Fiscal support for tourism and hospitality in coastal areas

The tourism and hospitality industry has been affected by a number of events and issues in recent years, most notably the Covid-19 pandemic. While the industry continues to recover from the pandemic, the sector is more fragile than in 2019, with businesses having taken on more debt.

Current issues facing the industry include staff shortages and inflationary energy costs. The Library briefing papers Tourism: statistics and policy (November 2023) and Hospitality industry and Covid-19 (May 2022) discuss these issues in more detail.

According to analysis published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in October 2020, coastal communities in England and Wales are more likely to have high levels of deprivation than non-coastal towns. Between 2009 and 2018, 50% of coastal towns had a decline in employment (average across all sectors, not just hospitality and tourism), compared with 37% of non-coastal towns.

In 2023 the economic output of the hospitality sector (food & accommodation services) in the UK was £73.8 billion, around 3.2% of total UK economic output. There were 225,550 hospitality businesses in the UK in 2023.

In the three months to September 2023, there were around 2.8 million jobs in the accommodation and food service sector in the UK. Representing 7.6% of all jobs in the economy, the sector was the 6th largest employer of the main 20 industrial sectors. Taking a broader definition of the industry, hospitality trade body, UK Hospitality, says the sector is the “third largest employer in the UK”.

Statistics on the economic contribution of tourism to the UK are provided in the Library briefing, Tourism: statistics and policy (November 2023). Figures are provided for 2019 as the latest data not significantly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2019, the economic output of tourism-related industries was estimated at £134 billion, of which £74 billion was estimated to be directly generated by tourism. These figures are equivalent to 6.6% and 3.6% of the whole economy respectively.