Travel industry associations have warned that plans to allow regional mayors to set their own overnight visitor levies in England could damage the competitiveness of the UK tourism sector, with concerns raised about the impact on visitors, businesses and destinations.
The Government confirmed yesterday it is going ahead with plans for a ‘tourist tax’ in England and said it will be up to mayors to decide what the levy should be.
ABTA Director of Public Affairs Luke Petherbridge said: “ABTA believes the introduction of overnight visitor levies across England will further damage the competitiveness of our tourism sector. As such, we are disappointed the Government has chosen to proceed with this policy.
“The decision to pursue a percentage-based model, which has already been recognised to be problematic in Scotland, is especially concerning and should be reviewed. It is critical that mayors now engage with the sector before they take decisions on the local level.
“While we don’t agree with this new tax, should mayors choose to introduce these levies, the money raised from visitors must be put back into improving the services they use and enhancing local tourism offerings.”
UKinbound CEO Joss Croft OBE said the proposed levy risked creating unnecessary complexity for businesses.
“The Government appears to have chosen the most complex and least practical way possible to introduce an overnight visitor levy in England,” he said.
“A percentage-based model will create unnecessary administrative burdens for tens of thousands of businesses across England, add complexity for visitors and risks repeating many of the challenges already emerging in Scotland.
“We support the principle of a national framework, consultation with businesses and residents, and allowing mayors to decide whether a levy is appropriate for their area. However, today’s announcement focuses on the wrong parameters.
“Rather than pursuing a percentage charge, the Government should use the implementation period to work with industry on a nationally consistent fixed banded model that is simpler for visitors to understand, easier for businesses to administer and provides greater certainty for destinations.
“The Government now has an opportunity to get the design right before implementation and should rethink its approach without delay. Businesses that operate in the UK’s fifth largest export sector need this assurance.”
Meanwhile, Business Travel Association (BTA) Chief Executive Clive Wratten said he was ‘genuinely angry’ about the overnight visitor levy and challenged the description of the charge as a tourist tax.
Posting on LinkedIn, he said: “Calling it a ‘tourist tax’ gets it wrong from the start. It shows a real naivety about who actually stays in hotels.”
Clive said a 5% levy across London room nights could raise over £1.5 billion a year, with business travel contributing around £385 million.
He said that is ‘money coming straight out of company travel budgets, training programmes, and taxpayer-funded public sector trips, not holidaymakers’.
He added businesses will be penalised ‘for doing nothing more than sending their people to work’.
“Think about the engineers rebuilding this country’s infrastructure, staying in budget hotels for weeks at a time. The junior employees sent on training courses to a site miles from home. The public sector officials attending conferences, with the levy paid straight out of taxpayer funds. None of that is tourism. All of it gets hit.”
Clive said the BTA, along with other organisations are ‘warning that this risks making Britain’s cities less competitive at exactly the moment we should be attracting investment, events and business to the UK’.
