Unlocking sustainable tourism in Cornwall and Scilly – Mark Duddridge
For 10 out of the last 11 years Cornwall has been voted the top UK holiday destination in the British Travel Awards.
Two decades of private investment worth hundreds of millions
of pounds has elevated our visitor economy into the premier league of places to
visit.
Tourism is now a two billion pounds a year industry,
supporting more than 52,000 jobs and accounting for around 20% of all
employment locally. On the Isles of Scilly, roughly 85% of all economic
activity is tourism dependant.
Tourism industry lost
£750m of income
It’s an understatement to say that 2020 has been a year like
no other. The 13-week lockdown in April, May and June cost our tourism businesses
an estimated £750m in lost revenue. In the UK, tourism revenue is forecast to
be down by £68.6 billion
And we saw how inter-related tourism is to other industries
– visitors to Cornwall spend more than half a billion pounds on food and drink in
a normal year, and £220m on attractions and entertainment.
When visitors were permitted again from July 4, we saw two
million people arrive in just 12 weeks, many of whom had abandoned their
traditional sunshine holiday overseas to vacation at home.
Covid has given us a
glimpse of a tourism future we do not want
And although we coped with that influx, there is no doubt
that Covid-19 has foreshadowed what could be a growing issue. The pandemic
basically concertinaed an entire tourism season into just a few short months. The
instances of littered beaches, clogged car parks and jammed country lanes brought
into sharp focus the fact that in some areas we do suffer from ‘over-tourism’.
That’s not new, and to an extent it’s something we have
accepted as the price to pay for living in a beautiful part of the world. But
it’s not sustainable. Covid has opened many positive avenues for change, but
it’s also given us a glimpse of a tourism future that we don’t want. One in
which more overcrowding and congestion impacts negatively on local communities,
harms the environment and leads to a poor visitor experience.
Managing growth in a
sustainable way
Tourism is a growth industry, and an opportunity for our
region. The challenge is to manage it in a sustainable way. Even a conservative
estimate of 1% annual growth would mean an extra two million day trippers a
year by 2030, and 660,000 more staying visitors.
But simply adding more visitors to our existing pattern of
peak-to-trough seasonality is not what we want in terms of jobs, steady income,
our environment or our experience of living in Cornwall.
Instead we need to focus on getting the tourism we want,
where and - importantly - when we want it. There needs to be far less
seasonality and more investment in targetting new markets that will bring
visitors where and when we need them.
Opportunity for a
regenerative visitor economy
Growth isn’t a dirty word, but it has to be ‘wise’ growth.
And instead of just trying to do less harm, there is an opportunity for our
visitor economy to be regenerative, to reverse the cycle and actually restore
what we have lost, from biodiversity to cultural heritage, while respecting and
investing in our Cornish host communities.
The visitor market is changing, and we must change with it.
Visitors are less sightseers than ‘sightdoers’. They want experiences that
enrich their lives, and many of them want them closer to home, mindful of the
climate emergency and other threats like covid and the uncertainties of post-Brexit
travel to Europe.
The distinctive natural environment, culture and identity of Cornwall
and the Isles of Scilly is what so many of our guests want to tap in to. It’s a
huge strength. They also want quality, and research shows travellers becoming increasingly
adverse to the risk that their trip will be sub-optimal, and their precious
leisure time wasted.
The need
to do things differently
If we are going to sustain a top-ranking visitor destination while
tackling climate change, creating wealth for our local communities and
protecting and enhancing our natural environment, then we need to do things
differently.
We need to flatten the peak, delivering quality, year-round jobs
where there are clear skills and career pathways. We need to retain more visitor
spend in the local economy, so it is recycled many times over, and above all we
need to manage capacity, so we do not destroy the very thing that makes our
area so precious.
There’s an argument for encouraging people to visit our less busy
places to try and spread tourism more evenly across the region and take
pressure off honey pot areas. The notion of ‘sight-doing’ is crucial to this,
encouraging and stimulating people to be inventive and seek out new experiences
in different places. One of the impacts of Covid has been people’s greater
appreciation of the natural world. What better place to give them a better
understanding of their environment and their place in it than Cornwall and
Scilly?
There are many tools to achieving these aims, from Social Tourism
voucher schemes that enable disadvantaged families and frontline workers to
holiday out of season, to public transport in which the LEP has invested
heavily to make it easier for visitors to get to Cornwall and Scilly, and to
get around when they’re here without reaching for the car keys every day. We
need more investment in our rail and bus and electric vehicle infrastructure if
we’re to decarbonise the visitor economy.
Sustainable
tourism strategy
To help drive this whole debate the LEP has commissioned
Cornwall’s tourism trade body, VisitCornwall, to lead a four-month discussion
across industry, higher education research, and local and national Government
to develop a sustainable tourism strategy for our area.
I firmly believe that Cornwall and Scilly can be exemplars in low
carbon tourism and hospitality, while ensuring our businesses remain
profitable, competitive and sustainable. Our goal is to retain a vibrant
visitor economy and increase the value of tourism, while improving the quality
of life for residents and visitors alike.
Mark
Duddridge is Chair of the Cornwall and isles of Scilly Local Enterprise
Partnership.