Welcome to Yorkshire must be shut for shaming county – Yorkshire Post letters
WELCOME to Yorkshire – what an advert for the county! This embarrassing apology of a company should be shut down immediately and a public inquiry held into the misuse of public funds.
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Hide AdAll councils contributing money to it should immediately suspend their payments until a public tourism body is set up.
My own local authority, Craven District Council, is to consider whether to make a £180,000 bid to host a start of the 2020 Tour de Yorkshire and has been paying Welcome to Yorkshire £10,000 a year since 2010.
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Hide AdThis is at a time when local authority services are being cut to the bone due to austerity.
Apparently Gary Verity and Welcome to Yorkshire have done very good work for the county. Have they? Figures about the millions of extra visitors and the billions of extra revenue generated are trumpeted.
If these are true, then I congratulate them on a great achievement. But where do these figures come from? Do they come from the company and have studies been done to verify them? If so, are the studies they truly independent?
You may have noted I have been referring to Mr Verity and not Sir Gary. That is because he should be stripped of his knighthood!