3rd Jun 2010 - 00:00
Abstract
With the election of a coalition government, the tourism industry has reason to look forward to the future with a greater degree of confidence than it would have if Labour had been re-elected, says Bob Cotton, chief executive, British Hospitality Association (BHA).
The inability of the government in the last 13 years to take tourism seriously had been a major concern to the industry. "Both Conservative and Liberal Democrat pledges to reverse this approach were widely welcomed but pledges are one thing, action is another," he warns. "We look forward to evidence of a greater government belief in the value of tourism to the UK economy, with measures that will enable it to fulfill its potential as one of the country's principal economic drivers." Cotton says that in the last year, very little had been done by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to address four key issues of concern to the industry: not adding to the burden of regulation, not to increase industry's costs, to encourage investment and to promote tourism. "What has the department done to help deliver these four commitments? Very little. The onward advance of red tape continued," he says. In his last annual report before retiring from the BHA, Cotton says that the economic doom-mongers were too pessimistic at the outset of 2009. "The media had predicted that the start of 2009 was to be the opening of a period of economic depression, matched only by the 1930s. Business did not, in the end, contract as much as had been feared, though the recovery is stilted and many member companies have faced an unprecedented squeeze on credit and on profits." In the report Cotton welcomes his successor, Ufi Ibrahim, currently chief operating officer, World Travel and Tourism Council, who joins the association on July 19th.