I’ll be speaking at this Inside Government event on 7th December in London.  My talk will examine the links between economic development and tourism in the UK, in the context of the economic crisis.  Click on the image below to go straight to the event booking page which has a list of all the invited speakers.  I’ve copied some of the information about what looks to be an excellent day underneath.

Tourism is essential to Britain’s economy. Government statistics show that tourism generates £97 billion each year, employs over 3 million people and supports thousands of businesses. The government aims to help tourism achieve its potential as a central part of Britain’s growth strategy.

Britain’s landmarks, monuments, countryside and culture attract visitors from all over the world. Major international events such as the Royal Wedding, Diamond Jubilee and the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games provide a great opportunity to boost tourism, showcasing what Britain has to offer, and created a sustained tourism legacy.

Developing the visitor economy is a priority for the coalition government. The Government Tourism Policy, published in March 2011, aims to harness the potential this area holds to grow Britain’s economy. Objectives include growing the overseas market across the country using London 2012 and other sporting and cultural events, strengthening the domestic tourism market, increasing private sector investment and increasing flexibility for local tourist organisations. There is also a focus on improving Britain’s international gateways and national transport infrastructure.

The tourism strategy is driven by a local agenda. Destination Management Organisations will work with Visit England, local authorities, local enterprise partnerships, and local businesses to regenerate and market their area in the most effective way.

A £100 million partnership marketing fund, co-funded by the government and the private sector, will aim to draw 4 million extra visitors to Britain over the next 4 years, which equates to a £2 billion spend for Britain’s economy, and 50,000 new jobs. The government has also announced the Regional Growth Fund (RGF), worth £1.4 billion, which supports projects that use private sector investment to create regional economic growth and employment.

Agenda

This forum comes at a time of exciting growth for the sector, and will offer delegates the opportunity to understand the implications of the new government tourism strategy in boosting the tourist industry. Key issues to be discussed include strategies for promoting the growth of the visitor economy, and best practice for delivering services, partnership working and localism.

Speakers include representatives of:

Department for Culture Media and Sport

Visit Britain

ABTA

Olympic Park Legacy Company

People 1st

National Trust

Broads Authority

British Library

Marketing Birmingham

*photo courtesy of Chris Campbell: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cgc/

 

The Olympic Park in Legacy mode

This is a free event, although you will need to book, and once the details are available I will post up more information on the event and a link to the OPLC booking page on here.

The reason for this is that the Games, like all mega-events, has a life-span that far exceeds the event  itself.  The pre-games period, of bidding, winning and preparing for the Games is hurtling to a close.  This is the period in which to build capacity, market incessantly and to plan.  The event period itself will be over in a flash.  In 2007, the manager of a branch of a major hotel chain told me how two floors of his hotel in East London had already been booked up by an American news network for their staff to use during 2012.    Many of the immediate opportunities presented by the presence of the event itself have already been monopolised by large companies who had access to the capital needed to invest in anticipation of the Games, and let’s not forget the licensing arrangements of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG), which means that opportunities to profit directly through providing services, merchandising or human resources are tightly policed.  Admittedly, I’m taking quite a narrow focus here.  It is possible that the cities and regions with their own Olympics strategies will benefit from increased tourism during the Games.   Outside of the South-East of England however, how many areas have a coherent and well-resourced policy for leveraging the benefits of this mega-event outside of the capital?  How many tourists will really want to extend their stay beyond the Games period outside of London and will any want to base themselves outside of the boundaries of high-speed rail and commute to the celebrations?

The period in which meaningful policy development can still have an impact and businesses, government and universities can still engage is in the post-games period and into the legacy phase.  The defining feature of London’s winning bid to host the 2012 Games was its concentration on the long-term benefits of hosting the event on infrastructure, social regeneration, education and sports participation.    I make no claims to an understanding of the relationship between elite sports, event hosting and increasing sports participation in the general public other than to say that the evidence for any linkages seems mixed, at best.  For the most authoritative views on this subject, check out Professor Mike Weed’s blog. 

 Disaster recovery

In many ways, the immediate post games period is going to feel like the aftermath of a disaster in London.  There will be a dramatic drop in visitor numbers to the city and the Olympic park and its surroundings will become inhabited once again by security guards and construction workers.  The parks and streets will feel less like “the world’s greatest party” and more like the opening scene from 28 days later:

Click on this image to watch the opening sequence from the film

Navigating successfully out of this disaster without creating a legacy of disappointment as the adrenaline of the games goes sour in East London’s system will depend on a number of factors; I’m going to concentrate on two here: creating meaningful opportunities for volunteers, and innovations in the local tourism industry. 

For many of the army of volunteers being recruited to help deliver the Games, this will be an opportunity to gain work experience, network, and to work towards qualifications.  Can we create meaningful opportunities for these volunteers to continue to develop their skills and to meet their raised aspirations?  Creating a reserve army of labour for the big society won’t support meaningful economic development in the deprived areas of East London that the Games are supposed to help, and may produce a downward pressure on local wages, encouraging out-migration and worklessness.    During the pre-event period of the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, unemployment in the city halved, mainly thanks to the creation of 59,382 jobs directly connected to the games.  Immediately after the games, unemployment rose again by 21,000, before falling again in 1995 (Brunet 2009).   The employer concords that have already been put in place for the construction work connected to 2012 should be extended to align volunteering opportunities during the games with meaningful post-games opportunities, for those who want them, to take part in mentoring programmes, internships and education and training.  This is an opportunity to upskill the entry levels of the tourism, events and leisure sectors in East London and to make sure that continuous improvements in tourism product quality can take place in the post-games period, helping to re-position East London as an innovative tourism brand.

Innovative tourism developments are going to be fundamental to avoid the serious over-capacity issues that have plagued Beijing and Athens in the post-games period.  Between 2005 and 2008, Beijing’s hotel sector grew by 227% and the number of available rooms rose from 6,452 to 37,360.  This over-supply has led to downward pressures on room rates and drops in confidence in the accommodation sector, accompanied by staff reductions and hotel closures.   In the same way that Barcelona is always used as an example of a ‘successful’ Games, Athens has become a by-word for redundant stadia and rotting facilities. 

Athen's Olympic Stadium: Hopefully West Ham FC will do a better job....

But innovation in tourism does not happen over-night. The Government’s new tourism policy should be seeking to support an innovation infrastructure for tourism right now.  This will mean encouraging partnerships between higher education, the private sector and social enterprise, with the public sector holding the ring.  Small pots of money to support entrepreneurial activity, knowledge transfer and product development should replace top-down destination management schemes and local authority controlled tourism networks.  Government can do this through designating tourism enterprise zones, with tax breaks and incentives to attract new businesses and to stimulate existing business to take on new staff and develop new products.  Moving Shoreditch’s Silicon roundabout to the Olympic Park won’t produce new forms of tourism that create opportunities for Olympic volunteers, or make full use of the excellent transport infrastructure that will connect East London to the tourism hotspots of the city.

 It is time to move tourism policy beyond a blind faith in the positive impacts of hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games and to start concentrating on what come next.  Supporting innovation now will mean that the investment in trained and motivated volunteers won’t result in a de-motivated bulge in the local labour market post-2012.  Creating exciting new tourism experiences for a post-2012 tourism market can’t be done by decree, but a supportive innovation infrastructure could create an environment in which creative tourism entrepreneurs can flourish, creating the products that make use of the accommodation, transport and services that are being put in place for 2012.

Most coalition policy so far has been put together at speed, based as it is on a document written in haste to cement a coalition between two parties with, at the time, very different agendas.  I’m hearing rumours however, that ministers and officials are now beginning to devote more time to meetings and consultation and that there is an acknowledgement at a high level that ministers need to invest more time in developing policies with depth and buy-in from the people and organisations that they affect.   This may explain the long delay between David Cameron’s very early announcement that tourism would be a key industry in the recovery and the eventual production of a policy to support this aspiration.  Let’s hope so. 

Tourism policy in the UK has often fallen between departments and has meant that the tourism industry has often struggled to be heard in the cacophony of industry voices expecting to have the ear of government.  A strong policy statement on tourism, supported by departmental commitments would help to position tourism in the public eye and help organisations and individuals working the industry to contribute to the growth that our economy so desperately needs.   When Labour came to power in 1997 on a wave of Cool Brittania excitement, it was clear that they were championing the cultural and creative industries, which had a galvanizing effect on that sector, which saw employment growth, led by creative industries exports and underpinned by state support for training, networking and promotion of creative producers.   This government’s new tourism policy should be equally bold – situating tourism as a key industry for sustainable economic growth and championing the success stories of UK tourism to domestic and international markets. 

My next few posts on this blog are going to be suggestions for where the state can intervene effectively in the tourism industry to support entrepreneurial, sustainable growth, led-by SMEs in the  private sector, but supported by an enabling state.

“Like all pre-games publications, this text suffers from the problem of grappling with an event that is yet to happen, in a policy environment subject to radical change.  However, by bringing together a diversity of perspectives on the relationship between hosting the games and urban development in one volume, it forms an excellent resource for anyone trying to understand how and why we got to where we are today in East London and the regeneration potential of a successful Games in 2012.”

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Concentrating on price promotions runs the risk of initiating a ‘race to the bottom’ in domestic tourism, a deflationary pressure that may, in the medium to long term, reduce the resources available to tourism businesses, especially SMEs, the tourism sector who were the most damaged following the last major recession.  The lack of investment in domestic tourism in this period significantly affected product quality in the sector, as well as having a structural impact – removing diversity of supply from the market and further affecting perceptions of quality in the face of homogenization.

Introducing new competitive pressures in times of recession may help to ensure the survival of the best resourced, but I hope that our state tourism bodies will also be promoting new forms of partnership and supporting product innovation in the domestic tourism sector.  The economic pendulum will swing back eventually, probably some time around or after the 2012 Olympics in London, and if the UK tourism industry is to be able to capitalise on the promotional benefits of this event it will need to maintain its diversity and the huge improvements in quality and destination image made over the last fifteen years.

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“This paper proposes the development of a memetic framework for analysing and evaluating the Cultural Olympiad of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.  A review of grey literature has revealed five recurring themes or memes (units of cultural transmission) associated with the Cultural Olympiad and the authors predict that they will be transmitted spatially, through planning and delivery processes and between the formal sectors of the Cultural Olympiad.  The paper proposes a methodology which includes a longitudinal study of three UK case studies in the four year run-up to the 2012 Olympics. These case studies (London Borough of Greenwich, Canterburyand Durham) will be the subject of quantitative and qualitative analysis which the authors hope will reveal valuable insights into the frequency, transmission and longevity of the identified memes.  The memetic framework proposed may provide future guidance for the planning and evaluation of public projects both within and outside the Olympic realm.”