TAITMAIL As one Gate closes, another fails to open
The die is cast, the gamble of a tourism tax – will it raise enough to offset the downturn in foreign visitors some predict, will it be the bonanza many others are promising it will be, what will the income be spent on ? – is on. And the squabbling begins.
The starting pistol was the Overnight Stay Levy Bill introduced last week by the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, as an adjunct to Burnham’s devolution to more powerful strategic authorities and their mayors.
“Our amazing towns and cities, and our picturesque rural and coastal communities welcome millions of visitors every year – local leaders should have the power to make the most of that popularity’ she'd told the House. “This measure will give mayors the choice to raise and reinvest funding where it’s needed most (my italics). It’ll help support the local services, public spaces and attractions that both residents and visitors rely on, with decisions taken by people who know their area best.”
There will be no cap on what mayors will be able to levy. Edinburgh plumped for 5% for its first year in 2026 (that includes the festival month when the hotels of Auld Reekie put up their rates by four or five times; it reckons to have made £50m) and London’s mayor would go with it. At that rate it would raise, according to various estimates, anything from £600m to £1.2bn (about half of what local authorities spend on culture now), shared around the merry mayors of England.
But how will the money be spent? However the mayors please, the bill will say, and “where it’s needed most”. Steve Rotheram, Liverpool’s answer to Manchester’s Andy Burnham as was, says his city’s visitor economy is already worth more than £6.8bn a year and 55,000 jobs. “A modest levy on overnight stays could potentially raise up to £18m a year – money that would stay here and be reinvested directly into the events, culture, experiences and infrastructure that bring millions of visitors to our region”.
But Brian Houchen wished to make it “extremely clear” to the House of Lords that that there will be no levy in the Trent Valley while he is its mayor, because of the doleful effect it will have on businesses there relying on overnight stays and on the poor English families that will be forced to holiday abroad because of the massive additional costs in the UK. He was much more interested in whether the ability to raise the levy would also give the mayors leave to reduce local taxes. In other words, replacement funding.
So mayors and putative mayors are musing that the money would be very useful for keeping the streets clean for our tourist visitors, to providing subsidised public transport for our citizens, for keeping our parks tidy on whose landscapes visitors could enjoy the packed lunches provided by their attentive hotels.
But this is no revolution in the offing. More than 40 countries already have some sort of hotel tax including Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Canada and France, charging between the equivalents of 50p to £14 a day. Manchester introduced a “city charge” a couple of years ago through the kind of tax loophole that allowed national museums to offer free admission 25 years ago (some of them are saying this is up for debate now, in the shadow of the hotel levy which The Times tells us would be used to keep them free). This year Scotland have introduced its own hotel levies, Wales will follow suit next year.
Meanwhile, museums, concert halls and theatres, especially theatres, are being assailed by rising costs and dwindling subsidy, many of which have built international reputations based partly on taxpayer support.
For 50 years one such as been the Gate Notting Hill, and now we have the doleful news that it will close at the end of next month. For ever, after what it called "several years of survival in a precarious funding climate".
“Its closure is an acute loss for our industry and for artists” said the Gate’s interim executive director Alice Linnane. “Like so many arts organisations across the UK, we have been operating in an incredibly difficult climate. Funding that reduces in real terms year on year, rising costs, and a fiercely competitive fundraising environment have left many of us living hand-to-mouth, and this has unfortunately become impossible to sustain.”
There’s an emotional lurch as well as a cultural one when a place like the Gate goes. How many thousands of memories are there of climbing, glass in hand, up those steep back stairs to the room over the Prince Albert with the butterflies of anticipation at the prospect of seeing the likes of Jude Law, Robert Stephens, Rachel Weisz, Alex Kingston, Kathy Burke and Sam Shepherd performing in the tiny space that saw the careers of Giles Croft, Stephen Daldry, Laurence Boswell, Erica Whyman and Thea Sharrock after being artistic directors here.
Sadly that didn’t cut it with the Arts Council three years ago when it removed 100% of its subsidy, 45% of its total income. The Gate left the Prince Albert and tried to make a go of peripatetic production partnerships. It tried to be inventive about fundraising and risk-sharing, as recommended by ACE. It hasn’t worked.
The income from the hotel levy is to be left to the strategic authorities and their mayors to place, Burnham wants them to have a free hand. How many of them will spend it on so far unsupported but vital aspects of life like art, how many will see it as Ben Houchen does as just another source of funding for what they already do?
Places like the Gate are the foundries of our globally admired art of theatre, they are the workshops where our drama and its presentation are crafted. Yet there is no mention of them in the words of vague and imprecise good intention in Rayner’s bill.
The Gate lies, or lay, within the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea which has an income of around half a billion a year, the biggest sources being council tax, government grant and parking/rents etc. It has no arts budget but allocates a modest £60,000 a year in arts grants, £160,000 to be an ACE music hub, £4.63m for parks and gardens. It has never given anything to the Gate, nor does the mayor. Would any of the levy profit be channelled to this gem of a playhouse? They haven’t shown any interest in 50 years…
By all means let Burnham’s new mayors have their free hand for their communities, but where is the fire brigade to prevent our Gates from being razed within those communities by a system that has already failed?
Each strategic authority should have to undertake to set aside, say, 10% of this new money as a survival fund for the creativity that not only feeds us locally but is the basis of our universal reputation.
This should be about a gate opening, not closing.