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Tourism

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones for asking this Unstarred Question so that we can debate these important matters. I want to concentrate on a sector of this country’s tourist industry that is often not even thought of as part of that industry: mountain walking, climbing and other adventure sports. That sector contributes a substantial amount, particularly to the rural economy and to economies of the areas where those recreations take place. I remind the House of my interest as a member of the access and conservation committee of the British Mountaineering Council. Important and useful reports in recent years have produced a lot of valuable information. Among the findings of a report in September 2003 for the Ramblers Association, from Dr Mike Christie and Jon Matthews, were that there were in the region of 188,000 kilometres of off-road rights of way in this country, and 36,000 kilometres of those were long-distance paths where people could go and walk for a day or a week. Obviously, there are many shorter, locally promoted paths: in Pendle in Lancashire, where I live, we have the Pendle Way, as well as the Brontë Way, which links us with Haworth over the moors into Yorkshire. There is also the Ferndean Way, along the beck in my valley. That is linked with Wycoller, which also has Brontë links, such as Ferndean Manor. Including the land that has been opened by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, there is something like a million hectares of open access land. All those figures refer to England, not Wales or Scotland, which are huge resources for such activities. An estimated 527 million walking trips are made annually to the English countryside, a huge amount of activity that is beneficial to those taking part in it, both psychologically and in other ways relating to their health. The expenditure associated with such trips is in the region of £6.14 billion each year. By and large, it involves a lot of small businesses, but added together it is big businesses. The income generated from that expenditure is estimated to be over half as much again: between £1.473 billion and £2.763 billion, supporting 200,000 to 250,000 full-time equivalent jobs. So this is important. It is estimated that there are 5,204 million day visits each year in the UK, and that 15 per cent of those are for hill-walking and rambling. That does not include other outdoor sports activities, such as mountaineering and climbing. About a quarter of people had visited a national park in the survey period, corresponding to 11.4 million visits, which shows the huge importance of those parks. Work by Scottish Natural Heritage in 1998 suggested that walking contributed £257 million to the economy in Scotland, the equivalent of 9,400 full-time jobs. If mountaineering is included, that rises to £361 million and 13,350 jobs. There is much more similar information. All the spending in those areas has multiplier effects on the local economies, and the actual effect of it is much greater than the direct spending. I have one further statistic: Snowdonia Active’s study of adventure tourism in north-west Wales in 2004 suggested that the contribution to the economy of adventure activities was £140 million, of which £60 million was in the national park, with the employment of 8,450 people—6 per cent of employment in that region. So we are talking about an important contribution to the economy. There are several things that we now need to look at. One of them follows on from what my noble friend said about the need for a more co-ordinated effort to attract tourists, certainly in England but also more generally. There is not a great deal of promotion of mountaineering, hill walking and walking as activities for people who do not live in this country. Most of the people who take part in those activities in this country are resident here and many of them take part in them on a day basis. Our superb mountains constitute a vast resource. They are very different from European mountains in many respects but are not necessarily less attractive. Some of us would say that they are more attractive in some ways. They offer a great opportunity to attract more overseas visitors on organised trips and overseas visitors travelling independently. Far more people from this country go climbing and walking in places such as the Alps, the Pyrenees and many other parts of Europe than come from Europe to this country to do so. There is scope for changing the balance in that regard. One of the recommendations in the Christie and Matthews report was more research into the economic value of the social benefits, health-related and spiritual—or, as I would say, psychological benefits—associated with walking. That might produce evidence to convince the Government that more public resources should be put into the national parks, local authorities and voluntary organisations that carry out work that makes such activities more attractive and easier to undertake, such as footpath improvement, improvement of access, improvement of access for disabled people where appropriate, signposting and promotion. In addition to footpaths, new access land was opened under the CROW Act. Some local authorities are signposting very well, but others are not signposting quite so well. Further resources may be needed for that, as we discussed in an Unstarred Question a fortnight ago. I finish with a local angle. I live in a part of the country that is typical of many old industrial areas, smaller towns and industrial villages on the edge of uplands and in valleys in the uplands. There are many in Wales. There are certainly many in the north of England. Those areas have suffered economically because the staple industries on which they depended have declined and have almost disappeared in many cases. Fifty years ago, cotton weaving was the dominant local industry in our area, but now it hardly exists. Such areas have had difficulties in adjusting economically, and tourism has a real role to play. It will never be the dominant local industry, but many communities, particularly those such as Nelson and Colne where I live, are located in valleys in the middle of extremely beautiful countryside. In many cases, that has been recognised only relatively recently, as the pollution and the difficulties associated with the old industrial towns have been cleared up only recently. I am talking about the past 20 or 30 years. The Minister will know exactly what I am talking about and exactly the kind of areas that I am talking about. Promotion of the kind of tourism that I am discussing—walking and outdoor activities—in those areas can go easily hand-in-hand with other interests such as bird watching and other conservation interests on the moors and in the valleys and with the industrial heritage. Thirty years ago, when my wife and I served on the local authority and said that we should conserve some of the mill chimneys, many of the councillors laughed and hooted at us. They thought that we were crackers. We may have been crackers—we may still be crackers; that is for other people to judge—but everyone now is very keen to keep the few remaining mill chimneys. They are seen as part of our industrial heritage. In economic terms we can to a small but significant extent use our industrial heritage to promote an area by telling the relevant tales and providing narratives for tourists. In many cases, such as the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, that fits together nicely with outdoor activities such as walking and cycling. Outdoor activities have an important economic role to play, as well as all their other roles, and all of us involved in those areas would like the Government to consider that and perhaps pay a little more attention to outdoor activities and provide a few more resources for them.