Welcome to Yorkshire administrators make 11 redundancies at tourism agency

Rob Adamson, Mike Kienlen and Daryl Warwick of Armstrong Watson LLP were appointed as Joint Administrators of Welcome to Yorkshire on Tuesday after council leaders announced they would no longer be providing the tourism agency with public money.

A statement from the administrators on Wednesday night said 11 of the organisation's 23 members of staff were made redundant on Tuesday.

The statement said: "Welcome to Yorkshire had a number of ongoing projects at the time it was placed into administration.

"The joint administrators are engaging with the various stakeholders to determine whether these projects can continue in the short term whilst they seek to establish whether a buyer can be sought for the business and assets.

"Whilst this process is ongoing, the business is operating using a reduced workforce. Regrettably, 11 employees were made redundant yesterday, with the remaining 12 members of staff currently being retained.

"The Joint Administrators are aware that Welcome to Yorkshire have a large membership base and the subscription position will be reviewed in the coming days. The Joint Administrators have been advised that all advance subscriptions were held separately by Welcome to Yorkshire. All relevant parties will be contacted in due course.

"Regrettably, a number of events that were due to take place in the coming weeks will now be cancelled – affected parties will be contacted as soon as possible."

It comes as it was revealed the planned new tourism agency to replace Welcome to Yorkshire look sets to be funded through contributions from local councils.

Council leaders announced this week that would be stopping funding to the region's current official tourism agency Welcome to Yorkshire, resulting in the company collapsing into administration.

The Yorkshire Leaders' Board, which includes the region's council leaders and metro mayors Dan Jarvis and Tracy Brabin, intend to set up a new Destination Marketing Organisation for the county in the place of Welcome to Yorkshire.

The leaders opted against setting up an 'inhouse' local authority-run service but are planning to create a DMO that would be funded with taxpayer cash.

Welcome to Yorkshire is a private company and was funded through a mixture of public sector funding from local councils and membership fees from local tourism businesses. Councils paid individual subscription fees to WtY, with considerable differences in the support they provided and some local authorities refusing to give funding in recent years.

But it is intended that the replacement model will ditch the membership fee model and instead be based on guaranteed public sector funding.

The decision of council leaders followed a report by Merran McRae, a former chief executive of Wakefield and Calderdale councils. Her report has not been published by the Yorkshire Leaders' Board has released a summary of its findings and the board's subsequently agreed actions.

It said a membership model "is shown to both distort strategic intention and compete with stakeholders" and argued that a multi-year funding package would provide certainty and allow the new DMO to focus on "delivering for Yorkshire, not for individual members".

The review said while businesses would receive a universal free service, there would be opportunities to sponsor specific events and campaigns.

The summary said the Leaders' Board is to begin a consultation with tourism businesses and other stakeholders "to ensure a new delivery organisation is designed to meet all possible interests as well as building in the key features noted in this report".

It added: "Yorkshire councils will open such consultation with an agreement that the funding model should not be membership based but should be a collectively managed grant from Local Authorities as core funding, with business sponsorship for specific campaigns/events, and that Local Authorities should have a collective, rather than individual, relationship with the new organisation."

The Yorkshire Leaders' Board is to establish a 'local authority project group' which will create a plan for how the new DMO will be governed and will also "finalise the costs for a new DMO and the total local authority grant needed". The group will also assess how much each local council should pay in and establish a timetable for setting up the new body.

An initial report will go back to the Yorkshire Leaders' Board, which meets in private, in May.

The review also highlighted the recent publication of the Government-ordered De Bois review into the governance of tourism agencies, which set out proposals for potential Government investment in top-performing DMOs.

Nick de Bois, a former Tory MP and chair of the VisitEngland Advisory Board, said in August that DMOs “are here to stay” but warned taxpayer funding for them has “all but evaporated in the last decade” with local authorities spending £127m less on tourism in 2017/18 than they did in 2009/10 - meaning that tourism agencies have increasingly had to devote more time chasing income from private members rather than focusing on their core purpose of promoting their regions.

“Core funding would give DMOs the breathing space and firm foundation they need to support a strategic agenda and lean-in to the Government’s tourism priorities, and I do not think the Government can expect high potential DMOs to consistently and substantively support them without it,” his report said.

The review, which was prompted by the struggles of the tourism industry during the pandemic, has put forward recommendations to move away from the “confusing” DMO term and create a nationally accredited system of tourist boards.

These would be split into two tiers - a top tier of ‘Destination Development Partnerships’ that would receive guaranteed Government funding and a second tier of smaller accredited tourist boards that would be members of the local partnership and get financial support from the top tier organisations.

The review said the top tier status could potentially be awarded to city-region sized tourist boards “or to a coalition of willing accredited Tourist Boards within an area that come together under a lead board”.

However, the de Bois review proposals are yet to be formally adapted by Government, with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport currently considering whether to adapt the recommendations.

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