We need a single voice to promote every corner of Yorkshire and champion tourism in the region - Andrew Vine

So why aren’t we shouting louder about it all? And why aren’t we doing so with a single voice to promote every corner of Yorkshire?

There is massive economic benefit to be had from the tourist trade, but we simply aren’t exploiting it as vigorously as we should be, and that needs to change.

Last week’s announcement by Visit North Yorkshire of a 10-year strategy to attract more visitors provides a perfect illustration of why much more should be done across our county as a whole.

The body, run by North Yorkshire Council, deserves every praise for its plan to target high earners from London and the south-east looking for “aspirational family fun”.

It’s a great idea and everyone in Yorkshire should wish the council well in its aims. We’re an ideal destination for affluent visitors with money to spend and we’ll be only too glad to welcome them.

But if we’re really going to reap the maximum benefit from our friends and neighbours from the south, we ought to be selling the county as a whole.

While wishing Visit North Yorkshire every success, a fragmented approach of promoting individual areas of the county isn’t going to make the most of our tourism potential.

And the scale of that potential is illustrated by what North Yorkshire hopes to achieve – a boost to the area’s economy by a fifth, on top of a tourism trade already worth £4bn which supports 38,500 jobs.

If that was replicated across all of Yorkshire, the benefits for the county would be huge.

There is a pressing need for an integrated, county-wide approach to attracting visitors. Other areas do it, even those with far less to offer than us. Just over the border from North Yorkshire, the north-east is marketing itself to visitors as a single entity. If they can do it, so can we.

But of course, there is an obstacle in the road to doing so. And we all know what that is. Welcome to Yorkshire.

When the county’s tourism agency sank into administration in 2022 after its final years were marked by scandal and financial mismanagement, it left local authority bosses wary of ever again giving scarce public funds to a body over which they had too little influence.

In the aftermath of Welcome to Yorkshire’s collapse, a very senior figure at one of the region’s biggest councils said to me: “Never again. How could I ever justify putting money into something when I don’t know how it’s being spent?” It’s a powerful point, especially when councils were already having to cut services to balance the books.

Yet the disquiet – and in some quarters, anger – at what happened at the old Welcome to Yorkshire have tended to obscure that the body did a great deal of good before things went wrong.

It transformed what had been a sluggish tourism marketing operation for Yorkshire and scored some notable successes, including staging a production of The Railway Children at Waterloo Station in London, and, most spectacularly, bringing the Grand Depart of the 2014 Tour de France to the county’s roads.

Surely it should not be beyond the wit of this county to take the best of what Welcome to Yorkshire achieved and use that as a template for a new marketing drive, with all the benefits but none of the flaws of what went before.

The obvious way to make that happen would be for Yorkshire’s elected mayors to join forces.

They are already working closely together for the benefit of the entire region, and coming up with a county-wide tourism strategy could only boost those efforts, especially when the final piece of the Yorkshire devolution jigsaw is in place with the election of the first mayor for Hull and East Yorkshire next year.

Tourism offers a valuable prize for Yorkshire if we are only willing to seize it. It is arguable that the county’s public profile has never been higher, thanks not only to hit television shows such as All Creatures Great and Small, but the exposure that Bradford’s status as next year’s UK City of Culture will bring.

We should capitalise on that high profile.