Lord Freyberg (CB)

My Lords, I declare my interest as a visual artist. Amendment 4 in my name is a small but important clarifying amendment. It simply adds the words “including through tourism” to paragraph (d) of Clause 2, which already defines “economic development and regeneration” as a core “area of competence” for strategic authorities. This reflects the Local Government Association’s view that tourism should be explicitly recognised in the Bill rather than left implicit. Tourism is not a marginal activity; it is one of the principal ways in which economic development and regeneration happen in practice. It supports local jobs, sustains town centres, underpins cultural and heritage assets and brings external spending directly into communities. In many places, particularly outside the large cities, it is the economic driver. I have deliberately not proposed tourism as a stand-alone category nor sought to incorporate it into the important Amendment 6 tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, to which I have added my name. His amendment rightly strengthens the strategic recognition of the arts, heritage and creative industries. My amendment is narrower and more operational. It simply makes it clear that tourism sits within economic development and regeneration, which is how local authorities already understand and deliver it in practice. Too often, tourism is grouped alongside the arts and creative industries in local authority structures, where its scale and commercial focus can unintentionally shape priorities and funding conversations that are not directly about culture itself. Placing tourism clearly within economic development helps to maintain that distinction while allowing cultural policy to retain its own strategic clarity. This matters particularly in the context of the Government’s emerging work on a visitor or tourism levy. Even at modest levels, published estimates suggest that such a levy could raise hundreds of millions of pounds a year in England and potentially over £1 billion annually if applied more widely—sums that would exceed Arts Council England’s entire annual capital budget and be comparable in scale to a decade of lost local authority cultural investment. In the Cultural Policy Unit’s helpful paper A City Tourism Charge—the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, will no doubt develop this point further on Amendment 6, with which I entirely agree—there is a strong and well-evidenced case that a significant proportion of any such levy should be invested directly in cultural and heritage assets, which are often the very reason that people visit in the first place. For strategic authorities to play a meaningful role in shaping and deploying such tools, tourism needs to be clearly within scope. Without explicit inclusion, there is a risk that tourism falls between stools—assumed but not quite owned. This amendment provides clarity, not prescription, and I hope that the Minister will see it as a proportionate and helpful addition.