“I’ve been cleaning toilets and changing beds, pulling pints, making a very bad cup of cappuccino, and cutting up onions badly.”
Should Chris Bryant ever wish to switch career and move into the hospitality industry, he might want to work on his CV. Yet the tourism minister gets an A for effort. On Wednesday afternoon, I caught up with him at Mylor Sailing School in Cornwall. He had just completed a stint of work experience that had included a hotel in Falmouth and a watersports enterprise just north on Mylor Creek.
“First of all, I’m trying to champion British tourism,” Bryant told me. “As you know, the number of domestic visitors to UK tourism venues has fallen, and has not reached pre-Covid levels yet. Secondly, I want to listen to the industry about the challenges they face.”
That is a brave invitation to businesses who feel bruised by employers’ national insurance rises, are angry at what they see as unfair competition from short-term lets on platforms such as Airbnb, and are unimpressed by the level of support the tourism industry gets from the government.
More than one business leader has complained to me about Bryant’s job title. He is the minister for creative industries, arts and tourism, and therefore has plenty on his professional plate besides the crucial business of persuading more British holidaymakers to stay at home – and luring more foreign visitors to the UK. Oh, and he also serves as MP for Rhondda and Ogmore. But today, the focus of the multitasking minister was strictly tourism.
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“I was in a hotel room here today in Falmouth,” he told me. “It could have been a room in an Airbnb – exactly the same. But the Airbnb wouldn’t have paid any tax. They wouldn’t have to abide by any of the legislation that a hotel would have to abide by. And that’s simply unfair. So we need to level that up. And I want to make sure that in areas that have a lot of short-term lets, the local authority has an idea of exactly what’s going on locally. So that should be in place by next April.
“We’ve got to get much better at enabling people not just to visit London. It’s a depressing fact: something like 60 per cent of international visitors only come to London. So we need to do better with that.”
A reminder that inbound tourism is the closest a community, county or country can get to free money. International visitors spend at local enterprises, creating jobs and helping to fund amenities that the citizens could not sustain on their own.
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They also pay a fortune in taxes and fees: starting with £16 for an electronic travel authorisation, continuing with 20 per cent VAT on practically everything they purchase, and finishing with air passenger duty at anything from £13 (returning home to Europe in economy class) to £224 (heading back to Singapore or Sydney in business class).
A nation whose public finances are in worse shape than a minister’s chopped onion needs foreign tourists desperately. Bryant understands this. He has set an ambitious target of attracting 50 million international arrivals by 2030, which will require a compound increase of four per cent each year until the end of the decade.
I put it to him that a really easy way to get a huge tourism win would be simply to reverse the petulant post-Brexit decision to exclude Europeans who hold national ID cards but not passports. I calculate that this is the status of 300 million citizens, who can go to dozens of countries – including some outside the EU – with their identity cards. But the UK wants to keep them out, unless they sort out a passport. Given the huge strides in improving the security of ID cards, this seems a good time to unlock a tourism dividend.
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The tourism minister does not agree. He says: “I think there’s a strong argument for, in particular, school trips. Obviously we’ve sorted that out with the French, and I think there’s an agreement coming with the Germans, as well, to be able to do that.
“But I don’t think we want to completely abandon the requirements to have proper passport controls. Not least because ID cards in different European countries perform different functions, and are therefore constructed in different ways and have different security arrangements around them.
“I think we would want to make sure that everyone coming here is coming here validly.”
As you will realise, I am contractually required when speaking to any tourism minister at the start of the summer to enquire where they will be holidaying.
“Thus far this year I’ve had a bit of a holiday in Loch Lomond at the Cameron House Hotel. Very beautiful, very cold on the water. And we went to a place in the Cotswolds for a weekend a few weeks ago.
“I’m going to Chepstow with my mother-in-law and my husband in a few weeks’ time. I’ve got a week in the south of France, when I’m probably going to burn to a crisp.”
After a hyperactive Wednesday, he deserves to be on the guest side of the hospitality industry.
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