Another stealth tax

DK wrote - A tourist tax could specifically could be used to provide free toilets, existing, refurbished and new ones.

If a tourist tax is to be levied it should be made law that that tax is used to pay for local services that the tourist is expected to use, such as toilets, information boards, Park and Ride, even road/beach etc maintenance.

There is a dire need for decent public toilets in many small towns and rural parts of Scotland, ones that are open 24 hours.  What use is something only open 9-5.30 as quite a few seem to be!

I think that of all the tourists we get in Cornwall the caravanners and Motorhomers who stay on Club sites contribute less to our local economy than any of the others.

Club sites are not locally owned - they are part of a national chain - the profits go out of Cornwall - and are the Clubs employing local people as wardens these days or still bringing in staff from outside? So little local employment there.

Caravanners and motorhomers arrive with half a weeks food brought from home and typically top up after that from one of the German supermarkets to cook their own meal every evening.  I never see them in my local butcher or farm shop or the village pub in an evening.

Sure they buy pasties and crab sandwiches, but that’s about it - they don’t often eat out in an evening - they sit in their awnings and watch television.

I doubt if they even go into Newquay. And they avoid Council car park charges by bringing National Trust cards and using NT car parks for free.

We subsidise visitors to Club sites by paying council tax.

Moderator comment: Post slightly edited. 

I think that’s rather a jaundiced view, Euro, although I’ll not deny there’s a small element of truth in it.

If people shop in supermarkets, irrespective of which, or use NT car parks and buy an ice cream or use the cafe, they are contributing to the economy of our County and helping those businesses employ staff. They buy fuel in our garages which again helps the local economy and employment situation. I bet most will visit an attraction or two and patronise the occasional olde gifte shoppe. Most will inevitably pay to park during their stay as you know as well as I that NT car parks don’t exist at all the coastal beauty spots and certainly not in towns.

Yes, we pay hefty Council Tax but so do the various camp sites. There is no doubt in my mind though that tourists do stretch our resources.

David, what I am saying is that local authorities probably get far more income from public loos than they would do from an accommodation tourist tax. 

It is a few years since we visited Cornwall, with caravan, no doubt the crowds in the school holidays have increased since then.   We went in September, and that was bad enough.

Our son and family will be in Cornwall in July, just before the school holidays, and I hope they will feel more welcome than we must have been. 

They are renting a cottage for a week, so will be shopping locally, visiting places, and probably eating out a few times, but they are young (ish), still working, well paid, and can afford to do so.

When we go away in our caravan, which are the only holidays we take these days, we spend longer away than they do (11-12 weeks per year  over 3 trips), and live like we do at home.  

At home we very rarely use farm shops, they are expensive compared to supermarkets, we do use Lidl and Aldi, but also Tesco, Waitrose and M&S.   

We rarely eat out ,  and we do not visit pubs.  We prefer to cook good food at home, and will often have a glass or two of wine with our meal.  

 We could not afford to eat out frequently while on holiday.  If we did, the holidays would need to be a lot shorter!   We do however make a point of eating a light lunch there when we visit a NT property.   NT membership is not cheap, why should we not make use of the car parks  when we find them?

We do bring the contents of our home fridge with us, not to do so would be very wasteful, but I'm  afraid, when we visited, we did not buy any pasties or crab sandwiches!   But we did spend a good bit on diesel.

Our council is not in what we would consider a tourist hot spot, nor do we have any Club sites in our county, so I do not feel we are subsidising tourists, but our council tax is about £500  more than yours, and we already pay over £1000 per year for water and sewerage, so not exactly a low tax area!

John

I do really somehow doubt that. It does not mean that if there were a tourist tax that suddenly those councils would stop charging for toilets, they would probably want their cake and eat it. To me the first order priority is having public toilets available for use whether they are free or charged for. One could also argue that paying a fee to use a toilet might well cut down on antisocial behavior. 

David

I wouldn’t baulk at paying a tourist tax. However, sadly like much of the taxes we pay, once paid, Joe Public has little control over how those taxes are used, and the integrity of the people administering those funds.

It’s a bit of a vicious circle really, most of us would agree that much of the country’s basic institutions and needs are getting ragged around the edges, but there doesn’t appear to be anything in the offing beyond bits of sticking plaster, and how any such taxes would be used isn’t clear. Hence a possible degree of hesitancy. 🤔

David,

I'm not saying for one moment that toilets would become free if a tourist tax was introduced. But look at the figures. Basing my assumptions on my French experience, a typical tourist tax is/was 1 Euro per person per day so let's say £1 in UK.  My assumption is that there are more day trippers to a city / resort than there are people staying in accommodation. If the loos were only 20p per time it only takes 5 uses by day trippers to equal the tourist tax paid by one person. A simplistic calculation but, I believe, a realistic one.

If one takes my own area as an example, Dovedale in the Peak District in Derbyshire has hoards of day trippers but relatively little in the way of accommodation in the area. The loos there are 20p per visit. At 2 people per minute using them that is an estimated income of about £200 per day from just one facility. And that is on top of the car park charge.