Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, whether she has made an assessment of the potential impact of the cost of hiring a car on holiday makers in the UK.

The Government does not generally intervene in how businesses choose to conduct their activities or offer their products and services, which is essentially a commercial matter. Business should be free to compete on matters such as quality, service and product pricing.

Provided consumers are not misled and able to make informed decisions, companies offering goods and services are free to offer their products and services under conditions of their choosing and consumers are able to choose those products and services or shop elsewhere for products and services which meet their requirements.

The Government is committed to supporting the tourism industry which is why we published the Tourism Recovery Plan in June 2021. It sets out the role of the government in assisting and accelerating the tourism sector’s recovery from COVID-19. The TRP sets out our ambitious and stretching targets to recover inbound visitor numbers and spend, and recover domestic overnight trip volume and spend, to 2019 levels at least a year faster than independent forecasts predict.