the cheesecake man wrote: ↑Wed Jun 15, 2022 20:41
Can of worms ahoy!
I often visit the Peak District, using roads etc that residents pay to maintain and I do not.
So it is not unreasonable to suggest I should pay some form of tourist tax to contribute?
But
I may well be paying the relevant council or National Park Authority handsomely to use their car park.
I will probably spend some money in local shops or other businesses, which are paying VAT/rates/national insurance/insurance premium tax/corporation tax/other taxes, many of which would not survive hence not pay those taxes without visitors from Sheffield, Manchester, Burton on Trent etc.
So do I really owe any more? Would residents really be better off without tourists? And why the focus on tourists? I am working in Morley this week so the wear and tear I am causing to roads maintained by Leeds City Council is no different (actually it's more because I have two passengers and heavy luggage), so why shouldn't I have to pay for that instead of Owain having to pay for it?
If the tax applies to overnight visitors only, why should they have to pay but not day visitors?
Also many Derbyshire residents visit Sheffield, Manchester etc for shopping, work, cinemas etc, using roads that I am paying to maintain. Should they not also pay a tax to reimburse me?
Or is all this already dealt with in the government's distribution of taxes to councils?
Well now road maintenance is the responsibility of the Highland Council so any tourist tax would presumably have to apply to the Norther Highlands which is just of well as there really aren't that many hotels on or near the NC500, if you include campsites , B&B's , Holiday Cottages etc you would increase the take but the season up there is not long and I really do wonder how much that would raise when you figure in the costs of collection. At the very least you would have to include Inverness to make it pay. Realistically I suspect at a minimum it would apply to Northern Highlands
I dug a little deeper into the income received by Highland Council and found this.
Our revenue budget for 2020 to 2021 is £633 million. This is met by grants from the Scottish Government, Non-Domestic Rate income and Council Tax income. The amount to be met by the Council Tax is £144 million. Band D for 2020/21 in Highland is £1,332.33, a 4.84% increase on 2019/20.
The actual repair work is apparently managed by Transport Scotland
A little more digging provided some numbershttps://
www.hie.co.uk/media/3037/nc500plusecono ... us2017.pdf
Number of visitors recorded in total on NC500 98,842 - lets say 100,000 in total assuming that each visitor is there 4 days and is charged £2 per night that would raise around £800,000 - lets be generous and call it a million
Realistically to make difference I suspect it would have to applied not to just the Northern Highlands but to Skye/Kyle of Lohcalsh, Inverness, Aviemore and Fort William.
These are the number I got from Visit Scotland for 2019
The Highlands attracted 17% of all overnight trips and 13% of the total overnight tourism expenditure in Scotland. At 2.9 million, the number of overnight visits was 30% higher than in 2018.
It looks as if anything promoting areas such as the NC500 has worked quite well but the question is do you want to apply taxes to every hotel , B&B etc in the Highlands to raise revenue to maintain the roads that make up the NC500
The next piece of information needed is how much the NC500 costs, fortunately some sent in a FOI request and the only separate cost they could identify was that for the signs which amounted to £80,000. It turns out that most of the damage to the roads is down to potholes and obviously occurs in winter due to frost heave. In 2020 of course very few visitors arrived but the winter weather still damaged roads.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/transport ... on-3180908