Chamber and committees

We should have a huge reach in America, too. I remember standing on Ellis Island pressing the buttons for where people of Scottish ancestry were, and there were more than 20 million people scattered across America, particularly on the eastern seaboard. Surely we should be capitalising on that.

You are basically talking about word-of-mouth advertising, which is effective, but if other countries are hard selling their products with more money than we have, how do we compensate for that? Once we get people here, they will have the experience and we hope that they will then go out and spread the word, but we have to get the people here first. The more money you have, the better chance you have to spread that word. Do we have enough money and resources to be able to do that in our target markets?

Yes, you did.

I want to take a different angle on the matter and ask Stephen Montgomery a slightly different question. How well have businesses been supported by VisitScotland and the enterprise and skills agencies? Are there lessons to be learned from that experience?

Yes.

Just to clarify this in my head, are you saying that the 2,000 businesses that are referred to in the survey were across the UK?

Were the 2,000 businesses in the ONS survey?

Good morning, panel. One thing that has come home to me in the course of evidence taking is the sheer complexity of the hospitality and tourism business. It is incredibly diverse, especially if we start taking into account local and international supply chains and so forth; then, we are talking about a fairly complicated beast to deal with. That makes it quite difficult to target support at one particular sector, because the knock-on effect all the way through businesses is extremely complex.

We have talked about various parts of the hospitality and tourism business. How would you describe the overall financial status of the business in terms of cash flows and—this is important—the levels of debt that some businesses might have taken on during the Covid emergency, as well as hangovers from before it? I ask Leon Thompson to kick off.

I assume that the report has been agreed and accepted by the commissioner’s office.

The report highlights the breakdown in working relationships between the commissioner’s office and other external bodies, and you have again touched on that. Can you give some details on how that breakdown happened, what external stakeholders the commissioner’s office should have engaged with, and how that led to the lack of scrutiny that one would have expected?