in the UK or a city break. That is the general model at the moment. The average spend for all that, according to things like GfK and ABTA data, is about £7,500. I don’t believe that. I think it is a lot more than that now. Going back to your question about what makes them choose, the one driver with the British holidaymaker is value: the money, the cost. The permanent constant problem with UK holidays is the high cost. For example, if you wanted to go away to a famous four star hotel in Cornwall at May half-term next year, that will cost you £1,020 per person B&B. You can have a week all-inclusive in the Algarve for £960 or a week all-inclusive in the Costa de Almería in Spain for £678. It is not competitive. Bear in mind that I just said that was £1,020 per person B&B. If you add a modest £30 a day per person for lunch, dinner, drinks, ice creams, things like that, that takes the full price up to £1,200, so it is twice the price of going to Spain. That is one of the biggest drivers and it increasingly makes the glamorous side of the British coast, the north Cornish coast, the south Devon coast, more and more a middle-class destination.

Mr Bayo Alaba

You did not mention the Essex coast, but we will come to that in a second.

Chris Haslam

I can talk about that.

Mr Bayo Alaba

Vicky, would you like to add to that?

Vicky Philpott

I think the cost of holidays in school holidays is escalating out of control. A holiday point I was looking at was £700 for four nights at the start of May but then in the May half-term it was three and a half times as much at £2,386. That is just for basic lodging, no food or anything like that. That is making it totally prohibitive for people to go on holiday.

Mr Bayo Alaba

I represent Southend, a beautiful part of the country, very historic, but, as you mentioned, over a generation or so it has lost out to international travel. You mentioned that your experience and speciality is coastal communities. What should communities like Southend do to increase their appeal to the tourism market?

Chris Haslam

I am going to make a position statement here. I have travelled almost everywhere. I can’t tell you how many countries I have been to in my job, so I am in a position of authority when I say that the British coast is the most beautiful on earth, without doubt the most beautiful, and I have seen almost everywhere. I have not been to Chechnya but I do not think they have a coast. The other thing you need to bear in mind is that the great British seaside is almost a figment of our imagination. If you look at the history of the British seaside, it was developed for short-term gain. You need a lot of money to maintain those massive Victorian buildings with all that wrought iron, all that decoration and grandeur. That money is not there and it never was there during the 12-week season. The season is longer now than it was at the height of the British seaside. It was never built to last and the idea that we go back to what we had is ludicrous. That said, what can Southend do? I think there are two very different towns to look at: Bude in north Cornwall and Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. Great Yarmouth was a moribund classic Victorian resort with piers and all the attractions that you would expect, winter gardens, in a state of decay, near collapse. It was not quite up to HMO level but it was getting there. Bude, on the other hand, is a little country town on the north coast of Cornwall. Great Yarmouth has benefited from external funding. First off, its council has gone for every grant it can get from the Government—the small town scheme, the community trust scheme, heritage funding. It has gone for everything, but it also has a big income stream from offshore energy, renewables. It has a lot of money and it is transforming that place. It is astonishing how it has grown in the past two years. That is one way that you can change fortune. The cheaper way to change fortune is to engage the community, and Bude is the exemplar of that. If you have ever been on a British beach and seen the #2MinuteBeachClean stand, there will be a litter picker and some bags. That was an idea that came out of Bude. Bude is the only place, apart from South Shields—it is one of the two places in the country—that has a coastal parliament made up of citizens who make decisions about what their town needs to survive and thrive. That is all community engagement. It is almost the polar opposite to the Great Yarmouth model using external funding. It is from within and it has succeeded. I write The Sunday Times beach guide and it won beach of the year this year, and that is a tough competition that Southend has never won.

Mr Bayo Alaba

Yes, it is interesting. Southend is definitely one of the fastest growing seaside towns for day visitors but not overnight, which is something that we have touched on. This takes me to my question. Vicky, you were talking about the experience being very important, and that is quite big for my constituency of Southend because of its growing day visitor base. What should UK destinations do to increase the experience? You spoke about the visual elements. What else should they be doing to attract families?

Vicky Philpott

I have lived in Portsmouth for the last nine years. I moved there to be by the sea, because I am from the midlands. Something that Portsmouth does really well is to have so many events every weekend, especially through the summer. People are coming down to join in the music festivals, food festivals, car festivals. There is all sorts going on throughout the summer and I think that helps to bring in people. One of our main festivals is Victorious, and a lot of people come and are so impressed by Southsea and Portsmouth that they come back. I have evidence of this. Events like that are important to bring people in because they might not necessarily have thought of Portsmouth or they might think of it in years gone by when it was not the most attractive place to go, but now they have done a lot work on the seafront and it is looking good. There is a lot to do there. The Portsmouth marine dockyard is the biggest attraction but then it is nice just being there. It is a very arty place, coffee shops, so people want to come back. After they have been to these festivals, they want to come back and see more.

Chair

And then pop over to Gosport, of course.

Mr Bayo Alaba

The Government are quite keen for regional mayors to have more say. There is talk about overnight visitor levies. What is your view, your position, on visitor levies for coastal communities, or even for any tourist attraction area?

Vicky Philpott

I think if you can directly see that it is benefiting where you are staying, then great, but if the money just disappears—maybe if there was a way for it to pay for something tangible that you can see and say, “This is what we got from the levy” rather than just saying it was distributed.

Chris Haslam

I don’t think I ever seen any evidence of tourism levies making the slightest difference to visitor intent. They come anyway. No one is not going to go to St Ives because they have to pay £5 extra a night. They will still go. If anything, tourism levies are way too low to make any difference and I think they could go a lot higher. You could probably start charging people to get into museums as well, because they are coming.

Mr Bayo Alaba

My last question is: if there was an opportunity for communities to have package offers—train, hotel accommodation and so on, maybe even into one or two attractions—is that something that communities or towns or cities could do to support their local communities? I know how that is administered could be a challenge but is it something that communities should be thinking about?

Vicky Philpott

It is an interesting idea. Every large city has something like the London Pass, so maybe they could work together and create something, maybe offer vouchers to help consumers. I think that would work.

Chris Haslam

I am interested that you say that because the systemic challenge faced by domestic travel in the UK is that it is up against a mature, efficient, highly polished industry that takes people, puts them on planes and delivers them by bus to the door of a hotel with a water park in it and it is all inclusive. That is the outbound travel agent, but if you look in the window of any travel agency in the UK and see how many UK offers are there, there might be a coach trip to go and see “Mamma Mia” but there is no equivalent. UK domestic is up against this huge machine of the travel industry. It does not have the equivalent. That is the same in other countries, but in Spain, for example, Turespaña has been massively successful at promoting Spain to Spanish people. It created the España Verde campaign, which completely transformed Galicia, Asturias and the Basque Country and turned that into a massive tourist attraction. That is the equivalent of finding a new Cornwall in the UK. Andalucía is always popular with everybody but it had a campaign called Andalucía te quiere, bringing people from all over Spain. I do not know if it is VisitEngland or VisitBritain—I do not know what they do. I do not hear from them ever, and I am in the industry. I think it is about stronger representation—if it is not going to come from the private sector, it will have to come from the public sector—of British tourism attractions to the British people, something like the English Tourist Board. That is my answer. In answer to packages, yes, definitely. There is only one all-inclusive hotel in the UK. It is on the Norfolk coast or Suffolk coast, called Hopton’s, near Lowestoft. Packages is a very good idea. I do not know how it would work, though.

Jeff Smith

Good morning. Before I ask my questions, I was very interested in what you said, Chris, about the Bude and Great Yarmouth examples. Are there others that we can look at where they have managed the transition from the traditional pier arcade?

Chris Haslam

Amble in Northumberland was a derelict former coal port and the community took the harbour over and turned it into a fabulous tourist attraction. It started with a coffee shop and it is great now. If you get hold of old pictures of Amble from maybe 20 years ago and look at the high street going down to the harbour and now look at the way prosperity has radiated back up the high street, you see that it has gone from being pound shops to boutiques and there is a deli. It is almost like Southwold. Amble is a good one. Hastings is another good one. It turned a huge derelict department store into a community art centre. It puts on gigs there and there are craft breweries. Again, it is the community. Bournemouth’s south beach is also a very good example. It was a neglected beach at the far end. Bournemouth is one of the most beautiful beaches in Europe if treated properly by those who look after it, the council. South beach renovated a patch of neglected beach. They put a double-decker bus down there and turned it into a café. They were holding classes for children, for veterans, for the lonely, for widows. It became a proper community asset, used by the whole community, and brought tourists into the beach. Now the lease has run out and the council is saying, “You have to go. We are going to give someone else the job.” They do not mind that. They do not mind going if someone else comes straight in but it could take two years, at which time south beach just collapses again.

Jeff Smith

Does any organisation bring all these coastal resorts together and learn from each other’s experience?

Chris Haslam

No.

Jeff Smith

Thank you. The questions I was going to ask you are about how people discover the places they choose to go on holiday. What has the biggest influence on a tourist’s choice of destination?

Vicky Philpott

I think it will be what they have seen on social media, places going viral. It used to be the Lonely Planet effect where Lonely Planet would mention something but now if it has gone on TikTok, everyone else starts going.

Chris Haslam

Definitely social media, definitely TikTok, also traditional media. Some 24% of our unique views on The Sunday Times are for UK destinations, which is extraordinary because we cover the entire world. There is a lot of interest from that, particularly in new hotels.

Jeff Smith

That is quite a change in just the very recent years from traditional travel journalism and official tourism promotion to social media. Should the UK, VisitBritain, just get loads of influencers in to promote the UK destinations?

Vicky Philpott

I think a lot of TikTok and Instagram is what has come naturally, not necessarily the tourist boards putting their information out. It is organic posts that randomly do really well rather than a targeted thing, but obviously they should do that as well. They do include influencers and invite influencers on trips and invite them to try new places out, but I think it is quite hard to make something go viral.

Jeff Smith

It seems that everything now is influenced by AI. Have you seen any influence from AI in the travel industry?

Vicky Philpott

I think it is quite negative.

Jeff Smith

How does it work?

Chris Haslam

I will give you a very quick example. A guy at the WTM two years ago told me to choose a random travel video from YouTube, and it turned out to be a German having a long weekend in London. We put that URL into an AI travel agent called Mindtrip and it scanned it and came back with exactly the same itinerary, where to stay, where to go, “Tower Bridge? This is the time to get there.” Not only that, going through the user’s Google records to find out what shops he goes to, what food he buys, it recommended restaurants and hotels. It was absolutely personalised. That was terrifying to see but, that said, travel agents talk about it all the time. At every conference you go to, there is a module on AI: is it going to steal our jobs? They have either got their heads in the sand or they are being extremely sanguine but they are saying no because you are always going to need humans behind AI. They are seeing it as a tool that travel agents can use rather than something that would make travel agents redundant.

Jeff Smith

Do you think it is the latter?

Chris Haslam

When I first started in this industry 29 years ago, I was told to write an article called “The travel brochure is dead” and you still get travel brochures. They are still making the glossy brochures. No, I don’t think it will put travel agents out of business but I think they will have to adapt.

Jeff Smith

Vicky, do you use it? You probably use it in your writing.

Vicky Philpott

I have used it for research, but I am of the stance that people will always want people. I think that is why social media is so influential because people see actual people like them doing the trips that they want to do and then they can recreate it rather than just typing it in and an AI avatar telling you what to do. I would not follow that information. I would want a real person.

Jeff Smith

Do either of you know of any examples in other countries where they have successfully harnessed social media to promote their destinations?

Chris Haslam

Dubai. Remember during the pandemic? That backfired a little bit because no one else could travel. Malaysia is good at it. I do not think anyone else is good.

Jeff Smith

That is helpful. Thank you.

Chair

Chris, given the rise of creator-led content on travel, is there still a place for travel journalism and travel journalists like you? What do you bring to the table that would not be there otherwise?

Chris Haslam

We see a lot of suspicion and fatigue in our readers of the whole notion of influencers and of a certain amount of travel writing as well. It is basically you have a free holiday and write something nice about it, so there is a lack of critical analysis. What we can bring to it is critical analysis. If we think something is rubbish, we will say it is rubbish. That has changed. In the past, not so much at my newspaper but in other traditional media, there was the idea that if you can’t say anything nice about it, don’t write it, but that has changed now because the public need it.

Chair

Yes, you tell it like it is.

Chris Haslam

You have to tell it like it is.

Jeff Smith

I still like using Rough Guides and Lonely Planet guides. Do you think they are on their way out as an influence or do they for that reason, the honesty and the rigour, maintain their market share?

Vicky Philpott

I think people still like them and it is just a different way of giving the information and a different way for people to receive it. One of my friends has just written the Cornwall guide but she is also a travel influencer. I think it is seeing it from those two different perspectives, from the influencing and maybe getting free things to make the video, whereas with Lonely Planet she is not allowed to get anything at all. It is interesting to see the different approaches.

Dr Rupa Huq

These are really interesting answers. They remind me of that Morrissey song “Every Day Is Like Sunday”—I think it is about Blackpool, the seaside town they forgot to shut down. Some of the things you are describing are a bit sad, the infrastructure not being up to scratch in some of the regional destinations. I used to get my trip to the seaside with party conferences—Bournemouth, Blackpool. I remember seeing Tony Blair at Blackpool. I think they have stopped using those because, as you have said, they just can’t cope any more. We are doing a trip to Blackpool, aren’t we? Is the onus going away from these regional seaside towns to cities? They used to be conference venues. The NUS conference used to be in Blackpool twice a year I remember.

Chris Haslam

I cannot remember the statistic but the vast majority of—as I said, the seaside has dropped off 18% in the past 10 years but overall overnight trips have also dropped off. They have dropped by 12% since 2021 for the time people are spending away from home in the UK. Event tourism is big now. You will fill this city up for Taylor Swift or you will fill Manchester up for Oasis. They are not playing in the seaside; they are playing in the cities because that is where you can get the crowds in and where the infrastructure exists to get that many people into a venue and out. The truth is that many of our seaside towns are in a terrible state of decline. Blackpool is one—Eastbourne, Bognor Regis.

Dr Rupa Huq

Could they be brought up to scratch? The party conferences, Neil Kinnock falling over in the sand—that used to be part of the thing, when the faithful would get a trip away, whereas now going to—

Chris Haslam

Is that why they did it? I did not realise it was so that—

Dr Rupa Huq

Do you remember? Am I the only one of my generation who remembers any of it?

Nigel Huddleston

If I can come in there, one of the things is the capacity. I was party chair for a while and we were looking into these. We need for both of the big conferences, Labour and Conservative, 6,000 to 10,000 rooms. The harsh reality is that Blackpool just cannot cope with that now.

Dr Rupa Huq

Even Brighton we have stopped using. Has Brighton gone forever? It is too small?

Nigel Huddleston

It is not just numbers; it is security and things like that, thousands of rooms for police.

Dr Rupa Huq

We talked about events. I see coming up on my feed things like Butlin’s 1980s night, Butlin’s ska night, Britpop night. Is that the way forward for these venues?

Chris Haslam

I think that saved Butlin’s, moving into those big weekenders. It is a mini festival every weekend.

Dr Rupa Huq

Is it still struggling?

Chris Haslam

I do not know, but I know that those weekends are very popular and they cross pretty much every genre.

Dr Rupa Huq

You were asked about travel. Are people from overseas coming to our seasides?

Chris Haslam

We get 43 million visits from overseas here every year and they spend £33 billion, but they are mainly from the US, then from the EU, then from Asia-Pacific, then from Middle East. They spend an average of eight nights here, but they go to, in order: London, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford, and recently Manchester is popular. They do not go to the seaside.

Dr Rupa Huq

Is England not aggressively marketed? An aggressive marketing campaign would not be enough because the stuff is not up to scratch?

Chris Haslam

You are right: it is not quite up to scratch. It is very seasonal. A lot of our seaside towns are beautiful on a summer’s day, but as soon as the sun goes in in wintertime, they are just ghastly. We have an issue with the British seaside in that because it declined as an industry from the late 1960s onwards due to the rise of the package holiday, many of our seaside towns have become retirement homes because the property was cheap and people could move to the seaside; the British dream to retire to the seaside. However, there is no youth there. The young people have had to move away to the cities. Bude is different because people always come back to Bude, but that is what makes it unique. Most places they leave, they do not come back. So you have a place that is effectively a retirement colony. The season is only 12 weeks long. The industry is all focused on making as much money as you can in the season and not investing. If you think of those huge Victorian properties along the seafront in Bognor or Eastbourne: the cost of maintaining those is staggering. Who is going to take on a great big building and open it as a seaside hotel? In Cromer, Norfolk, we have the Hotel de Paris, opened in 1888 by a Parisian hotelier who swore the future was in the British seaside. It is now almost derelict. The southern Med has serious issues going forward. Look at any climate science you like, but if you take World Weather Attribution or CRS, the prediction is that by the middle of this century one in two summers will be detrimental to health. We will have blisteringly hot summers detrimental to health, with a 50% frequency. It is supposed to be one in 10 now, although it is not. We have already seen something called coolcations; everyone talks about coolcations now. They do not really exist in the UK yet, but the idea is that people flee the summer heat to the northern climes, to get away from the heat and enjoy it. We talk about people going to Finland, Lapland, but the UK is in the perfect position to grasp that opportunity and to profit from it. We have the seaside resorts; we have properties within the seaside resorts. When we see the migration of people from the south, people from Spain, Italy and Greece will be coming on holiday in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Scandinavia.

Dr Rupa Huq

When was this?

Chris Haslam

This would be by the middle of this century. This is the prediction.

Dr Rupa Huq

A long time to go.

Chris Haslam

Well, it is only 20 years away.

Dr Rupa Huq

Vicky, you are a blogger. I just wondered how far TripAdvisor ratings affect where people go, and how manipulable are they? I am an academic and I remember people used to review each other’s books and, say, give it 10 out of 10. Could you muck about with those things?

Vicky Philpott

I think reviews are very controversial because anyone can leave them and you can be really annoyed at something—you see reviews where people are moaning that a mountain was too windy and things like that. It is not a science; it can just be an opinion in that moment. A one-star review can totally drag them down, and competitors can do it. I used to work at a company called Hostel Bookers and competitors of the hostels would book a one-night stay, so they would only have to pay the deposit, and they would drag each other down with the reviews.

Dr Rupa Huq

Okay, I am being told to shut up.

Chair

We are just trying to keep to time. Thank you very much. Let’s move on to Nigel.

Nigel Huddleston

I refer hon. Members to my entry in the register of Member’s interests and declare that I previously worked in the tourism sector, was a tourism Minister and shadow Minister, and I have taken hospitality from players in this sector previously. Chris and Vicky, thank you. There is so much that you have already mentioned. One area that I would like to look into is how can, and should, our tourist destinations or individual attractions or hotels differentiate themselves? Chris, you have alluded to this a little bit. Imagine two tourist resorts that are similarly beautiful with similar beaches: what makes the difference in terms of controllable things that either a local authority or an individual hotel can do? Vicky, you are probably familiar with this. What I am thinking here is things like cleanliness, basic customer service, access to toilets—those practical things that can differentiate one place versus another and make something stand out or, indeed, people complain. I will come to you first, Vicky.

Vicky Philpott

There are a lot of things that you can do to add value to a destination or attraction. If we are already paying all the money that it costs—and some people would deem some attractions too expensive—you can add value by being kind, the place being clean, by people helping you and having maybe more things to do there, especially for the kids. If there is an app or even just some activities for the kids to do while they are there, I think you can add value in that way. It is not necessarily all about what they are directly doing. There are different ways they can make it a better attraction and more appealing to people, and make people want to tell their friends about it as well, so that it can either come in from word of mouth or through them sharing it on social media.

Chris Haslam

If you speak to anyone who has been to Disneyworld in the US, the one thing they always say is it is so clean. We have seen real big problems in the west of this country where councils have stopped emptying bins, closed public toilets and depended on the private sector to provide toilets, and the private sector charges 50p to use it. That causes distress. It is very simple. Divesting car parking to ANPR—people are furious about that. If you do not buy your ticket within three minutes, £60 fine in the post, rapidly becoming £200. That is what gets people’s goat. It is a very easy fix, if you have the money for the local council to keep it clean, keep the facilities open, make sure the toilets are clean, make sure the bins are emptied and make sure the car parking is fair.

Nigel Huddleston

Following the pandemic, we had a staycation boom, and lots of people were saying, “First time I have had a domestic holiday in ages; it is great, really enjoyed it”. Chris, you have come up with some quite alarming figures about numbers declining recently. You have mentioned value for money in the prices and that it is very expensive in the UK. Is that the killer? Is it all about the money and the cost?

Chris Haslam

It is and it isn’t. Yes, it is, but it is the same everywhere. I looked at the top complaints in the German, Spanish and French media, and it is exactly the same. Top of it is cost of living, the price. The other thing that I thought was uniquely British was the service window: the fact that you walk into almost any British pub at 8 o’clock in the evening and the kitchen is closed, “Sorry, you can’t eat”. You end up with families sitting in cars eating fish and chips. It is the same argument in Germany, France and Spain. I do not think that our travel industry is as bad as we sometimes think it is. In many ways, it is better than other countries’.

Vicky Philpott

I just want to say that one of the biggest things in the UK is the state of the waters, everything that Surfers Against Sewage is doing. The amount of sewage getting pumped in is huge with the decline in coastal accommodation and holidays, because it is not as fun to go in the sea any more. Even if they say it is a clean sea, you still have it in your head that it is where they pump sewage in. There is a place in Portsmouth by the pier that is probably one of the most populated parts of Portsmouth—everyone is coming to the beach. You are not meant to swim in that bit year round, it is condemned, but people still do. That is shown around England. I was recently in Northumberland on a beautiful beach, and there was toilet roll everywhere. I check on the app and it says that there has just been a sewage discharge there. I think that is a huge part of what is affecting coastal tourism in the UK.

Chris Haslam

Can I add to that? The difference is that we have DEFRA doing samples on bathing water throughout the season; 20 samples throughout the season every year. They then rate the beaches, but when you go to a beach, say Cromer beach, next year, you will be looking at last year’s ratings. It had three stars, so it was good last summer. The peril on the British beaches is the CSO discharges, the combined sewer overflow discharges, which can happen at any time. As Vicky has said, we are now dependent on private sector apps to find that out: Surfers Against Sewage, Safer Seas & Rivers Service. That is a massive turn-off for the British coast now.

Nigel Huddleston

That concern of the British public, and indeed overseas visitors, for the impact of their tourism on the environment and sustainable tourism has been going round for a while, but do we need to worry in the UK about overtourism, or is that fabricated?

Vicky Philpott

That is Cornwall, everyone going to Cornwall when there are so many beautiful places. This year, in the heatwaves, I went up to Northumberland and on the beaches there was barely anyone about. I had come from Portsmouth where the roads were blocked, and everyone is going to Cornwall and Dorset. There are definitely areas, like Cornwall, where everyone is going, but there are many beautiful parts of the UK that people are not. It is a problem.

Nigel Huddleston

How do we deal with that? We talked earlier on about the tourism tax, which I am personally dead against because I think we are already very expensive and should not be taxing the sector more. However, there is an argument about it. It looks like it is being brought in. One logic of the tourism tax is to inhibit overtourism, such as Venice and so on.

Jeff Smith

No, it is not.

Nigel Huddleston

Well, some of the argument for that is.

Jeff Smith

We disagree on this one.

Nigel Huddleston

Yes. Well, the logic overseas is, is the point I am saying. Is that part of something we should do here in the UK?

Vicky Philpott

Tourism tax?

Nigel Huddleston

Yes, as a tool to depress tourism numbers?

Vicky Philpott

I do not think we want to stunt them, do we?

Chris Haslam

No.

Nigel Huddleston

Right, okay. I am a bit leading there.

Chair

You have seen in areas like Barcelona and Venice there have been objections by local residents to the volume of tourists coming in, and you do begin to sense that a little now in some parts of Cornwall, where the resident population is completely overwhelmed in the height of summer by this huge ingress of visitors. It is a double-edged sword, because these are areas whose economy entirely relies on the visitor economy, but equally they can sometimes become swamped in the summer months, making it unbearable for those who live there all year round. Is there a balance where the taxation could be used to try to find a happy medium to that?

Vicky Philpott

I would need to think about that more because, as you say, these places want all those people but at the same time it is a problem, like in the Cotswolds and the Lake District where people are parking on people’s gardens. I am not sure how a tourist tax would help those people.

Chris Haslam

It would need to be a significant tourist tax to deter anyone. As I said, £5 extra is not going to stop anyone going to Porthmeor Beach in Saint Ives. More to the point is looking at seasonality and extending the season. At the moment, all the traffic is happening within three or four months, when everyone is piling into the British seaside. The good resorts are working to extend seasonality. That is an initiative within the private sector and the public sector.

Chair

To what extent is that dictated by school holiday times rather than just weather?

Chris Haslam

If we go back to the model at the beginning, the way the British travel on their big holiday is almost always overseas, so a package holiday to the Med in general. They would not be coming to the UK in the summer months anyway. They would not be spending July in Cornwall, although some people are. The issue is to spread it out more across the year. If we are taking four holidays in the year, if there was something that would attract us down to, say, Cornwall, or the Gower Peninsula, or the Llŷn Peninsula, in October. One thing that has transformed the British seaside is neoprene, because now you put the kids in a wetsuit and it does not matter if it is raining, 12 degrees; they will have fun all day. That has been transformative on the UK coast. It is not that we only go to the seaside in the summer, when it is sunny.

Nigel Huddleston

This is one of the points that we will be looking at very carefully here, because you have hit the nail on the head: seasonality is the key to the success of British tourism. It will help with productivity, all the problems with people getting a job in the summer and then being unemployed for six months, all that kind of thing. If we can extend the seasonality, that is the magic thing, but how do we do that in the UK, recognising the challenges of the weather?

Vicky Philpott

There is also school holidays. You get charged to take the children out, so there is no way that parents of school-aged children can do that.

Nigel Huddleston

There is also the 3 million people who work in the tourism sector who cannot have a holiday with their own families because they are working in the peak season.

Vicky Philpott

You can obviously extend it for people without school-aged children, but some have no option.

Nigel Huddleston

There is lots to cover, yes. Chris can I just challenge you again on the tourism? I know what you are saying £5 probably would not make a difference, but £50 would. Given what you said earlier on about people coming to a caravan and then the first thing they do is the Lidl shop rather than go to the pub, bar or restaurant nearby, I think you are right that a few pounds here would not make a difference. However, there is that magic point at which the tourism tax, if levied in an appropriate way, could make the difference in people’s decision to go. Do you think that might be the case?

Chris Haslam

Yes, it would. A per person tax, suppose you made it £10 per person for a caravan park in Lincolnshire, that is £40 extra for a family. They are going to say, “No, we will not go there”. Then, going back to your thing about overtourism, they go, “Where can we go that has not got a tourist tax?”

Nigel Huddleston

So the way that the tourism tax is implemented, and the dynamics and one region versus another, is also important here? Yes.

Chris Haslam

We could also just develop the UK as a low-volume, high-price destination. That would be another option. Rwanda and Bhutan have done it; Botswana has done it fantastically. The Balearic Islands are trying to do it, clamping down on STR—short-term rentals—and all-inclusive properties, trying to basically get people to come and spend more money. Fewer people, but spending more money.

Nigel Huddleston

Finally, is that one of the key things? We have been obsessed in the UK with domestic tourism or inbound tourism numbers, volume, as in 43 million or 100 million overnight stays. Do you think that is the wrong thing? You alluded earlier on that it is the length of stay and how much they are spending that is key.

Chris Haslam

I do not know, I am not an economist—but you think do we pile it high and sell it cheap or do we go for high-spending, low volume?

Vicky Philpott

That is something that has been seen on the Isle of Wight, where they have had fewer visitors but they are all spending more money because it is the people who go to Cowes Week and other yachting things. They are seeing fewer people but they are spending more.

Chris Haslam

Remember the argument against that is we cannot make travel a pursuit for the elite, although “elite” is the wrong word. I mean the rich.

Jeff Smith

Just on that, how could we do the pile it high, sell it cheap, without the guarantee of good weather?

Vicky Philpott

That is one of the troubles with the UK. It is unreliable weather, unreliable transport.

Chris Haslam

The weather is changing at the moment.

Dr Rupa Huq

Yes, 40 degrees is not unusual any more.

Chris Haslam

No. That is something to look at in development of policy going forward: how can we profit from climate change rather than suffer? All those Spanish people are going to want to go on holiday somewhere.

Jeff Smith

On the fewer people and more money, what markets are we looking at? Are we looking at the Middle East or US?

Chris Haslam

The US already are spending a lot of money here. They stay for eight days and they spend a fortune. Their biggest complaint, though, the one thing you could do to change, is to bring back VAT-free shopping—tax-free shopping in the UK. That is the biggest complaint of all the foreign markets coming to the UK. They are going to Madrid; London’s loss is Madrid’s gain.

Dr Rupa Huq

This Committee did recommend that we do that.

Chair

Yes, we did, a couple of times. I have a couple of extra questions. You mentioned how areas like Galicia have been successful at attracting tourists away from your mainstream Spanish destinations. What could the UK learn from them? How did they do that? As you say, we have some amazing coastal locations, not all of them are right there in the heartlands of the tourist destinations, so what could we learn from areas like that?

Chris Haslam

What comes straight to mind when you ask that is do you remember those great railway posters for the seaside? Even now, you see those posters and you think, “Wow, I actually do want to go to Grimsby”— or wherever it is, Scarborough—“It is so bracing”.

Jeff Smith

Skegness.

Chris Haslam

Skegness, yes, “It is so bracing”. It is as simple as that. It is just to remind people—and it is not going to be the private sector because the travel industry does not deal with the UK; it would have to be public sector somehow, reminding people how beautiful the UK is and what they are missing. We do it in our newspaper all the time.

Chair

How did the Spanish do it? How did they attract people to go to Galicia?

Chris Haslam

Turespaña, the Spanish national tourist board, but working in conjunction with DMOs in the regions, said, “Let’s promote your region; what have you got?” It has worked so well, so much so there was an anti-tourism protest in Asturias two years ago. There is no definition of overtourism. It is like Father Christmas; if you think you have overtourism, then you have overtourism, but it is not defined. The increase in visitors had gone up by 0.02%. The village of Santillana del Mar decided it had too much tourism and they had a protest, and the mayor had to show them the statistics and say it is basically the same as it was two years ago.

Chair

It is good to see that misinformation is alive and well all over Europe as here in the UK. I have one final question. Chris, I think I know the answer to this from you, but I want confirmation of it: if you had to choose a holiday in the UK or a holiday abroad, what would you go for?

Chris Haslam

What am I going to say? Norfolk coast, north Norfolk coast, where I live.

Chair

Vicky?

Vicky Philpott

I would still go abroad.

Chair

Where would you go?

Vicky Philpott

Where would I go? I have just come back from Seville and that was lovely.

Chair

Before we let you flee, were there any questions that you wanted us to ask you today that you did not get or any points you wanted to make?

Vicky Philpott

My main points were about the sewage that is ruining coastal tourism, in my view, and about affordability, especially when you have children in school. How are you meant to be able to afford to go on holiday in England? My friends do want to go on holiday in England—it is easier than all the airport drama—but at the same time it is just too expensive. You can get a week abroad cheaper, guaranteed weather and entertainment for the kids rolled into that, if you stay in a hotel with a water park. It is just very difficult.

Chair

Chris, do you have any final messages for us?

Chris Haslam

I also wanted to raise the state of the seas, of our bathing waters. It is such a turn-off. The comments below the line for the Beach Guide this year were, “I wouldn’t go to the British coast, I don’t want to get sick”. That is a terrible thing to have. It is awful to have that reputation for our coast. In terms of our bathing water quality, we have come back to being, again, the sick man of Europe, which is what we were before the legislation came in in the 1990s. We have slipped back to that. The one thing to bear in mind is that the great British seaside was born in Scarborough. The seaside holiday began in Scarborough at the Spa. Scarborough south beach is now unrated. It is dangerous to swim in that water. It is not even one star; it is unrated. That is criminal.

Chair

Okay. That is very helpful, a very good landing of your message. Thank you both very much for your time this morning. I will clearly bump into Vicky at some point in the Portsmouth area, but in the meantime we are going to suspend this panel very briefly while we bring in the next witnesses. Examination of witnesses

Witnesses

Jamie Christon DL and Alex Polizzi.

Chair

Welcome to our second panel this morning. We are joined by Jamie Christon, the Chief Executive of Chester Zoo, the UK’s most visited tourist attraction outside of London, and Alex Polizzi, the hotelier, businesswoman, television presenter and star of “The Hotel Inspector” on Channel 5. What a CV! Welcome to both of you. I am going to kick off the questioning with you, please, Jamie. How would you assess the current health of the UK tourism sector?

Jamie Christon

I think it needs a lot of support. I have been in the tourism sector for the majority of my career, first of all working in Devon, and linked to Visit Devon, and seen over the last 20 years or so the funding for the tourism sector from the public purse decrease substantially to the point of almost zero. One of my other roles is as chair of Marketing Cheshire, which is the LVEP and DMO for Cheshire and Warrington. We are going through devolution with the mayor next year that will hopefully change things, but we are getting to the point where the three local authorities within Cheshire and Warrington have more or less zero funding for Marketing Cheshire. As a result of that, the impact that the organisation can make within the county has diminished massively. I have seen that happen over the last 20 years. I think the tourism sector needs a huge boost from Government. It is being supported where it can be by the private sector, but fundamentally we need some support from Government to try to move us back up to where we were 20 years ago.

Chair

Alex, it is the same question for you. What is your diagnosis of the health of the UK tourism sector?

Alex Polizzi

I would argue that it is not so much that we need support; it would just be helpful if they did not keep swiping the legs out from underneath us. In preparation for coming here, I did a brief analysis of the rising costs since 1 February 2024, and between business rates, the utility rise, the national insurance rise and the rise in minimum wage, our three little hotels have added a staggering £950,000 to our cost base. You will agree that that is a rather difficult sum to absorb.

Nigel Huddleston

What revenue base is that on? What proportion increase is that?

Alex Polizzi

I can talk to you best about the staff, because that is the one I am involved with most in Sussex. My staff costs alone are 46% of turnover. We do very well; we are increasingly worried about the visitor levy and what impact that will further have, especially in Cornwall where so many of our customers are domestic. I was listening with great interest to the witnesses before me, and certainly in Cornwall we are passionately against the visitor levy, partly because it impacts lots of low-cost holidays. I would completely disagree that we would want to only have rich people coming into this country and spending lots of money, because what are normal working people supposed to do? Where are they supposed to holiday? Do we really want to export them all to Turkey?

Chair

I take your point. Jamie, on that point, what are you seeing within your work and across the sector that either gives you concern or confidence about the sense of direction at the moment?

Jamie Christon

Just to back up a comment that Alex made a few moments ago about our feet being taken from beneath us, the impact of the increase in national insurance contributions cost Chester Zoo £600,000 overnight. We are a conservation education charity, and that is money that could have been ploughed into conservation. We employ 1,200 people at Chester Zoo. A large proportion of those people are on lower pay, a lot of seasonal staff because we are obviously very much a seasonal business, and an organisation that is trying to encourage those people who are not in education, employment or training into work. The hospitality, tourism and visitor economy sector is key for that, so to suddenly have a lot of money taken away from you overnight is pretty difficult for us to manage. That is just to add to that point. In terms of the overnight visitor levy, one of my other roles within Marketing Cheshire is we tried to bring in an accommodation bid to the City of Chester last year, which failed in the end. That was a disappointment for the city. It would have generated about £1 million to £1.5 million extra for the city of Chester overnight. We have quite a pragmatic view of OVL. If it is led locally, proportionate and simple to administer, then it is something that we might think is a good idea, but we understand that there is significant opposition to it. I see the benefit of it if it is managed properly, at a local city or county level.

Chair

Can I also just get a sense from both of you on whether you think there is a full understanding of the contribution that tourism businesses and visitor attractions make to the local economies in the areas that you operate, but also nationally? Do you think the Government nationally understands the contribution that you make, Alex?

Alex Polizzi

Of course I am going to say no. Traditionally, hospitality and retail have employed the largest number of entry level workforce, so we are disproportionately affected by the changes that have come in, and the changes that are proposed to come in about the increase in minimum wage for under 21-year-olds. Again, there is going to be an enormous leap. I calculated that if it comes in, that is an extra £8,500 to my wage bill, again overnight. I do not think there is much appreciation for the fact that we are encouraging young people. I have five or six young ones who started with me at 15, who are now 21; I would like to think I have contributed and helped to make them upstanding members of the community. They are now paying their parents rent and have bought themselves cars. They know how to talk to people, how to appear professionally. That part of my role, my job, I take seriously and am incredibly proud of. I feel it is thankless. I have certainly never been thanked for the fact that I assist at the first faltering steps in work. That is something that we are not sufficiently appreciated for. There is a lot of chat about minimum wage, but the truth is quite often you take people in who are starting their work, who have no idea how to tie their own shoelaces, and we are noticing that more with the new generations. You are really taking people on and having to teach them quite often very basic social skills as well as technical skills. It is an honour and a pleasure to do so, but the difficulty involved in that and of administering that is not fully appreciated.

Chair

So, there is not only the economic benefit of what you do for your local region, there is also what you provide in terms of the skills for training that first step on the jobs ladder for young people in your area, that you think is under-estimated. Jamie, do you agree?

Jamie Christon

Yes, absolutely. To give you some statistics, tourism supports nearly one in 15 jobs in the UK, about 2.4 million jobs overall. The sector generates about £52 billion in tax revenues; that was a figure from 2024. It is a vitally important sector. Within Cheshire and Warrington, £4.3 billion in visitor economy value; 39,000 jobs within the sector; 59 million visitor days coming into Cheshire and Warrington. I see it as vitally important. At Chester Zoo, we were 2.136 million visitors last year. We will be over 2.2 million visitors this year. In the last panel you were talking a lot about seasonality. A lot of the work that we now do at Chester Zoo is making sure that we have visitors coming through throughout the year. We have campaigns going on throughout the year. We are just about to launch a Christmas campaign, where we will see another 175,000 visitors coming to our zoo on an evening. That is supporting further jobs, further seasonality, and bringing money into the city of Chester; bringing money into Cheshire and Warrington; people staying overnight; staying for a long weekend; travelling on to north Wales; travelling to Manchester, Liverpool and so on. It is vitally important, and I agree with Alex wholeheartedly that Government is not really taking it as seriously as it should do in terms of supporting the sector.

Chair

You have spoken about some of the campaigns that you are running to bring more people in, like the Christmas events, but what else can you put your finger on when you look at the fact that you are the most visited tourist attraction outside of London?

Jamie Christon

I have a list; where do I start? We are an organisation that has been running for 95 years. We have a fantastic reputation as a conservation education charity. We welcome over 2.1 million visitors every year; 250,000 school children come to us every year. We teach young conservationists about what they should be doing in the future to help support their lifestyles and support the United Kingdom and the world. We work in 20 countries around the world. I have just come back from India over the weekend. I am going out to Uganda next month to help support the work that we do and the projects that we have worldwide. As a conservation education charity, we are there to help stimulate people into being inspired about the natural world and helping them to help support and revitalise biodiversity and nature around the world. Since covid especially, people are trying to get out and connect with nature and connect with wellbeing to help support their mental health, to be able to spend time with their families and to get away from the stresses and strains of daily life. That is what we are there to do. We are a national conservation zoo and people flock to us because they can see, look and understand things that we do at Chester Zoo, and understand what we do and the impact that we have worldwide in being a conservation charity.

Dr Rupa Huq

Thank you both for coming. You are Deputy Lieutenant as well, are you, Jamie?

Jamie Christon

I am.

Dr Rupa Huq

Okay, the King’s representative—how cool is that? You have both painted a very compelling portrait of all the pressures that you are under with national insurance, utilities and all those things. Alex, do you remember the Caspian guesthouse?

Alex Polizzi

Yes, I do. Of course I do.

Dr Rupa Huq

Are you having nightmares still?

Alex Polizzi

No, my lovely Persian friends in Ealing.

Dr Rupa Huq

Yes, that is the one, Nousha. They are still going strong. Nousha and Samir. I think she must be nonagenarian; she never reveals her age.

Alex Polizzi

No, she is pretty amazing.

Dr Rupa Huq

Yes. The boy must be a fair amount as well. I have been lobbied by them—and obviously your intervention was key there so thank you so much—when he comes and sees me, and even in the street. His issue is Airbnb. He says, “These guys are not regulated, not subject to the same requirements we are. They are undercutting us. They are killing us”.

Alex Polizzi

There is that issue, and then the other thing that we feel very strongly in Cornwall is how unfair it is with the small business rates relief for places that are holiday homes. From the very moment that you consider letting your place, you have to, quite rightly, adhere to a whole set of health and safety regulations. You have to refit your house completely in order to accept visitors. You have to be able to let your house for 140 days, and it has to actually be let for 70 days. You only get a more relaxed tax regime if you are successful in your letting. Anywhere is being squeezed by people who basically get better rates on their tax than an ordinary B&B. Airbnbs have definitely affected my industry, but I think that there is room for us all. I just wish it was a level playing field on the taxation side.

Dr Rupa Huq

What would you like to see? Again, you get into a black cab and the cabbie says, “That is an Uber. He has no insurance, no”—not even an Uber. These new disrupters, the old guard do not like them because they are undercutting and non-unionised.

Alex Polizzi

There are lots of things that people do not like about Airbnbs. Some of the loopholes have been closed, I believe, so it is a bit fairer, but I would like to think that there is room for us all. I am a great believer in the fact that if you can afford a caravan park holiday, you ought to have the best caravan park holiday that anyone can possibly offer you. I personally, as a hotelier, am a hotelier because I like having my breakfast cooked and my bed made when I go and stay somewhere. I think it is hard for small businesses, partly because employing anyone has become so very hard. All these small businesses are desperately trying to keep their businesses going basically as one-man bands or, in the Caspian’s case, a mother and son band, and it is somewhat thankless. I think many people do not understand just how hard the hospitality is and I certainly would not want to walk a mile in their shoes.

Dr Rupa Huq

I know you said the whole guts had been ripped out, both of you. What practical measures can we suggest in our report that would help?

Alex Polizzi

In Cornwall, Visit Cornwall went bankrupt so we have a load of professionals now trying to start up the Cornwall Visitor Alliance. One of the things they feel very strongly about is that they are being unfairly penalised because of the second home 200% council tax, because people are now moving to rent out their homes to try to reduce that. They just feel that there is not a level playing field and that one does not make an enormous amount of money renting out their home as a second property. If you do not manage 70 nights a year, then you are back to your 200% council tax. It is the only example I can think of. An ice-cream shop is not only an ice-cream shop if it sells a certain number of ice-cream cones a year, for example. I would suggest that we are unfairly penalised. I would very much like to see that go, and it would be nice to have a professional register of properties so that they can be properly inspected. We are very happy for it to be a more professional side of the industry but not to treat us all as if we are taking advantage of the tax regime, because it is a pretty hard picture down there, particularly in Cornwall. It is interesting that you think there are too many people going down there, because my stats show that there were 1 million visitors less last year. That is because at its peak it is rammed—exactly what they were saying before—and there is very little business in the shoulder months. That is because of terrible transport links, quite significantly, and the fact that so many businesses just close. What do you go to Cornwall for in the winter when you can barely find a restaurant or an attraction open? It is very hard. There are the sterling ones like the Eden Project that have done such a good job in bringing people to Cornwall, but there is still a lot more to do.

Dr Rupa Huq

The licensing thing is interesting because councils do it with landlord licensing now. Jamie, I think anyone who came to the Labour Party conference will know Chester Zoo.

Jamie Christon

Yes, we were there. We were present.

Dr Rupa Huq

Good show, though. What do you think of the regulatory changes? What would you suggest?

Jamie Christon

From a zoo sector specific point of view, one of the big issues is that zoos do not fit neatly within existing Government policy structures. This is quite pertinent in the news at the moment. We are regulated by DEFRA in terms of our animal welfare standards and what we do with our animals and plants within our zoos. We are also major visitor attractions, we are employers, education providers. Chester Zoo is a major scientific organisation, and we are also drivers of regional economic growth. That means that we end up falling between Departments—between DEFRA, bit of BIS, bit of DCMS—and we have seen a couple of examples where we have missed out on opportunities. One example is the £1.5 billion cultural and heritage investment package launched by DCMS in January 2026. We would have loved it if the zoo sector could have been part of that, but we seem to fall between the cracks and that was not available. Going back a few years, covid also demonstrated the limitations of existing support structures. Some 97% of our revenue comes from our visitors coming through the gates. We do not get any other funding apart from people who give donations to us as sponsors. My zoo costs around £1.6 million a month to run. During covid we were closed for 208 days, we had zero income coming in, but it was still costing £1.6 million. I had 200 people still working at the zoo because we have 37,000 animals to feed and look after, with zero money coming in. There was a subsequent zoo animals fund but about 85% of that was left unspent because of the way it was structured. Again, it was an example of where zoos seem to fall between the cracks. That is one example. The other example is gift aid. For our day visitors coming to Chester Zoo, the only way that gift aid is applied is if they will pay at least 10% donation on top of their ticket price. We would love for that 10% to be taken away, or that need for that 10% to be taken away, to allow us to be able to claim that gift aid. With 2.1 million people coming to the zoo every year we reckon that could generate another £1 million to us.

Chair

Why is that, Jamie?

Jamie Christon

That is the current legislation. It states that you can only claim gift aid if you donate at least 10% on top of your ticket price, HMRC. We would like that taken away. That would allow us to be able to pump another £1 million worth in. As you can imagine, if people are booking online—as the majority of people book now—it is quite difficult to have a discussion with them online about the benefit of paying another 10% on top of their ticket price.

Dr Rupa Huq

Sometimes at Tesco it says, “Do you want to donate to Ukraine?” or whatever. Could you stick that at the till?

Jamie Christon

We try all the legal arguments to make sure that people will try to donate, yes, but when they are already paying a ticket price—and we heard from the last panel how people are looking for value for money at the moment—it is difficult to be able to encourage them to do that. Therefore, we cannot claim that additional gift aid.

Dr Rupa Huq

As an educational provider does that mean there are possible DFE funds, and are you Ofsted registered?

Jamie Christon

We have a great relationship with the Department for Education but we do not get any funding at all. We are essentially a classroom with 250,000 school children coming to our zoo every year, and we are taking children from primary school all the way through to higher education and teaching them about conservation in the main but also teaching them about how a business operates, teaching them about feed and what we supply our animals, all sorts of different things. We get no funding at all to be able to help support that.

Dr Rupa Huq

On the guesthouse side of things, a bit like Chessington Zoo did many years before—it is now a World of Adventures at Chessington—is it overlapping with the things Alex mentioned?

Jamie Christon

Yes. We are a young disruptor. We became hoteliers last year for the first time, pretty scary stuff. We built a hotel and on the first day I thought, “What have we done?” We have a 51 lodge hotel, which is one side of the zoo. Sixteen of those lodges surround a paddock with a northern giraffe, Grévy’s zebra, blesbok, so our visitors can open their curtains in the morning and look out on to our animals and see our keeping teams do their work in and around the zoo. It allows our visitors to get into the zoo before we open in the morning, and we allow our visitors to go into the zoo at night and have nocturnal tours of the zoo and see the animals that you would not normally see during the day. It has been hugely popular but it is a massive, steep learning curve being a hotelier. You learn all the things that go on in hotels that you do not see—or sometimes you see on “The Hotel Inspector”—but our visitors have loved us for doing it. It has been one of the things that we have been keen on doing since covid and since being closed for 208 days. We have realised that we cannot rely on admissions and people buying through retail, food and beverage. We need to find other ways of making sure that we can survive in the future, and opening a hotel is one part of that. Our diversification policy now is looking at the other land that we have in and around the zoo where we can bring in additional income that helps support the work we do and hopefully be able to pump it back as a charity into our conservation work in Chester and around the world. Our hotel is probably the biggest thing that we have done since covid and is helping to support the organisation.

Chair

I have had a look online with—

Jamie Christon

Have you booked?

Chair

I want to come.

Jamie Christon

Yes, I welcome you all to come and stay.

Chair

We are in, we are all in.

Dr Rupa Huq

Lastly, did you both say that you were implacably opposed to the overnight levy?

Jamie Christon

We have a view that—I will go back a step. Cheshire and Warrington are going through accelerated devolution at the moment. A combined authority has been set up and we will have a mayor from next May. We have two candidates for mayor at the present time and we are already talking to both of them about an overnight visitor levy. One of them is against it; one of them is in support of it. The argument I have been making is that as long as it is locally led, that the money is pumped directly into tourism within the area and it is not there to fund buses or fill potholes, then I am supportive of it. There is a need for the tourism sector to have a boost, a kick-start. We will clearly not get it from local authorities or from Government in any other way at the present time. As I said earlier on, I have been working in the sector for 20, 30 years, initially down in the south-west of England, and I have seen Government funding and local authority funding slowly drift away to being zero. Within Cheshire and Warrington, in two of the three local authorities the funding for Marketing Cheshire going forward is zero. It is the only opportunity we have at the moment, so pragmatically if it is managed carefully, managed locally, and includes the private sector in that management as well and is not just being managed by the mayoral authority, then I would support it.

Alex Polizzi

I would like to agree with you about one key thing: that if the money comes in it should be ringfenced. At the moment we are worried that it will dribble away in a number of other things. As we all already pay business rates and have our rubbish collected privately and so on, I do not want it to be spent on that. It depends very much on the area that you work, whether you are rural or urban. Seasonality will make a massive difference. It will not help Cornwall be more successful in the shoulder months if on top of trying to tempt people down you are also charging them still more for coming in October or November than they would have paid before. For domestic visitors we have to be very careful because people who holiday domestically are often the ones on the lower incomes. I would argue that I do not want my visitors to have to pay more. I understand Barcelona, I understand Venice; it has some of the wonders of the modern world and those cities have to manage their numbers very carefully. However, there is a whole great big swathe of Cornwall that is crying out for this not to happen, so I say it for them. I understand why it would work in some areas but I think it has to be applied very carefully.

Jeff Smith

It is voluntary, though. Cornwall does not have to take it on.

Alex Polizzi

Well, they say there is public consultation but I am not entirely sure how much I believe in public consultation as an agent for change.

Chair

Are you done, Rupa?

Dr Rupa Huq

Brilliant, thanks.

Chair

Thank you very much. Let us move on to Bayo, please.

Mr Bayo Alaba

I want to go on to workforce and skills. The irony is not lost on me that before coming into this place I came from a hospitality background. My background is bars and restaurants. Alex, you spoke about business rates, minimum wage, cost of living, national insurance, and so on. Jamie, you spoke about Government support as well. I understand that, and feel free to advance those cases, but I also want to see if there is anything else that is preventing tourism businesses from recruiting and retaining staff.

Jamie Christon

If I talk first about the zoo sector, the zoo sector is an amazing opportunity for people to get into employment. As I mentioned earlier, Cheshire Zoo is like a village of many skills. We employ over 250 zookeepers who have all got zoological degrees or animal behaviour degrees. They are all at degree level. We have scientists, we have commercial specialists, we have field conservationists, we have apprenticeship schemes that allow our staff within a couple of years to be trained blacksmiths, electricians, carpenters, and so on. The zoo sector is fantastic. Pay is probably one of the issues that we have. I am sure Alex will agree, trying to recruit chefs is impossible. They move around for 10p more an hour and trying to retain them is particularly difficult. We constantly have probably six or seven chef vacancies on our books at any one time. The most important thing for us as an organisation is having a fantastic staff engagement, which allows our staff hopefully to try to stay with us a long time. Some of our staff at Chester Zoo have been working for us for over 40 years. I have one member of staff, a zookeeper, who has been doing the same job for 47 years; imagine that. We are lucky within the zoo sector that we do not have that much of an issue in retaining staff, encouraging staff to come to work for us, because of the organisation that we are and because of the opportunities that we can give to our staff. We have pockets of areas where it is particularly difficult. All the skills training that we do is all zoo funded. We do not get support from Government or elsewhere in funding for those particular skills. They are all done through either the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which is a membership organisation for zoos, or through the zoo specifically. Within the wider Cheshire and Warrington catchment, and within tourism and hospitality, again pay and pay progression is one of the main reasons why people do not stay within the sector. We have seen specifically since covid—and again chefs is a key example—many people who were chefs working in hot kitchens on a weekend at 11.00 pm, 12.00 pm at night have found other careers where they are getting better or equal pay, where they are not under the same pressures they were before. That has had a big impact, especially on hotels, small businesses, and food and beverage businesses. That continues to be an issue right throughout the sector. Pay and skills are particularly important and trying to get funding to be able to encourage those is particularly difficult.

Alex Polizzi

I would say with my three hotels in rural locations: public transport. Unless you drive you are dependent on the taxi of mum and dad, which is very difficult. Obviously, hospitality is quite a lot of early starts, quite a lot of late finishes, and rural bus transport is completely defunct. There isn’t any. Combine that with the fact that as much as possible we offer accommodation to our staff, but obviously I cannot offer accommodation to a 15 or 16-year-old. Government-mandated allowances, what I am allowed to charge my staff, which is £11.10 a day—which is the grand sum of £336 per calendar month—do not exactly make it attractive for me to buy housing, especially in the south-east where housing is very expensive. It is almost impossible to pay off a mortgage on those rates. For someone to want to work in the industry they have to have a very dedicated support network to allow them to work in that industry from an early age. For me that is one of the biggest problems.

Mr Bayo Alaba

Thank you. On recruitment and skills shortages, does that affect the visitor experience?

Alex Polizzi

Can I jump in? I am sure, like you, I spend an enormous amount of time and energy training my staff up. I have made my career talking about customer service and it is still something I am completely and utterly passionate about. I believe a smile costs nothing and that is what I am constantly telling my staff.

Mr Bayo Alaba

Even when you are not at work.

Alex Polizzi

Yes. Work should be pleasurable and I am very proud in training young people, but it is amazing how many people I meet who come out of school barely able to read and write after they have left, and with very low expectations for their life. I think part of the training that I do, as much as anything else, is to show them what they are capable of. It is all done in-house, like you. I get no support for it. It is constant. If I was ever going to give up hospitality it would be because of the exhaustion from the revolving door scenario of training someone up and making them be completely amazing and seeing them walk out the door for 10p extra an hour.

Chair

Does the apprenticeship levy work for your sector?

Alex Polizzi

I have an apprentice chef in one hotel. Again, they are not terribly—certainly in my locations we have not had them banging on the doors for apprenticeships.

Jamie Christon

Yes, we have an apprenticeship scheme—I mentioned it a little bit earlier on—in various different skills throughout the zoo. It is not massive and it is probably only in its infancy. We have around 20 to 30 apprentices every year, and that is in a full workforce of 1,200 people, but it is something that is growing. What we have found is all those apprentices have found paid, full-time work either in Chester Zoo or other zoos around the UK after doing that apprenticeship. I think that is partly because they have Chester Zoo on their CV and if they have the top zoo in the UK on their CV it helps. Going back to your question around whether the skills shortage affects the visitor experience, the answer I would say is no. The same as Alex was saying, we work extremely hard in making sure that our staff are trained, plus we are in a fantastic outdoor environment. Who would not like to come and work in Chester Zoo when you are spending time with 37,000 animals and plants, and you are in an outdoor environment in 130 acres of beautiful parkland being looked after by the organisation that you work for, and being trained and have that job on you CV? We also have, very luckily, Chester University in the city and we find that our Chester University students come in as freshers in year one and have seasonal jobs with us across the three years. We get a high degree of returning seasonal staff coming back to us year in, year out, which helps us. It means we do not have to retrain people as much as we have had to do in the past. Our visitor engagement scores are very high, both in the hotel and within the zoo, although we are working like swans below the surface to try to keep it going like that.

Mr Bayo Alaba

In terms of entry-level training, the sector carries the load and does quite a lot. Alex, you alluded to it as well earlier, and yourself, Jamie. How hard is it to get across that the long-term career objectives, the long-term pathway can be a sustainable—you have someone who has been at your organisation for 47 years. How hard is it to get that point across?

Jamie Christon

In terms of zookeepers, they do it because they are extremely passionate about animals. They spend more time with the animals that they look after than they do with their families. They take their laptops home at night and open their laptops and look at the animals on CCTV overnight, so there is massive passion for the role that they do, and they do it for that passion rather than for salary and progression. As I said earlier, all our 230 zookeeping staff and conservationists at Chester Zoo all have at least a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in animal behaviour or zoology, which they have obviously done before they come to Chester Zoo. We provide training for them as they move through their career and through the ranks, but many of them stay doing the job that they first came to do because that is what they want to do and they are not interested in management. Many of the people we employ as conservationists and animal keepers do it because they prefer animals to people, so they are not particularly good people managers sometimes. At the other side of the organisation, although we are a conservation education charity we are extremely commercial, so we do lots of exciting things with our teams in terms of helping them progress through their careers and helping them move forward. When I first joined the organisation back in 2013 we had around 400 staff and we are now at 1,200. That is partly because of our success but partly because we have grown as an organisation. We are a scientific organisation, we are an education organisation, we work in research, we work overseas in the commercial world, as well as being animal keepers.

Mr Bayo Alaba

Thank you for that. I understand. Alex, I imagine it is a little bit more challenging.

Alex Polizzi

I think I am an exemplum for lots of my staff because they see that although I have a slightly more glamorous edge to my life, which is the television, I assure you that if you come and stay at one of my hotels on a Saturday morning I will still be serving you breakfast and cleaning the tables. I speak to a lot of schools and school leavers about the pleasures of hospitality because I think that they are not touted enough. It is still considered rather a last choice career and not a profession. What I always say is I still love it. I still love it because it allows you to interact with people, to engage with people, and to participate in joyous moments in people’s lives. I feel like one of my jobs is to lead by example. If I show the pleasure that I take in my work it is a lot easier for everyone around me to take pleasure in what they are doing in their work. I spend an awful lot of time encouraging people to think about their next steps, what they next want to do, how I can skill them up, what they need to work on. There is a lot of employee engagement and I am always thrilled when someone moves on from me to a high flying job, but I have quite a few staff—rather like you, Jamie—who are quite happy to have no responsibility and want to come in and want to do their eight-hour shift as a waitress, serving breakfast and tidying up afterwards, and then go home and live a life. For the ones who want to progress, there are enormous possibilities in this industry and I am always pointing them out to people.

Mr Bayo Alaba

You said you spend a lot of time in schools, which is one thing, colleges, letting people know about the pathway to sustaining a career. Would you suggest that conversations can and should be had with parents as well?

Alex Polizzi

That is very difficult. If you look at the old English model, the first son inherited, the second son went into the army, the third son went into the church, and the fourth idiot child goes into hospitality, I always feel. It is not considered a viable career for one’s children, yet here I am, and I know lots and lots of clever, multi-talented people who are doing this because it is a fantastic career to be in. I have an uphill struggle persuading parents of that, who will say, “The hours, the pay”. There is still a big hangover from the bad old days when you did a lot of overtime, you were not paid for it, and wages were terrible. You definitely earn a living wage now. A lot of my young staff are buying their first homes at 26, so it is possible to have a good life in hospitality, but I am afraid it is hard convincing parents of that.

Jeff Smith

Good morning. This is a question for you both. There was some research from VisitBritain that said 57% of international visitors could not imagine what there was to see outside London. As people who have a focus outside London, how can the UK encourage more international visitors to explore destinations outside London, and domestic visitors as well?

Jamie Christon

I mentioned a while ago that we regard ourselves as the national conservation zoo, although officially we are not the national conservation zoo at the present time. We would love Government to be able to support the fact that the UK’s zoo is in the north of England, and not necessarily in London and the south-east. We are lucky: No.10 North is literally 30-odd miles away from Chester, and taking those opportunities to be able to move and have a national asset in the north of England I think would be a fantastic step forward. We have all the proof points that we think we need to become the national conservation zoo. We are leading. We have the most visitors coming to us. We are here sat today giving evidence at this Select Committee. To be able to have some key assets that are sustainable, that have fantastic reputations, that will not cost Government anything, and have them in key areas of the UK away from London would be a fantastic first start.

Alex Polizzi

In some ways we have succeeded much better than we think because if you think about the 1970s and all the package holidays, it is amazing how much domestic travel we have now managed to retain, which is partly, I am sure, thanks to the pandemic but also thanks to the fact that it is so vetted trying to go anywhere by plane these days. I think our natural landscape is something that we need to celebrate more. I completely agree with you that there is a well-trodden theme to people wanting to reconnect with nature and reconnecting to the outdoors. If I put on stargazing or guided walks or foraging, anything like that, people are interested. We have some of the most wonderful natural environments. I am slightly spoilt because I sit in the South Downs National Park, which is completely wonderful. Endsleigh is by Dartmoor, which is all completely wonderful. I have the Cornish coastline, which is wonderful. It is a question of banging on about it. Certainly, people who come to me in Sussex are constantly saying, “Goodness, I had no idea that East Sussex had so much to offer”. It is about us talking to our customers as much as possible. I had two groups of Australians—believe it or not—with me last week, one book lovers and one garden walking people. I think the word is “spreading” slowly but surely, because we have a very gentle, very beautiful, in pockets quite unspoilt landscape that is balm to the soul. It needs to be banged on about.

Jamie Christon

One of the big problems that we have, and Alex mentioned it earlier, is around transport and the transport infrastructure. Chester is just over two hours north of London on the train—

Alex Polizzi

Supposedly.

Jamie Christon

Supposedly. Avanti West Coast is the train provider. Thankfully it will be nationalised next March, but we have had constant issues around connectivity between London and Chester, even though it is a direct service and two hours is not bad, to be honest, to be able to get from London to the north. If we had improved infrastructure to allow people to be able to move out of London to other parts of the UK a lot easier than we do currently, that would help.

Jeff Smith

You took the words out of my mouth. That was my next question. It is not only about those main routes, it is also about the last mile as well, which has been an issue that has been identified. To what extent are attractions and accommodation providers involved in the decisions about transport and infrastructure?

Jamie Christon

About zero.

Alex Polizzi

Not at all.

Jamie Christon

Yet 90% of our visitors come by car. We are trying to reduce our scope 3 carbon emissions, as you would expect with an environmental charity: virtually impossible. The majority of the people who come to a place like Chester Zoo are families. There is no way they will get on public transport to try to get to the zoo and back because of that last mile issue. As well as the south-north connectivity, it is the east-west connectivity that is pretty poor as well. Trying to get from Manchester or to Chester or to Liverpool, as you know, is not easy and not particularly pleasant either.

Jeff Smith

No. Is that your experience, Alex?

Alex Polizzi

My experience is that Cornwall is a very tricky one. The last few times I have gone to Cornwall I have been chucked off the train unceremoniously at a much earlier point in the journey, on one occasion sharing a carriage with 40 schoolchildren and their poor teachers, who were clearly wondering how on earth they were going to get them home. We had the derailment at Lewes, and I would like to charitably assume that some of the problems we are having at the moment may still be connected to that. I would say that probably—obviously I have much fewer visitor numbers than you—at least 90% of my hotel guests come by car, partly because they want to explore the area and there is no way to do that without a car.

Jeff Smith

This is a question specifically for you, Jamie. Chester Zoo’s submission to the inquiry highlighted the influence of weather apps on the visitor destinations. Perhaps you can explain the issue, but then how can digital weather information be improved to support you?

Jamie Christon

The issue is that many people coming to Chester Zoo—it is largely an outdoor attraction—and all those people going to indoor attractions in reverse will check a weather app before they come. Around 70% of people the research has shown will check a weather app. If you look at your BBC weather app, it tends to give a single icon as you go into it. I have not looked at London today but it will probably say cloudy, maybe a little bit of rain at some point.

Jeff Smith

I am looking at it now and it says showers and from 12 pm onwards it will be pure sunshine.

Jamie Christon

That there is the issue. That icon will pick up maybe 20 minutes of showers at 8 pm, which has no bearing to what is going on during the day. The research that we have had says between 42% and 45% of people who look at those icons will change their mind because of what that major icon says, which can have a massive effect on visiting attractions, to hoteliers, to indoor attractions as well in the reverse, and what people decide to do on that day. At Chester Zoo we estimate the worst case examples that we have seen could cost us about £137,000 in a single day in visitor income. What we would like to see is a new model. There is a Norwegian example that allows the icon to show the weather at four points during that day: first thing in the morning, around lunchtime, mid-afternoon, and the evening. It is simple to see rather than this one big icon. People do not scroll down to look at what the detail is below that. They will look at that single icon and make the decision on what they will do that day. We have had interest from DCMS on this. We have had over 100 attractions from around the UK back our campaign. We had a weather summit with the Met Office in early summer. Unfortunately, it was the start of the heatwave so there was only one weather, so it was slightly difficult to try to explain to them. We want to continue with that campaign. We want to get further support to get those icons changed to make it a lot easier for people to see what the weather actually is rather than what the icon thinks it will be.

Jeff Smith

You have had a willingness from DCMS to move on that and try to make some change?

Jamie Christon

We have, definitely, yes.

Chair

Good. We would like that. Last but not least, birthday boy, Nigel.

Nigel Huddleston

Thank you. I will talk a little bit now about Government strategy and Government support. Alex, you came in at the very beginning and said nobody has ever thanked you. I will correct that today and say thank you, Alex, to you for creating opportunities for so many young people.

Alex Polizzi

Thank you.

Nigel Huddleston

I have visited Chester Zoo many times. Jamie, your team are fantastic. This is the point: you both contribute towards—and the millions of others who work in tourism and hospitality—creating huge opportunities for large numbers of people, creating a lot of jobs, generating a lot of tax, and bringing joy to millions of people. Do you believe that the Government has your back? Alex, maybe you first.

Alex Polizzi

I do not. I feel like there is a perception that hospitality in general is something that you can turn upside down and shake or squeeze until the pips squeak. I have no expectation of there being a VAT cut to allow us to compete properly with Italy, France, Germany, and any of the other European countries that have 10% or lower VAT. There have been a whole series of things that I feel were mistaken. For me, the top of that was the national insurance hike that has made a £700,000 difference to my bottom line. I do not want to have it taken away with one hand and given back with the other. In hospitality, all of us as professionals are best placed to know how to train our people and how to encourage them. I would love there to be proper backing for a professional centre of excellence for hospitality, which we lack entirely in this country. Unlike France, Switzerland, Germany, America, there is not a professional qualification that counts in the same way as a degree course does, that allows you to step in very well trained and prepared for the workplace. That would allow us to convince both young people and their parents that this is a career to embark on. That is what I would like the Government to get behind, thinking about how to professionalise this, how to make it an aspirational career.

Jamie Christon

Yes.

Nigel Huddleston

Alex, you also mentioned earlier on that you get up at 7 am, or probably earlier than that, to provide breakfast. I have seen this a lot in my constituency and as I have been travelling around the country as well. You have been bombarded with all these additional taxes. One thing I am worried about: you come in here all positive, energetic, which is fantastic to see, but all these taxes are coming your way and you are working all hours God sends. I am worried that a lot of people in the sector are not paying themselves, if they are business owners.

Alex Polizzi

I do not pay myself.

Nigel Huddleston

Do you think that is quite common?

Alex Polizzi

I moonlight as a television presenter to be allowed to indulge my hobby as a hospitality provider. I think that is common because I borrowed money to develop a project. Obviously, I want to pay back the bank. I never pay minimum wage; I want to pay my wonderful people as well as I possibly can. I want to enhance the visitor experience to whatever degree I can. There are lots more things that are higher priority on my list than paying myself. I am fortunate I have a secondary career and I can do that, but I have been looking at the casting tapes for the next lot of “The Hotel Inspector” and people are desperate, absolutely desperate. It is no surprise. It is a well-touted fact how many pubs close every year—over 300 pubs close a year in the UK—and I am afraid that is also going to be true of some of the bed and breakfasts and small hospitality providers. That will be a shame because it is a lot more people who will need to be supported rather than supporting themselves.

Nigel Huddleston

Some of these places I think look busy but they are not profitable, and then the proprietor is not even paying themselves minimum wage. There is a hidden danger there.

Alex Polizzi

There are definitely hidden costs, and that is something I feel very strongly about for small business owners. I am a successful one. I have managed to pay back the bank. I have managed to do all the things that I want to do, but you see people who have put their families, their health and their security on the line to embark on and try to do something, and who are desperate. I see more and more of them every year.

Nigel Huddleston

Jamie, you have mentioned as well some frustrations about dealing with Government and that you are falling between the cracks. This again is a perennial problem with tourism and hospitality. It straddles multiple Government Departments. Do you think it would be best for the sector if DCMS did not exist and you were part of business or another Government Department? How do you think this should work? The Government are developing a tourism strategy but is it misguided? Is it that within Government we have it wrong and we need to restructure Government?

Jamie Christon

I do not agree that not having DCMS would help. From a zoo perspective, only the animal welfare section of what we do in a zoo—which is a big part of what we do—is within DEFRA. Zoos are becoming more and more commercial—because they have to to be able to fund what they do, to be able to pay for the increasing utility costs. You cannot put a jumper on a Komodo Dragon and just reduce the temperature in that particular building. We have to become more and more commercial. For zoos to be able to have a better or stronger footing within DCMS would be much better. We would like to sit within one Department totally rather than being spread out across other Departments. The forthcoming national visitor economy strategy could help us by taking into account how diverse we are as a sector, and to take into account how we sit across tourism, conservation, education, science, and employment. We do not sit into one fully but we would much rather a Government Department say, “We will pick zoos up and we will deal with them in totality”. To your original question around support and what Government think around zoos, we get a lot of support from local government, from our council, from our MP who happens to be sat in the room today, and from others. Locally, we get lots of support because they see first hand what we do as an organisation. They have come to Chester Zoo. I know you have been, Nigel, and Jeff you have been as well—you have seen on the ground the work we do. We encourage every MP and everyone involved in Government to come and see what we do. When you are on the ground seeing the fantastic work we do you get a better understanding of how significant we are.

Nigel Huddleston

We are running out of time, but we would really appreciate what you would like to see in the strategy. The strategy seems to be a little bit focused on inbound as opposed to domestic tourism. Alex, you spoke earlier on about the importance of domestic. The reason I am raising that question is that the reality is the budget of DCMS is tiny; £1.3 trillion Government spending and the DCMS budget is £7 billion—but it is not, because £4 billion of that is BBC licence fee. Therefore, VisitBritain’s budget and VisitEngland’s budget is tiny. What would you like to see from them? Recognising they have limited resources as well is key. They do a great job with tiny budgets compared to what we see around the world. The report we will be writing is quite important to suggest to Government what we would like to see in there. We are running out of time today but please do keep your feedback coming. Thank you.

Dr Rupa Huq

Throughout covid I remember there were debates about having a dedicated hospitality Minister, because that sector was so done over. I know Chester Zoo is a bit different because it straddles so many things, but should there be a dedicated tourism Minister so it is not just something else on someone’s desk?

Alex Polizzi

I would love someone who engaged with the issues and the problems and gave a voice to us because I feel like it is a slightly lonely path that we tread. Although we are banding together as best as we can, I do not think we are represented very well.

Jamie Christon

We have a tourism Minister, but not one dedicated to hospitality.

Dr Rupa Huq

Not dedicated, yes.

Jeff Smith

Nigel has talked about VisitBritain and VisitEngland. Do you think there is confusion in the way that our destination support organisations work? Is there any structural change that would be helpful?

Jamie Christon

I have applied to get on to the board of the British Tourist Authority for that very reason. I think there is some confusion around what VisitBritain does and what VisitEngland does, what LVEPs do, what DMOs do. It needs to be made a lot more simple, first for us as employers and people working within the visitor economy, but also for Government as well.

Alex Polizzi

I have no expectations, wrongly, of VisitBritain or VisitEngland. I think it is every county for themselves. It is down to private hands, I am afraid, and I recognise that is because there is very little money to assist.

Chair

The money that they have—you are not entirely convinced it is being spent in the best way?

Alex Polizzi

I have no idea how it is being spent but I do not see any result from it.

Chair

I do not know if you were here in the room earlier when we had our two other witnesses. Chris said, “What do they do? I do not hear from them”. You would agree with that?

Alex Polizzi

Yes.

Jamie Christon

I hear from our local northern VisitEngland representative, and that is because she used to work for Marketing Cheshire and she is a good friend. She has been to Chester Zoo and sees the work we do. Over and above that, no, I do not see what they do.

Chair

Thank you. The final question is from me. Given all the challenges and obstacles that we have covered, if you could each ask the Government to make one change that would make the biggest difference to UK tourism over the next five years, what would it be, Jamie?

Jamie Christon

For us from the zoo sector, getting us into one Department that we work with in Government would be a lot easier than we currently have at the moment—not falling between those cracks.

Alex Polizzi

The professionalisation of the industry is something I have been banging on about for a long time. We have T-levels, we have apprenticeships, and nothing seems to touch the surface. I honestly believe it is about time that we had a centre of excellence in this country and we could all therefore be proud of people who are in this industry and contributing so much.

Chair

Thank you. Is there anything else we have not asked you today that you want to get off your chest?

Jamie Christon

No, I am fine. Thank you.

Alex Polizzi

No, thank you very much.

Chair

Thank you so much for your evidence today. That concludes today’s session.