After a decade at the helm of the British Hospitality
Association, Bob Cotton is bidding farewell. In this retrospective he
describes some of the changes that have taken place in the past 10 years
- and makes a suggestion for the future.
Little did I
realise, when I took up the appointment at the British Hospitality
Association (BHA) in January 2000, that a year later the two biggest
dramas to hit the industry for many years would erupt.
The first,
the foot and mouth outbreak, inflicted £5b of damage on UK tourism. I
found myself with the then tourism minister, Janet Anderson, in TV
studios in New York, trying to explain to the US audience that foot and
mouth was not the same as mad cow disease, that British meat was safe to
eat and that Britain was not a land of vast funeral pyres of cattle.
The second drama, of course, was 9/11, which made 2001 an annus
horribilis.
In 2003 SARS hit the headlines. Then in 2005 came
the 7 July bombings in London. And lastly, the economic recession, which
began to swirl around the industry in 2008, gathered pace in 2009 and
is still with us.
The industry has survived all these events and I
think I can claim that the BHA has played its own part in overcoming
their impact. Certainly, in 2001 we persuaded the Government to help
tourism regain the initiative with £15m of additional funding to
VisitBritain (matched by an equal sum from the private sector) as well
as a temporary postponement of VAT and PAYE payments.
A HIGH POINT IN GOVERNMENT RELATIONS
Looking back, that was perhaps the high point of our relations with
the Government. Since then, regulation has piled upon regulation,
funding has been cut back for VisitBritain, and tax breaks for new hotel
construction have been abolished. It is as if Whitehall has decided
that tourism is not worth taking seriously.
Noticeably,
regulations and voluntary schemes are now beginning to pour not only
from the Government but also from its agencies, like the Food Standards
Agency. Here, caterers and restaurateurs are under pressure to introduce
costly calorie-counted menus and healthy food dishes in support of the
Government's anti-obesity campaign.
The fact that the Government
does not appear to understand the value of tourism and wants to tie it
up in red tape gave birth to our Take Tourism Seriously campaign, which
the Tourism Alliance launched in 2008. Although this message more or
less fell on deaf Labour ears, we can only hope that the coalition will
be more receptive. We shall see.
PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE
But we -
the industry and BHA in particular - have made progress. When I joined,
our annual lunch was attended by just over 130 people. We had more than
1,000 at our centenary celebrations in 2007 and this year, we'll welcome
over 800. If anything, this signals a growing and sustained interest in
the association and all it does for the industry. Even so, we recognise
that we have to get together with other associations to make our
combined presence felt.
We have helped to create new alliances -
the Tourism Alliances in England, and Wales and the Tourism Forum in
Scotland, for example. We were a key party to the creation of the Safe
and Local Supplier Approval scheme (Salsa) to help push local produce.
We've worked closely with Business in Sport and Leisure and the British
Beer and Pub Association - the latter in fighting the tariff increases
of Phonographic Performance, a case we recently won with a £15m payback.
We were instrumental in forming the Best Practice Forum.
And we
campaigned successfully against the introduction of a bed tax - though I
suspect this will re-emerge.
Meanwhile, the industry has
developed hugely. We estimate that investment in new and refurbished
hotels during my tenure in office is in the region of £30b, with more
than 1,000 new hotels - in all categories - offering well over 80,000
new rooms. There are 40,000 new rooms in the pipeline.
Here,
there has been a fundamental change. Major hotel companies have become
hotel operators; few are now hotel owners. The development of
franchising and the growth (and investment) in brands by major operators
is changing the structure of the industry.
But it is not just
hotels that have improved in number and quality. We have more
Michelin-starred restaurants than ever before - 115 - many of them run
by British-born and trained chefs who now confidently appear on
television - a medium that has opened up the industry and given it a
huge platform from which it can prosper.
Another sector, food and
service management, or contract catering, has grown into a £4.2b
industry, with one British company, Compass, acknowledged as a world
leader.
And of course advances in technology have yielded
enormous benefits, with state-of-the-art systems in the front and back
offices. In restaurants, too, technology has led to direct, online
bookings and to other developments, which transmit customer orders
directly to the kitchen and prepare bills automatically.
Finally,
our training schemes are producing high quality young people who match
any worldwide standard. This is not to say we do not need more of them -
we do. Training must continue because we need to recruit nearly one
million people in the next few years to take account of leavers,
retirement and expansion; skilled staff mean fewer staff. Staff
turnover, however, remains a problem though employers appear to have
taken the message on board: train to gain. The Hospitality Skills
Academy, which I chair, is helping by identifying the best colleges and
the best training schemes.
DEVOLUTION
AND LOBBYING
Devolution has meant that the BHA's
lobbying efforts now have to extend to both Scotland and Wales as well
as to London and Brussels. The regional development agencies, with their
varying degrees of interest and support in tourism, can be difficult to
engage; indeed, they may not last long under the present Government.
Local authorities, to which devolved powers will increasingly transfer,
are even more difficult to influence.
At the same time, the EU
has become ever-more powerful, driving much of our domestic legislation.
More than ever before, we now spend time lobbying in Europe with our
partners in Brussels - HOTREC on hotel and restaurant issues, and FERCO
on contract catering issues.
And talking of lobbying, the
introduction of 24-hour news and the raising of the BHA's profile puts a
new burden on the association. Requests for radio and television
interviews, often at very awkward hours, are now commonplace; 10 years
ago they were a rarity.
TOURISM
DEVELOPMENT
What of the future? I believe the
industry should have one overwhelming objective: to drive home the
message to Government that tourism, hospitality and leisure is the main
economic driver of many regions of the UK (even London) and needs to be
nurtured if it is to reach its full potential. Other countries, from
Spain and Italy to Dubai and China, have fully recognised the value of
their tourism industry. Why not Britain?
In 1969, the Labour
Government introduced a Development of Tourism Act, which certainly took
tourism seriously. Now, despite several tourism framework reviews since
1969 (one of which I was involved with when I was tourism adviser at
the DCMS in 1999) a new Development of Tourism Act, with input from the
industry, is sorely needed.
Its aim would be to establish the
right tourism structure in Britain. At present, there are far too many
organisations involved in tourism, many competing against each other,
some more competent and knowledgeable than others, but all without any
coherent comprehensive strategy to take the industry into its next phase
of development. In other words, we need to take tourism seriously.
Will
the Government recognise the need for this? Let's hope so. Tourism and
Government have muddled through for the last 10 years. Surely we can -
and must - do better in the next decade?
ACHIEVEMENTS AND CHALLENGES
The
BHA's top five achievements
1.
Bringing the hospitality industry together (including taking in the
Restaurant Association) and creating a more coherent approach to
government
2. Persuading the Government to aid
the hospitality industry so significantly after the foot and mouth
outbreak in 2001
3. Helping to create the
Tourism Alliances in England and Wales and the Tourism Forum in Scotland
4. Winning the bed tax argument
5.
Winning the recent case against Phonographic Performance
The
BHA's five biggest challenges
1.
Persuading the Government to understand the contribution that
hospitality and tourism can make to the UK economy
2.
Persuading industry to invest more in training to improve standards of
service
3. Ensuring that the industry is
represented by one strong trade association; governments don't listen to
individual companies
4. Persuading industry to
take sustainability issues seriously
5. Ensuring
that the Government recognises the dangers and costs of excessive
regulation
