Tourism sector not taken seriously due to ‘snobbery’, MPs told

The managing director of strategy and operations at London & Partners has told MPs that the tourism sector is not taken seriously due to “snobbery”.

Allen Simpson said the industry was “socially important” and one of the few areas where school-leavers could progress into management and leadership roles.

Simpson was speaking during a hearing with industry representatives at the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee last week.

He was representing London & Partners, a social enterprise that promotes the capital to an international audience and receives half its funding from the Greater London Authority.

Simpson said: “[Tourism] has never achieved the level of focus at national government level that it should do, and I think that is part of a wider social disinclination to take the sector seriously which I can put down to nothing other than snobbery.”

When asked whether he would like to see the position of tourism minister moved from DCMS to another government department, he said having a minister “sit at a different desk” was not the point.

Simpson said: “The question is do we socially and governmentally take this sector, which is one in five jobs in London, as seriously as we [should]? We tend to call London a financial services city, it’s more accurate to call it a tourism city, but [people] wouldn’t see it that way.”

The panel also discussed the need to encourage tourists visiting London to take further trips around the UK and how the sector could make use additional government funding.

Simpson said small hoteliers could use funds for practical things which required time and money, such as setting up taking payments from China and advertising on foreign language websites.