Tourism leaders slam SNP strategy

Published on Friday 16 March 2007 01:05

THE SNP's plans to eliminate the cabinet post of minister for tourism threatened a "severe setback" to the £4.2 billion industry in Scotland, tourism leaders said yesterday.

The remarks came at the Tourism Hustings, the climactic public event of Scottish Tourism Week in which MSPs from all the main Holyrood parties apart from the Liberal Democrats were questioned by industry representatives on their plans for the future of the industry.

Alan Rankin, chief executive of the Scottish Tourism Forum, which staged the event with the Tourism Society Scotland, said that expelling the minister answerable to the industry from the top table of government would send the "wrong signal to the industry".

"I think when the industry is growing as it as it is, when Scotland is attracting more visitors than elsewhere in the UK, continuity in the structure of leadership is very important," Rankin said.

"The industry has spent two years working with a ministerial department and the result has been the very positive and popular policy document the Tourism Framework for Change [TFFC]. All that time and effort to this and it has been attracting increasing buy-in from the public and private sectors working together.

"Although the SNP has never said it would tear up the TFFC, introducing a sea change in policy and strategy would set us back severely."

With the SNP, the Conservative Party, the Green Party and the Scottish Socialist Party all advocating increased decentralisation in the management of the industry, Rankin defended the TFFC, published in March last year, as a "market-forces, bottom-up document, not some top-down bureaucratic dictat".

"It would be a step in the wrong direction if we were to lose the present interaction between the industry and the minister. We need someone sitting at the cabinet table who knows how tourism cuts across education, transport, sport and culture," he said.

Earlier in the session Brian Adam, the Aberdeen North MSP and SNP deputy tourism spokesman, laid out his party's plans to merge VisitScotland with Scottish Enterprise. While he pledged that an SNP-led administration would not cut Scotland's tourism marketing budget, he declined to provide details of how the SNP's proposed new tourism body, to be re-titled "Welcome to Scotland", would sit within a refashioned enterprise agency.

Adam said Alex Salmond's leadership would be enough to direct the tourism sector, even at one remove from cabinet. Asked if Salmond had any special interest or expertise in tourism, he said: "Alex Salmond has a strong interest in growing the economy".

INDUSTRY 'MOVING UP THE AGENDA'

THE second Scottish Tourism Week concludes today with a series of grass roots events.

The "Politicians Challenge" asks councillors, MSPs, MPs and MEPs to participate in tourism businesses in their area. "Back to the Floor" requires tourism managers to work alongside staff "to find out first hand how their business is delivering the customer experience".

Outgoing chief executive Alan Rankin hailed the week as a success, saying the increased involvement of politicians indicated how tourism was "moving up the agenda in Scotland". The themes of the week were the need for businesses to collaborate to tackle local level industry representation and remaining problems over the controversial website VisitScotland.com.