Tourism in Lancashire
2006
December 2007
This article uses official government statistics to consider employment levels in the Lancashire Tourism industry. Anyone wishing to obtain details of tourist attractions and/or accommodation in the county should go directly to visitLancashire.com.
Introduction
This article uses results from the 2006 Annual Business Inquiry (ABI) to assess the numbers of employees in the Lancashire Tourism industry. Tourism is one of the most important economic activities in the UK. It not only has an economic impact, but also has a strong influence on other factors such as quality of life and improvements to cultural activities that are of benefit to local inhabitants.
Tourism in Lancashire is not just restricted to the leisure market, but also includes commercial visits, day trips and overnight stays, as well as internal visits within Lancashire. For these reasons the industry is best viewed as a market rather than a sector as it impinges across a wide variety of businesses. These range from historic houses and gardens, tourist offices, tour operators (which are solely devoted to serving tourists), through to hotels and restaurants (which primarily although not exclusively serve tourists) to sport and recreational activities, transport services and retailers, a proportion of whose turnover may come from tourists. Also, the businesses that serve tourists directly are supported by a variety of other (often local) firms, from food and clothing manufacturers and distributors to laundries, car hire firms and many others.
A variety of businesses in Lancashire have been listed in this article. Their inclusion emphasise the problems of trying to identify employees who should and should not be allocated to the tourism sector because of the range of services that can be undertaken by a single company. Multiple sites owned by a single business (some of which may be outside Lancashire) can also cause problems. Mention is also made of the fact that the official classification of tourism employment excludes a large number of employees whose jobs are virtually exclusively dependent on tourists visiting the area.
Tourism Employment
Table 1 details the Standard Industrial Classification headings from the Annual Business Inquiry that together present a definition of employee jobs in the Tourism industry. Tourism is one of the largest employment sectors in the Lancashire NUTS-2 area. In 2006, the total of tourism-related jobs in Lancashire was 56,800 or 9.4% of all employees in employment in the county, a full 1.7 percentage points higher than the percentage for Great Britain.
Arguably, it would also be valid to include within the official definition of "tourism" such entertainment activities as concert and theatre halls, fair and amusement parks, etc. These activities (classified within SIC 92.3 'Other entertainment activities') would add a substantial 3,200 jobs to the "tourism" total in Lancashire. It is only necessary to think of the Blackpool Pleasure Beach Theme Park to be aware that tourism employment is narrowly defined and that a broader classification would have a noticeable impact on the Lancashire results. Section 92.3 also includes employees at establishments such as the Dukes Playhouse in Lancaster, the Grand Theatre in central Blackpool, the Marine Hall in Fleetwood and the Thwaites Empire Theatre in Blackburn.
The Winter Gardens in Blackpool is a theatre, but also a conference and events facility and may or may not be classified in this section depending on what is the main activity at the site for purposes of the Annual Business Inquiry.
The ABI figures also take no account of the self-employed and there are also likely to be many family/casual workers who escape official statistics altogether.
| SIC Code | Activity Heading (SIC, 1992) | Lancashire NUTS-2 | North West | Great Britain | |
| Number of Employees | % of All Employees | % of All Employees | % of All Employees | ||
| 55.1, 55.2 | Hotel and other short-stay accommodation | 11,600 | 1.9 | 1.4 | 1.3 |
| 55.3 | Restaurants, cafes, etc. | 14,500 | 2.4 | 2.4 | 2.2 |
| 55.4 | Bars, public houses and nightclubs | 16,000 | 2.6 | 2.4 | 1.9 |
| 63.3 | Travel agencies and tour operators | 2,800 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 0.4 |
| 92.5 | Libraries, museums and other cultural activities | 1,700 | 0.3 | 0.4 | 0.4 |
| 92.6, 92.7 | Sport and other recreation activities | 10,200 | 1.1 | 1.6 | 1.5 |
| Total Tourism | 56,800 | 9.4 | 8.6 | 7.7 | |
| Source ONS - Annual Business Inquiry, 2006 | |||||
The Hotel and other tourist accommodation classification (55.1 and 55.2) accounts for a significant number of tourism jobs. Blackpool, not surprisingly, is a major source of employment in this sector (see Table 3), and the Blackpool Hotels and Guest Houses Association lists a significant number of local hotels, apartments and guesthouses in Blackpool.
Morecambe is the other major seaside resort in Lancashire with an extensive range of accommodation. Of note in the hotel section for 2008 will be the reopening of the famous Midland Art Deco Hotel on the Morecambe sea front.
A business that classifies its main activity under the Hotels sector would have all its employees classified to sector 55.1, including those employed primarily in the bar or restaurant, however in practice the situation may be more complex. For example, Northcote Manor in the Ribble valley is an exclusive hotel with a reputation for the quality of its restaurant and its offsite catering functions. It may therefore have all its employees classified under section 55.1 or 55.3 or a mixture of both. It depends on what is considered to be its core business and whether the onsite and offsite functions could be effectively separated with different paypoints thereby allowing separate entries under more than one core business heading. In comparison, a company such as Heathcotes that only seeks to offer an exclusive dining experience would have its employees classified under section 55.3. The Barton Grange Hotel to the south of Garstang offers hotel accommodation, restaurant, conference and function facilities and there is even a garden centre on site. The varied facilities exemplify the difficulties involved in classifying employees to particular sectors.
Section 55.2, (Other short-stay accommodation) should include employees at the Pontins at South Shore, Blackpool, next to the tram terminus at Starr Gate. It is also likely that the Pontins employees at the company's administrative centre at Eccleston near Chorley also allocated to this sector.
Another example in section 55.2 is South Lakeland Caravans based in Carnforth. The company has sites throughout the Lake District, Morecambe Bay and North Wales. Multiple sites bring in to question the exact location where employees are registered under the Annual Business Inquiry. A firm with different locations but only one administrative paypoint will have all its employees recorded in just one local authority area that has the company headquarters. Separate paypoints would distribute the employee totals between their respective establishments.
Under normal circumstances, major retailers with multiple outlets would have their employees' paypoint allocated to their place of work, but for smaller companies with a limited number of sites, all the firm's jobs may be registered at one address. Sales staff with no fixed place of work would be registered to their head office, which may be far from their work area, whilst temporary employees registered with labour recruitment agencies would be allocated to the agency's paypoint and not to the company to whom they are currently attached. The hotels and restaurants sectors in particular, may make significant use of agency workers, but none will be allocated to the tourism sector.
For section 55.4 (Bars, public houses and nightclubs), a Lancashire-based company that specialises in the management of public houses is Honeycombe Leisure Plc.
Section 63.3 (Travel agencies/tour operators), will include Tour operators such as the Holiday Cottages Group in Earby, Sunterra Europe Ltd in Lancaster and Alfatravel with a site in Chorley. Another very important employer in this sector is Gold Medal Travel Group plc based at Riversway Docklands. As one of the UK's leading independent travel companies, it makes an important contribution to Preston district employment levels in this sector (See Table 3).
There are a number of long-established and independent Lancashire businesses that will either have staff allocated to section 63.3 or have workers that could potentially be allocated to this section. A popular Travel Agency based in East Lancashire is Althams Travel. This independent company was established in 1874, and continues to compete against much larger national rivals. The tour operator Traveller's Choice with its headquarters in Carnforth can trace its heritage back to 1872. Companies such as Fraser Eagle and John Fishwick & Sons are very well established independent local businesses that amongst other things are tour operators. Since tour operator functions are not the main activities of these two companies, it is possible that these particular jobs would be allocated under other transport-related sections.
The Libraries/ Museums and Other Cultural Activities sector (92.5) incorporates the range of local museums in the county managed by the Lancashire County Museums Service.
The Sport and other recreation activities sector (92.6 and 92.7) includes employees at the professional football and other sporting arenas in the county. An example of public-sector employment in this sector is the Rossendale Leisure Trust that manages a range of facilities including, Ski Rossendale, Haslingden Sports Centre, Swimming Pools and Bacup Leisure Hall.
Also worth a mention in this section is the Royal Lytham Golf Club. It has one of the premier links courses in the world, and over the years has brought this part of the county to the attention of an international audience by hosting Open Championships (it will be the venue for the 2012 Open), Ryder Cups and numerous other major tournaments including the Women's and Seniors' Opens.
The importance of the tourism industry in terms of job numbers by district is illustrated in Figure 1. At the local level the estimates should be treated with some caution but the importance of the industry to Blackpool, England's most popular seaside resort and conference destination, is clearly evident. Around 17.8% of Blackpool's total employees (10,600) work in tourism-related jobs. Numerically, tourism-related employment is second highest in Preston (6,800), whilst Lancaster District, which contains the resort town of Morecambe, was in third place with 5,300 jobs.
Employment Trends
Employment in the Lancashire tourism industry grew strongly throughout post-war years, expanding two and-a-half fold between the early 1950s and the early 1990s, making it one of the fastest growing areas of new job creation in the county. Expansion was particularly rapid over the 1970s and 1980s when nearly 15,000 net new jobs were created. The early 1990s recession however saw retrenchment in the industry with employee job numbers falling back both nationally and in Lancashire.
The latest set of figures for 1998 to 2006 are displayed in Table 2. In 2000, there was a substantial increase in employment levels, but anecdotal evidence suggests that this may in part have been the result of the reclassification of some employees from retail to tourist-related employment. The results for 2004, 2005 and 2006 emphasises the volatility of the data and therefore the difficulties in measuring the total number of tourism jobs.
The large yearly fluctuations at the county level are likely to be primarily because of errors resulting from the small sample size of around 5% used to derive the totals for all employees. This means that that figures for individual sectors are subject to some margin of error.
The percentage change figures for Lancashire in Table 2 (1998-2006) should therefore be used with caution, but the North West and national figures are more reliable being based on larger sample sizes. Of note is the strong growth in employment in both restaurants and sport and recreation. The rise in obesity levels over recent years, and the need for people to improve their health, presents strong growth in areas associated with food and the need to stay healthy.
Another point from Table 2 is the large reduction in Travel agent/ tour operator jobs that occurred in the county between 2000 and 2002. This was the result of a large number of jobs at Airtours previously allocated to Rossendale district being reallocated outside the county.
| Hotels and Other Accommodation | Restaurants, Cafés, etc. | Bars, Pubs, etc. | Travel Agents and Tour Operators | Libraries, Museums, etc. | Sport and Recreation Activities | Total | |
| 1998 | 10,200 | 9,800 | 15,200 | 5,700 | 1,100 | 7,700 | 49,700 |
| 1999 | 10,200 | 9,400 | 14,100 | 4,900 | 1,300 | 7,600 | 47,500 |
| 2000 | 11,500 | 12,100 | 15,500 | 5,500 | 1,500 | 8,400 | 54,500 |
| 2001 | 9,700 | 11,300 | 13,900 | 4,700 | 1,400 | 8,600 | 49,600 |
| 2002 | 10,700 | 11,700 | 13,800 | 2,800 | 1,500 | 10,700 | 51,100 |
| 2003 | 11,200 | 12,900 | 14,600 | 2,900 | 1,400 | 9,600 | 52,500 |
| 2004 | 12,700 | 15,400 | 17,800 | 3,000 | 1,400 | 9,200 | 59,500 |
| 2005 | 10,400 | 13,100 | 14,600 | 2,400 | 1,400 | 9,400 | 51,300 |
| 2006 | 11,600 | 14,500 | 16,000 | 2,800 | 1,700 | 10,200 | 56,800 |
| % Change 1998-2006 | |||||||
| Lancashire NUTS-2 | 14.2 | 48.2 | 5.2 | -50.1 | 50.7 | 31.7 | 14.4 |
| North West | 16.6 | 46.2 | -2.3 | -5.4 | 63.7 | 29.1 | 18.9 |
| Great Britain | 13.8 | 34.9 | 2.3 | -0.3 | 51.8 | 38.2 | 20.7 |
| Source ONS - Annual Business Inquiry, 2006 | |||||||
Table 3 details tourism employment figures for each of the 14 authorities in Lancashire. Blackpool not surprisingly has the largest number employed in Hotels and Other Accommodation and Bars etc, but perhaps surprisingly Preston has the largest number in the Restaurants, cafés sector. Travel agents, tour operators is also an important sector in Preston due in no small amount to the presence of Gold Medal Travel.
| Hotels and Other Accommodation | Restaurants, Cafés, etc. | Bars, Pubs and Nightclubs | Travel Agents and Tour Operators | Libraries, Museums, etc. | Sport and Recreation | Total | |
| North Lancashire | 7,400 | 5,800 | 6,100 | 1,000 | 600 | 3,100 | 24,100 |
| Blackpool | 3,900 | 2,000 | 2,400 | 300 | 200 | 1,700 | 10,600 |
| Fylde | 1,700 | 1,000 | 800 | 200 | 100 | 300 | 4,100 |
| Lancaster | 1,100 | 1,300 | 1,700 | 400 | 200 | 700 | 5,300 |
| Wyre | 700 | 1,500 | 1,200 | 200 | 100 | 400 | 4,100 |
| Central Lancashire | 2,000 | 5,000 | 5,400 | 1,000 | 500 | 2,700 | 16,700 |
| Chorley | 900 | 1,000 | 1,400 | 100 | 100 | 700 | 4,200 |
| Preston | 700 | 2,100 | 1,900 | 700 | 200 | 1,100 | 6,800 |
| South Ribble | 200 | 900 | 1,000 | 100 | 100 | 400 | 2,700 |
| West Lancashire | 200 | 1,000 | 1,100 | 100 | 100 | 400 | 2,900 |
| Lancashire West | 9,500 | 10,900 | 11,600 | 2,000 | 1,100 | 5,800 | 40,800 |
| East Lancashire | 2,100 | 3,600 | 4,400 | 800 | 600 | 4,400 | 16,000 |
| Blackburn with Darwen | 300 | 800 | 1,000 | 100 | 200 | 1,800 | 4,200 |
| Burnley | 100 | 600 | 900 | 200 | 100 | 900 | 2,800 |
| Hyndburn | 300 | 500 | 700 | 100 | 100 | 400 | 2,100 |
| Pendle | 500 | 500 | 600 | 100 | 100 | 500 | 2,300 |
| Ribble Valley | 800 | 800 | 800 | 100 | 100 | 300 | 2,900 |
| Rossendale | 100 | 400 | 500 | 300 | 100 | 400 | 1,700 |
| Lancashire County | 7,400 | 11,700 | 12,500 | 2,400 | 1,300 | 6,600 | 41,900 |
| Lancashire NUTS-2 | 11,600 | 14,500 | 16,000 | 2,800 | 1,700 | 10,200 | 56,800 |
| North West | 43,300 | 70,900 | 71,600 | 14,300 | 10,600 | 48,300 | 258,800 |
| Great Britain | 382,900 | 628,500 | 533,000 | 108,000 | 103,000 | 431,000 | 2,186,400 |
| Source ONS - Annual Business Inquiry, 2006 | |||||||
General Characteristics
Structurally, the tourism industry is an amalgam of small independent businesses, some well-established medium-sized local independent companies and a few large multi-interest groups (see the Visit Lancashire for details of a number of tourism-related businesses in the county). The results from the Annual Business Inquiry for 2006, estimated that there were just over 5,000 Tourism Sector business units in the Lancashire NUTS-2 area representing 9.5% of the total for the county.
Tourism is an important employer of female staff, part-time and temporary workers, and is where many young people obtain their first experience of employment, however in general terms, the sector's overall image as a career choice remains at best modest with a high reliance on part-time staff. In the Lancashire NUTS-2 area, female employment in the Tourism industry accounted for 54.9% of total staff numbers and 67.6% of females worked on a part-time basis. About 49.1% of men in the sector are also employed part-time.
The industry is fairly labour intensive with new technology tending to impact on the quality of service, particularly in the travel services, rather than on labour content. Many tourism operators continue to face problems of recruiting staff and recent years has seen a significant influx of employees from new entrants to the European Union.
Whilst some tourism employers take pride in their employee policies and development programmes, staff turnover in general is liable to be high. There is often a lack of structured training, and pay and conditions often tend towards minimum levels. Such factors, together with the strong seasonal character of many tourism activities, inhibit the potential growth of the industry.
Tourism relies on consumers visiting the area to take advantage of the service therefore success depends strongly on promotion and investment in current and new projects. The local industry has shown some ability in adapting to trends and in generating new market segments such as short and weekend themed breaks, business and conference tourism along with new facilities and attractions. For example, there has been an emphasis over recent years to develop the tourism potential of Lancashire's rural landscape and wildlife assets. See the Forest of Bowland.
The industry has however, lost market share, particularly to overseas destinations and has failed to share fully in the higher spending quality conscious market. There is nevertheless some optimism about future prospects assuming plans to address weaknesses in traditional resorts are successful. For instance in Blackpool, there are a number of projects that will help to transform the core central area . The major extension of the Hounds Hill shopping is due to open in 2008, whilst the project to remodel Blackpool's Central Seafront is well underway and involves the construction of a new seawall, the creation of six large headlands and a new summer promenade.
The tourism industry is seen as being able to play an important role both in the regeneration of those parts of the county that have seen a decline in their traditional industries and in aiding the diversification of the rural economy, particularly in addressing the problems facing upland agriculture. It also has a very important part to play in enhancing the overall image of Lancashire.
For further details, or if you have any ideas for improving the content of this article, please contact:
Bryan Moulding
Tel 01772 534172
Email Bryan.Moulding@lancashire.gov.uk