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Tourism

My Lords, I am the third Liberal Democrat speaker, and whether I am the third wise monkey or part of a triumvirate remains to be seen. I shall try to confine my remarks to one of the main problems with tourism in this country: getting information out to visitors about what we have to offer. The visitors might come from the locality itself, just up the road, or from abroad. The network of tourist information centres throughout the country should be the first port of call for anyone looking for information about what is on offer in this country. I have been led to believe that they are under threat because local authorities do not have to give them money. They need money to get the information out there. They are not a mandatory service. The reason why they are so important was hinted at in the speech made by my noble friend Lord Greaves. Tourism in this country is not passive or contained. If you are going on a beach holiday, you do not go to Britain. You do not get constant sunshine where you can slob out, have a drink, have a meal just down the road and walk back again. You cannot guarantee the weather for that relaxing time of not worrying about doing anything. A degree of activity is required to be a tourist in this country. My noble friend at times painted an intimidating picture of going on holiday and marching up and down hills. I was brought up in East Anglia, where walking is a rather more gentle pursuit, because the best we can do there is rolling countryside. Where I currently live, on the Berkshire/Wiltshire border, we have real hills, but I do not know whether they are up to the standard that my noble friend is used to. That is very much a part of British tourism. It is easy enough to find out where the trails are if you are slightly informed. The real thing that backs up the whole process is where you stay, where you eat and where you go for your little trip out halfway through. In this country you have to be active, and there is a lot to see. There is historical built environment everywhere. Where I come from in East Anglia we have the great houses of the land magnates of the early 18th century who first decided that industrial agriculture could really pay, and to show off how much it paid they built huge houses. On other occasions, Members of your Lordships’ House would say how difficult that was once things like global trade and trade coming from across the Atlantic took away the money bases, but the houses are there. Other types of built environment with a historical basis are in other parts of the country. Indeed, industrial heritage tourism is a growing attraction for many people. All of those are there, but they are complicated; you need to have information to find them. You need to know how you can integrate the activities. You need to know what you can do that brings everything together so you have a series of things to do. The big cities have a huge advantage, especially the historic ones. Even in London it is a fairly brisk walk between most of the big attractions in the centre. The simple reason is that when they designed the city they had no choice; you had to be able to walk across large parts of it. It breaks down slightly because the city has become so big, but most other cities, for example my home city of Norwich, the city centre is compact, because it had to be. That is nothing unusual, so those cities will do well for our purposes. When you go out to smaller communities that are either connected by a walk or a short drive, you need information to find the interesting bits and the local attractions. It is all about information. Unless we give more emphasis to finding out what is there we are going to miss a trick. There have been several suggestions about how we do that. One is simply to push more money in from the local authorities. If I suggest that, I am sure that there will be an armed posse waiting for me outside from my own party, let alone any others. More money could be called for from the Government; then again, someone can always coffin wave about some of the other things on which I am keen, such as disability rights. Are we going to use the private sector? That sounds attractive, but if you subscribe to a service and it has to tell people where competitors are as well, are you going to buy in? That is an important factor. If only those who buy in are allowed to provide the service, is it worth consulting? I put that forward as a situation in which the answer is core funding from some form of government, with some regulation to make sure that advice is to a degree impartial. I do so because I had the experience at a conference recently of phoning somewhere up and, when I asked for some information that was not to do with that booking agency, I was told that it was thought that the place would soon close. More details can be provided outside the Chamber, as I have not warned those people, but saying that is a bad example of, ““When you buy in, you own””. Will we allow such information to be pushed forward better? Do the Government have a vision of a network where we will always be able to find some information about local areas? It would have to reflect the character of a local area and show a degree of local knowledge and training. Somebody from it should always be able to guarantee that I will get the right information for my needs. Simply having a good website will not do. If you do not know what is on offer, you probably do not even know which box to start ticking. If it is something of which you have not heard—if you do not know that there is a local history of museums, or of cloth production in the north of England if you come from the south—you will miss it, so we need people manning the network who can guide you through at least the start of the process. If the Government will take the matter on board, they must set standards and provide some form of funding or regulatory framework. If they do not, we will simply underutilise many of our assets and leave many people who would like to pay visits to places in this country booking the next flight abroad, where they know that they can get either a very passive holiday or at least something different—something that their neighbours have not seen.