World Expo: United Arab Emirates

(asked on 16th November 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for International Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade, if she will make an estimate of whether the number of people who attended the UK pavilion during the EXPO 2020 in Dubai was higher than her Department had anticipated in advance of that event.


Answered by
Andrew Bowie Portrait
Andrew Bowie
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
This question was answered on 22nd November 2022

The UK pavilion recorded 1.1 million visits. To note ‘visits’ does not necessarily equate to separate individuals, who may have visited more than once. The number of individual visitors is not known.

Although not directly comparable, for planning purposes, the UK at Expo 2020 anticipated 10% of overall visits to the wider Expo event which was based on visitor attendance at the previous Expo. The organisers of Expo in Dubai announced 24.1m actual visits, whilst the UK registered 1.1m, equating to 4.6%. Our assessment is that this was due to the much larger scale of the Dubai Expo, and the site configuration which resulted in less overall footfall past the UK Pavilion.

The number of business contacts was not set or captured as a key success metric.

The cost to design the pavilion was £2.83m. The cost to build and maintain was covered under one contract and therefore these costs are being finalised as decommissioning (including dismantling) of the pavilion has only recently been completed.

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