Dorset Council accused of 'cut and run' decision over three TIC closures
A Sherborne Councillor says town councils taking over the service should be given more direct support
Dorset Council has been accused of taking a “cut and run” decision with the closure of tourism information centres in Dorchester, Sherborne and Wareham.
Sherborne councillor Matt Hall said that while some of the work with tourists had been taken over in his town there was a need for more support and partnership working with Dorset Council to make the service better.
He said that with 12.6million day visitors to Dorset and 1.8million staying each year tourism was a vital sector for the county’s economy.
“When it comes to the push we cut and run rather than try and make the system work and I think that should worry us, because we keep being told that we need to be more business-like, yet we can’t make a system work with millions of people coming here,” he said.
Cllr Hall said that the council ought to be looking at proper partnership working.
He said in the case of Sherborne the town council was left trying to run a service it had no experience of and had struggled to get the new system up and running in the space of a few months.
“We need to work in partnership, not just working with, there is a difference,” he said.
Cllr Hall said one of the problems had been the need to make changes to a tourism leaflet – but it took months to find the master copies and work out how to change them, missing the Easter period, usually seen as the start of the holiday season.
He said he wanted Dorset Council to show more commitment to the town councils who were taking over the tourist information function and to offer more direct help to them, rather than just the initial financial support which had been agreed.
Cllr Mark Roberts said that despite the potential for difficulties the towns which had recently started running their own tourism services were doing well, while others, such as Lyme Regis, had been working well, on their own, for a number of years.
Dorchester councillor Andy Canning called for a cross-county review into tourism services to find out which services were working well and to examine whether it might be better to publicise Dorset as an overall attraction venue, or whether it was better to focus on a town alone.
Place and resources scrutiny chair Cllr Shane Bartlett said the council needed to ensure it got best value from the money it put into tourism services and work out whether there should be one model, rather than different models in different towns.
Cllr David Tooke said he believed it would be better to get away from the image of Dorset tourism as either “blue or green” (seaside and country) and encourage people to visit the whole of the county with information about the rest of the county available in every tourism centre.
Cllr John Andrews said for many years the focus had been on just the coast but it was about time inland Dorset also received tourism investment.