Rainy days and funding droughts

This week the Prime Minister has chosen to highlight Tourism as a key driver for economic recovery.  But as I write this (in August), the rain is pouring down.  We’re not going to be either encouraging ‘stay-cations’ or attracting vast numbers of new inbound tourists by focusing on the weather.  So why do people visit these damp isles?

The Visit Britain website has a fantastic section on ‘insights and statistics’.  In February this year they produced a great resource called the ‘Culture & Heritage Topic Profile’.  It states that ‘57% of respondents from 20 countries agreed that history and culture are strong influences on their choice of holiday destination’ and ‘Britain’s mix of “culture” is key to our success: from heritage, the arts, museums, through our creative industries (eg fashion, music, design, media) to living / contemporary culture (eg language, traditions, festivals, sport, cuisine)’.

And the scale of that success?  ‘Visit Britain estimates that Britain’s unique Culture and Heritage attracts £4.5bn worth of spending by inbound visitors annually, equivalent to more than one quarter of all spending by international visitors, and thereby underpins more than 100,000 jobs across the length and breadth of Britain.’

£4.5bn is more than the DCMS currently provides in Grant-in-Aid to sponsored bodies (£2.6bn) and distributes from the Lottery (£1.7bn).  And that’s before the planned 25% savings.

So to summarise:

1.       Culture and Heritage is fundamental to the UK’s tourist offer

2.       The UK gets more back in from inbound tourist spend on Culture and Heritage than the UK Government invests in Culture and Heritage

3.       The government plans big cuts to Culture and Heritage in the next spending round at the same time as trying to attract more visitors to Britain. 

The Cultural sector has been very mature at not special pleading in the current financial climate, but if tourism is key to the recovery, do you really want to diminish your principal asset? 

‘Come to Britain in 2011 – it’s still wet and there’s less exciting things to do than last year’. 

David Brownlee, Chief Executive, Audiences UK