Tourism and Crawley

While councils by their nature are designed to work at the very local level, inevitably the decisions taken by central government affect our ability to deliver. As a single organisation our voice doesn’t carry much weight, so over the years councils have formed various organisations together to try to increase our lobbying impact, the most significant one being the Local Government Association and a few years back I was privileged to serve as a member of their board for Culture, Tourism, and Sport.

Of all the LGA’s committees at the time, I wasn’t hugely happy to be given that particular assignment. As a council leader, I had developed specialised knowledge of local government finance and my main interest was housing policy, but I’m a team player so I started attending the meetings.

The views of the LGA do actually carry weight with government and non-departmental public bodies, so I found myself dealing with various senior decision-makers involved in culture, leisure, tourism and sport. While it hadn’t immediately dawned on me, I began to suspect that ‘tourism’ was the reason I had been put on that committee, for while Crawley isn’t an obvious destination in its own right, more tourists travel through Crawley every day then almost anywhere else in the UK. Our economy remains bound up with tourism, no matter what efforts the council goes to in order to diversify local industry.

Today marks the start of English Tourism Week, a week when various organisations try to sell the attractiveness of England to tourists, both those at home and overseas. While we certainly want the UK to prosper as a tourist destination, Crawley clearly has mixed interests here. On the one hand, we want England to be an attractive destination for people to visit from overseas, but on the other, we can’t afford for too many people to stay at home for the holidays. So, while I hope the week goes well for Visit England, I’m very much hoping they are targeting their adverts abroad.