Funding decisions questioned by ‘bemused’ Welcome to Yorkshire

TOURISM chiefs in Yorkshire have hit out at both the Government and Visit England over what they have described as recent “inexplicable” funding decisions.

Welcome to Yorkshire chief executive Gary Verity said he was “bemused” by the granting of money from the Regional Growth Fund to individual locations rather than the region as a whole.

However, he stressed the future of the tourism organisation “was not terminal” without Government help.

Marketing Leeds and Visit York, organisations that both promote tourism within their respective cities, recently received more than £500,000 each to invest.

The funding, which forms part of the Growing Tourism Locally initiative, a three-year programme coordinated by national tourist board Visit England, aims to create jobs in the tourism sector.

However, Mr Verity said his organisation had been left frustrated after he claimed it had “consistently” been informed it would not receive any funding “because we’re not a destination”.

“Try telling that to the thousands of visitors who choose to holiday in Yorkshire every year, or the many tourism businesses who know how important the Yorkshire brand is in helping them to attract visitors,” Mr Verity said.

Mr Verity said the future of Welcome to Yorkshire was secure without external funding – the organisation now operates on a self-funding model – but he stressed that more impact could be made with financial help.

He said: “What we’ve seen over the last four years or so is that if you’ve got a decent amount of spend, and you spend it wisely, you can have a serious impact and make a big change. But you can only do that if you’ve got some resources.”

He said he was frustrated after being told repeatedly by government officials there was no money available to invest in tourism, that some groups had now benefited.

“Clearly there is money,” he said. “That’s been evidenced and that claim has been outed.”

He added: “We’ve spent much of the last 18 months lobbying government ministers and Visit England to support the work Welcome to Yorkshire does to promote our great county, and we believed we were making progress.

“Only last week the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt singled out Yorkshire as an excellent holiday destination, and the government’s own tourism policy highlighted Yorkshire as one of the country’s ‘attack’ brands which should be developed to compete with London.

“Which makes it even more inexplicable that when it comes to handing out government funds the Yorkshire brand doesn’t get a look in.”

Mr Verity said Welcome to Yorkshire had helped to boost the visitor economy in Yorkshire from £5.9bn to £7bn, creating 4,000 jobs.