Stop kicking Welcome to Yorkshire and support tourism by building on positive aspects of its legacy after Gary Verity scandals – Andrew Vine

Welcome to Yorkshire vacuum after wind-up will harm tourism firms due to two-month delay before councils meet – The Yorkshire Post says

I told the person concerned they were wrong. Whatever its mistakes, this was an entity that had done an immense amount of good for our region, and its loss should be a matter of regret.

Full disclosure – I worked with Welcome to Yorkshire on a book three years ago. I neither sought, nor was offered, any payment for the collaboration.

What I found there was a group of hard-working, conscientious and enthusiastic

staff completely committed to helping our county’s tourist industry grow and thrive.

There was a time, not too long ago, when hardly anything was done to promote Yorkshire as a tourist destination, apart from our seaside resorts and York.

The occasional television series, including the original All Creatures Great and Small and Heartbeat which used Yorkshire locations, produced an upsurge in interest in the wider county as a place to visit, but the potential to develop a valuable tourist industry went largely untapped.

WtY changed all that. It promoted Yorkshire with vigour and imagination not just in Britain, but to the world via cycle racing, and without it we would not have a tourist industry worth £9bn a year.

Despite all that has happened, especially the disquiet over its former chief executive, Sir Gary Verity, this is an agency that could point to many more positives than negatives on its record and it deserves thanks for that.

The decision to place WtY into administration came as no real surprise. Too much had happened, not least the strain placed on council budgets by Covid, for it to continue in its familiar form.

Without downplaying the seriousness of WtY’s failings, its legacy is a solid foundation for the future of Yorkshire tourism.

We need a tourist body that shouts about Yorkshire and keeps the visitors – and their money – pouring in, especially now that a resurgent post-Covid package holiday industry is tempting them abroad after two years of enforced staycations.

But the decision by Yorkshire’s councils to delay a decision on what should succeed WtY until after the local government elections in May is a mistake that needs rethinking.

Yes, everybody knows council budgets are tight, and there needs to be a long, hard look at how any new tourist body is funded and operates, especially in terms of oversight and accountability.

Even so, there is a risk here that by not acting sooner to put something in place on an interim basis, our tourist industry will not get the support it needs. Easter, the traditional start of the tourist season, will be past and so probably will most of the peak summer weeks before anything much is agreed, let alone funded and set up.

Owners of businesses that rely on visitors for their living – usually small, family-run enterprises – have endured a torrid enough time without now feeling that too little is being done to bring tourists in. In talking to quite a few of these business people – guest house and café owners among them – they tell me that they are far from out of the woods after the losses inflicted by Covid. Savings have been plundered and loans taken out to stay afloat, and this summer needs to be a good one if they are to survive.

They still need all the help they can get, and that means keeping Yorkshire in the forefront of people’s minds as a destination for their main holiday of the year or shorter breaks.

There is a reservoir of expertise in how to do that amongst what remains of WtY and its staff, who cannot in any way be blamed for the scandals that beset the organisation in recent years, which have all essentially been failures of management. Can no way be found to utilise their knowledge and professionalism for the benefit of our tourism industry in the coming summer?

That is a question that councils ought to ask themselves. There would then be time enough to agree long-term plans for a new organisation during the autumn and winter, when the need for hands-on promotion of what Yorkshire has to offer is less pressing.

It is time for the kicking of WtY to stop, because it achieves nothing. Instead, the county needs those who have responsibility for supporting a hugely important industry to learn from the best of what WtY did, and build on it.

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