Another stealth tax
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We will just stay at home and go for short day trips avoiding low emission zones and 20 mph speed limit zones.
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Kj
It wouldn't need to be decided who pays as it would be applied equally across the industry. Even your home country is thinking about doing the same and Norway is hardly regarded as the cheapest place in Europe to holiday?
On the wider issue, why do so many people look at such suggestions so negatively? This country is hardly working at the moment. It's not because organisations that provide our services are particularly inefficient but they are starved of funds and the only way that can be corrected is take more away from those that already have very little or we all pay more tax. A tourist type tax would be focused on those that can afford to go on holiday and as SteveL pointed out way back in the thread the reality of such a tax does not massively impact the cost of a holiday. The people that propose such taxes are also not very good at pointing out the benefits that such a tax could bring to a local community. It is a bit like the debate on road pricing some years ago. There was uproar with the suggestion and yet many of the people protesting may well have been far better off with that sort or regime.
David
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It seems the fairest way to get money surely-if you want it you pay for it. I have no problems with that, If I think it is extortionate I won’t pay/visit. If these places are starved of funds from central Govt then they will try anything. We are being short changed in many areas, I fear right now we are being pushed into the USA system of ‘no pay no play’. Tourist tax is just another vehicle to make up the constant shortfall of funds🤷🏻♂️
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I have no problem with a tourist tax or paying for what I use but I think we are already paying it in many towns, cities and coastal resorts under another guise. And that is public loos. I'm guessing but I think most users of the loos in popular places are the tourists rather than locals. These loos used to be free, (paid for, though, by local council tax payers) but now many are charged for. It used to be, in recent years anyway, 20p, then 40p and now, in some places 50p a time, quite a lot to 'spend a penny' .The income from the loos must out-way any potential tourist tax income which is only levied on those staying overnight and not the myriad of day visitors. This loo charge seems to be an England thing more so. During a two week stay Wales last year I don't recall having to pay to use the loos at all. I can't comment about Scotland.
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Yes paying for Loos is a bit weird when you have to use a card and your bank statement states how many times you've used the local loos on holiday (that's me in Devon recently!
)If a small tax helps local services and infrastructure it might ease some of the problems but some places get extremely overcrowded and can barely cope with or without tax. St Ives is probably one of the worst areas for general overcrowding, a victim of it's own success. We were in Padstow recently and that has suffered from "over tourism" and is looking tired and less attractive.
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So not a tourist tax, but an accommodation tax.
Norway is a terrible place for taxes and never ending red tape, I am really glad I do not live there any more, so not a country I think we should be looking to copy!
It is generally very expensive, but right now the kroner has plummeted against the £ and other currencies, so a little less expensive for foreign tourists at the moment. Downside is my pension has also nosedived, and of course, Norwegian tourists are finding it rather pricey to travel abroad.
A flat rate charge would greatly impact less expensive accommodation such as hostels, CLs/CSs and MH stopovers. The next CL we are using is £15 per night, and there are still some that cost less, so an extra £2 would be a 13.33% increase.
At the risk of getting too political, the problem with some of these taxes is that they may end up being in addition to rather than instead of others, which is what I reckon motorists thought about road pricing.
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John
Unfortunately the other side of not charging is shutting them down as has happened in so many places. Toilets not being available is a very stressful thing to many people who I am sure would be happy to pay the amounts you mention. In Europe you are often charged €1 or more to use their public toilets! A tourist tax could specifically could be used to provide free toilets, existing, refurbished and new ones.
David
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Personally I don't mind if we have to pay a tourist tax, we do all the time in France.
My only concern is that I don't trust the government (local councils will decide in Scotland) to spend the monies raised on making tourist experiences better. I read that Edinburgh should benefit by 6 million pounds a year.
This might happen initially but in a year or 2 will it just get wasted as so much of our taxes are.
The Scottish government have a very big gaping hole to fill, they seem to be unable to do simple maths, why should I and others give them more money to throwaway.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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
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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. 🤔
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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.
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Regarding money that tourists bring into local economies when Baltic Wharf became threatened with closure estimates of the loss of tourist expenditure reached a few million pounds but this was destined for private hands including CAMC. The problems arise when local public infrastructure investments can't keep up with demands and these are funded by local rate payers eg roads, water, sewage, car parks, hospitals etc so tourist taxes would go some way to alleviating the ever increasing public costs. However bigger costs are funded by all of us via government allocations so tourists taxes would only plug a few gaps but probably better than nothing in the long run?
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There are a few sources online showing estimates of what could be raised from a tourist tax. One suggests £428m a year for all local authority councils. Another suggests £216m across 62 cities considered. The latter picks out keys locations, like York, Edinburgh and Blackpool, that would have expectations far above the average. They estimate £6.2m a year for Blackpool for example.
Even if toilets were to charge 50p per visit that's about 34,0000 visits every day of the year - so far, far more than that in season.
Referring to the OP: It is by no means only Scotland which has considered a tourist tax; it would be quite wrong to single out the Scottish Government for criticism. I was wondering if it is fair to call a tourist tax a stealth tax? A stealth tax is a levy that is not recognised as a tax by most people or which people may not even be aware of. On that definition, I think a tourist tax is a stealth tax. Some people see VAT as a stealth tax.
On balance tourist taxes seem like a good idea to me. My guess is that the impact on demand would be marginal. They are common overseas.
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Beyond our preoccupation with toilets a couple of worthwhile uses I can see a tourist tax being used for are perhaps providing a local authority with the seed funding to build proper parking, both day and night for motorhomers so it is not a burden on the local population. Having had the funding to set such things the resulting parking fees could further enhance the LA funds. Also such a tax could provide funding for local community amenities like swimming pools and theatres which would benefit both visitors and local residents. With a bit of imagination so much could be achieved. It wouldn't happen in five minutes but the opportunity is there.
David
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So would the parking fees for such motorhomes have incorporated into them the tourist tax? Must do for an overnight stay at least?
If not then it could be viewed as other tourist's paying the tax in other overnight accommodation are subsidising MH use?
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One supposes it would depend on how the rules were set up but I assume if its a nightly accommodation tax (for want of a better word) motorhomers staying overnight in a car park, and being charged, should pay it. I can't immediately see a reason why they shouldn't? I don't see where subsidising motorhomes comes into it. I was suggested that money raised through the TT could, not would be, used to provide the facilities, so no need to use local funds and once built the LA could decide a level of nightly fee, including TT, to charge. Those fees would have to be at a level to pay for future maintenance and hopefully provide a stream of future income, probably fairly modest, back into council coffees so really a win, win for all. This is only a think aloud exercise on my part and I sure you and others, as indeed would the local authorities themselves have a totally different set of priorities. I think I am just trying to sell the positive possibilities of such a tax. What would your priorities be?
David
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Well if the money raised by non motorhome owning people paying their tourist tax in any other overnight accommodation is used to provide and build MH parking then they most are subsidising MH in my view.
My priorities, a bit too strong a word, but I would expect the money to be spend on things for all tourists and/or for the benefit of locals having to cope with increased numbers.
I've nothing against a tourist tax at all and I've been paying it for years abroad and it's not an issue, it's where I want to be and so be it.
Actually as we went as a family last September we stayed in a rented accommodation rather than the family home in Florence so we payed it. But I couldn't find one local who knew what happened to all the money.
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It appears that you don't read many (if any) reviews of CMHC sites, as numerous reviews comment on the food and drink in pubs, cafes/ restarurants. and often fish and chips shops, as well as the products in farm shops, local butchers and other local shops which they have patronised in the locality and recommend, so they do actually contribute to the local economy. As for supermarkets, how do you know which supermarket or which car park they use? When I am touring in my van, if I use a supermarket, I simply use the one which is nearest to the site! I would point out however, that German Supermarkets source many of their produce in the UK, as other supermarkets do.
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+1, I travelled to sites with enough provisions for the day the rest was bought from the areas shops & eateries. I love seeing life in different areas & real life is in the shops👍🏻. Being addressed as ‘moy Luvver’ in 3 different shops in the south West area was great with similarities in Yorkshire-without a hat-‘baht ‘at👍🏻😊
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Kj
Can't remember the last time I went to a pub to just have a drink, not really my scene either. Yes to have a meal or a lunch or even sometimes a coffee. I suppose places like Cornwall would benefit more from a TT than other parts on the country albeit it probably only be very seasonal?
David
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