Rebecca Pow
Main Page: Rebecca Pow (Conservative - Taunton Deane)Leaving the EU: UK Tourism
Rebecca Pow Excerpts(7 years, 6 months ago)
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Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)
I rise to support my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Nigel Huddleston), particularly on his good points about visa-free travel, airport expansion and VAT on tourism. If we can address those issues and take advantage of the weak pound, there are huge opportunities to build on tourism in this country, and it is crucial that we do so. Public relations and promotion will form a big part of what we need to do to up our game.
Tourism is really important in the south-west, bringing in £10.7 billion. In Somerset alone, where my constituency is, it brings in £1.2 billion. It also employs 10% of the workforce. When the whole of Somerset was recently shut because of flooding, the consequences were dire for rural tourism: we lost something like £250 million as a result. We do not ever want to see that happen again, so we do not want an impact of leaving the EU to be that we see no tourists coming. We do not want a knock-on effect as significant as that. We must therefore make tourism, which is already important, even more significant.
I will look at one area that is a great selling point for the UK, and the south-west in particular—garden tourism, which brings £1.4 billion a year into the UK. Just in my constituency we have Cothay Manor and Hestercombe gardens. Hestercombe attracts 100,000 visitors a year, many of whom are from Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. I have worked at that garden, promoting it for tourism, and there are great opportunities to build on that strength, but we must ensure that those visitors can still get here easily.
I stress in particular the importance of the Government building on all their commitments on connectivity. Our visitors have to be able to get from A to B, and I stress to the Minister that we want the injection of funds to continue.