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Should you pay for loitering in front of the best paintings in galleries or talking on speakerphone to your relatives back home?
The great thing about tourist taxes is that they conform to everyone’s first rule of revenue generation, in that someone else has to pay them. Opinion polls routinely show that people are strongly in favour of higher taxes for someone else.
If your city levies a tourist tax, you won’t be paying it unless you get drunk and decide to spend the night in town. Even so, that’s probably not likely to happen very often. But the main point is that, by and large, someone else will be paying and you might be benefitting.
And it’s coming very soon to a town near you. Mayors will soon be able to levy a tourist tax on overnight stays, and we can bet that every Bürgermeister will be rushing to stuff their coffers with the extra funds they can throw at their pet projects, or even at residents.
And come on, who among us hasn’t had moments when we’d love to tax a tourist? Walking to Waterloo station across Westminster Bridge past hordes of stationary visitors blocking every square inch you could be forgiven for wondering if the proposed tax on hotel and rented accommodation goes far enough. And as for those viciously standing on the wrong side of the escalator . . .
So how about a selfie surcharge for those lingering outside the entrances to Tube stations? Can I demand payment when asked for directions, and should they really be able to walk on the cracks in my pavement without making any contribution to its upkeep?
Loitering in front of the best paintings in galleries could carry a standing charge (see what I did there?), while talking on speakerphone to your relatives back home must surely be worth an on-the-spot fine. It’s no more than they deserve. They come over here, patronise our businesses, spend their money, keep watching The Mousetrap and don’t even have to pay for the cost of long-term social care.
I have even wondered if this is something we might consider on a more local level. Can I tax the guests who come to stay with us? A small utilities surcharge rising rapidly after, say, three days, could manage expectations and help us maintain the house as a desirable visitor location. A contribution to the cost of a new air fryer can be justified as an upgrade to the facilities.
So if the idea of whacking visitors seems so attractive, why do I still feel uneasy about it? The optimistic argument is that as long as places are not greedy, it might be possible to shave the tourists’ chins without them noticing the nicks. Lots of cities already do.
But these new charges come at a cost. Money spent on the accommodation tax is money not available to spend elsewhere. It’s a cash transfer from business to local government. A family booking two rooms or a rental for up to five nights (the limit in Edinburgh, which already has one) will be noticeably out of pocket. That could be a restaurant forgone, coffee shops not visited, souvenirs not purchased or even a trip shortened. And it’s just one more reason for a business looking to cut costs to move that meeting on to Zoom.
But perhaps the greater objection with this particular model is that the moment you step outside your own area, guess what, you’re a tourist too for tax purposes. Fancy a weekend away in England? Cough up, you bloody tourist. UKHospitality estimates that domestic guests account for 69 per cent of short hotel stays. That’s suddenly a lot of Brits paying more for a business trip or a weekend break.
When the spawn were little, I made it a regular half-term holiday to take them round cities of England because I wanted them to know their own country. Should I be taxed for showing my children the country they live in? Why not allow the residents of my street to turn it into a toll road? Mind you, that’s essentially what low-traffic zones are doing.
There are cities like Barcelona that are in open revolt against foreign tourists. This seems terribly self-defeating, but at least the locals actively want to deter visitors. That is not the plan here.
And it is hard to shake off the feeling that, rather like resident parking schemes, these taxes are not really about mitigating the adverse impacts of tourism and will simply become a revenue generator for cash-strapped councils and self-promoting mayors.
So when you are cheering the idea, remember that most of those tourists will actually be you. Then ask yourself how many British cities you really feel like paying extra to visit. I can think of several that should be paying me.
Email Robert at magazineletters@ft.com
