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(Photo: Ashley Cooper/Getty/Corbis RF Stills)
With the cost of living biting and the UK’s tax burden at an all-time high, the prospect of an extra levy on your summer holiday is anything but welcome. But that’s what Malcolm Bell, head of Visit Cornwall, suggested last week when he mooted the idea of a Cornish “tourist tax”.
Mr Bell suggested the proceeds could be invested in protecting the environment and upgrading Cornwall’s infrastructure.
Inevitably, the idea drew howls of protest, but tourist taxes are already commonplace across much of the world.
France, Spain, the Netherlands, Greece, Portugal, Austria, Iceland, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy have their own versions (generally levied on accommodation). Just last week, Venice introduced its controversial entry charge of €5 (£4.30) for day-trippers.
As yet, only one place in the UK has followed suit. In 2023, Manchester introduced the City Visitor Charge, which adds a nightly £1 levy for stays in the city centre; Scotland and Wales, as well as several city councils, are considering something similar.
Every summer, four million people – eight times the resident population – visit Cornwall, yet its infrastructure, from hospital beds to roads and reservoirs, remains unchanged. There are twice as many vehicles on Cornwall’s roads in August compared with January. Key services, from A&E to maternity cover, are badly overstretched.
Yet the county receives no additional revenue from the Government to account for the influx: it is residents who foot the bill, in the form of increased council taxes and rampant house prices underpinned by the holiday-let boom.
A tourist tax would be one way of boosting the coffers, but if Cornwall charged a tax, but Devon and the Lake District, say, chose not to, it’s easy to see how that might affect people’s decisions on where to spend their summer break.
Meanwhile, Cornwall is already becoming pricey. Since the pandemic, businesses have increased prices to mitigate rising operating costs. An on-the-day ticket to the Eden Project now costs £42 per adult (£116 for a family of four); hotel rooms are hard to find for less than £200 in summer; even pitching a tent can easily cost upwards of £40 per person. A tourist tax would add another cost to a destination that is rapidly spiralling out of reach for many.
(Photo: Ashley Cooper/Getty/Corbis RF Stills)
So what to do? The obvious answer would be for the Government to provide more direct funding to Cornwall. But with public finances under so much pressure, the likelihood of that happening seems slim to non-existent.
Maybe a Cornwall Community Fund would be something visitors would contemplate if they could see their money making a difference, and if the funds were ring-fenced for something with a direct, visible impact, like cleaning up the beaches, funding lifeguard services, or habitat regeneration. Ideally it would be voluntary, or it could be administered via an optional donation added on to card transactions,.
But it may well be, as Mr Bell suggests, that a compulsory levy may be the only viable solution. If so, Cornwall, like Venice, might be about to find out just how much people are willing to stump up for their week in the sun.
