Chamber and committees

The main objective of Homecoming Scotland is to increase tourism revenues and VisitScotland is working to a target of an 8:1 return on the core funding; meaning that a £40 million increase in tourism revenues should be delivered. The Scottish Government is, however, confident that with all the additional activities and focus on homecoming across Scotland, this return will be exceeded.

Homecoming should also have a significant impact on the annual survey figures that are used to judge the level of Scottish tourism visitor numbers and expenditure. The UK Tourism Survey (UKTS) and International Passenger Survey (IPS) provide the national statistics for the Office of National Statistics. It may not be possible to identify exactly the specific impact of Homecoming on the figures as it may not be clear whether a visitor only visited Scotland because of Homecoming.

As well as this overall assessment of the tourism figures, detailed assessments of specific events and campaigns will be carried out by VisitScotland and EventScotland. There are three main strands to these technical evaluations.

Conversion Studies of VisitScotland Marketing Activity

VisitScotland will commission a dedicated conversion study into its Homecoming marketing activity in the US and Canadian markets. The study will be carried out independently and will target respondents to their US / Canadian campaigns. This will be an online survey and respondents will be asked, among other things, about the impact of Homecoming 2009 on their decision to visit. The survey will be carried out in the winter of 2009. A similar conversion study will also be carried out in the UK and in two key European markets.

Event Organiser Outcome Reports

Each event which is receiving funding for Homecoming from EventScotland will be required to conduct an event outcome report which assesses the impact and success of the event.

Scottish Omnibus Surveys

There will be six waves of the You Gov Scottish Omnibus Studies to assess awareness and favourability towards the Homecoming programme among the Scottish population.

NHS Grampian has provided information on the value of Standard Rate VAT payments for the financial year 2007-08, the last financial year for which information is available. The total value of these payments is £25.396 million set against combined Resource Limits of £758.408 million (Revenue £729.245 million and Capital £29.163 million) for the same period.

NHS Grampian has provided very broad estimates of potential changes to their costs. The reduction is estimated at £1.7 million (Revenue £1.4 million and Capital £0.3 million) during the financial year 2009‘10 as a result of this one specific temporary change to the standard rate of VAT. This is set against an estimated draft Resource Limit baseline budget of £699.6 million for 2009‘10 (Revenue £667.0 million and Capital £32.6 million).

Care must be taken with these figures which are one in a number of recent changes to VAT legislation, some of which are a recurring cost to NHS organisations. These additional costs relate to VAT rules for agency fees for medical staff, restrictions on reclaimable VAT on other agency staff, except for nurses, and the removal of a concession that currently allows employment businesses to exclude the wages element from the calculation of VAT. This will have an estimated recurring impact for NHS Grampian up to £1.2 million.

I met with the UK Minster for Culture, Creative Industries and Tourism in March 2008 and discussed the plans for Homecoming and other general tourism matters.

The Scottish Government has had discussions regarding Homecoming Scotland 2009 with the Stakeholder Engagement Team at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Officials there have received a core briefing pack on Homecoming and were sent copies of the new Events Guide shortly after it was launched by the First Minister and opposition party leaders on 18 December 2008. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office are also promoting Homecoming by placing a link to the Homecoming website on 150 in-country post websites.

Scottish Government is committed to the effective marketing of Homecoming Scotland 2009 and are continually reviewing the advertising of this initiative. There are already indicators that the advertising targeted at domestic visitors and in 40 countries around the world is working well:

More than one million people engaging with VisitScotland per month through visiting the suite of websites and receiving the e-newsletters are exposed to the Homecoming message.

The Homecoming Scotland websites have attracted over 340,000 user sessions to date (end December 2008). Over the span of Homecoming we expect 25 million people to have used these sites. homecomingscotland2009.com and homecomingscotland.com.

In the month of November, the peak of VisitScotland''s autumn long-haul I am a Scot campaign, the two principal websites alone attracted 100,000 user enquiries, equating to one visitor every 35 seconds.

The Homecoming Caledonia advert was seen by three million Scots (60 per cent of the population) when it premiered on TV in November and in Scotland the evidence of awareness is emphatic, with a You Gov poll in early December 2008 showing that 66% of Scottish people are aware of Homecoming.

VisitScotland staff are in regular contact with staff at VisitBritain and, as a result, VisitScotland''s own Homecoming promotion is being significantly extended through collaboration with VisitBritain who are actively promoting Homecoming through their offices worldwide with websites, e-comms and PR and trade activity. This includes a significant presence for Homecoming across the VisitBritain network of 40 country market sites which are translated in 19 languages from Russian to Mandarin and Japanese, and which attract 10 million users. In addition, the VisitBritain global PR Conference in 2008 was themed around Homecoming and trade events across the globe have used Homecoming as their main theme.

Formal activity plans were agreed between VisitScotland and VisitBritain in 2008 and the delivery against these plans is being closely monitored by VisitScotland.

In common with all of NHSScotland, NHS Grampian will be affected by changes to be made to the rules by which NHS bodies can reclaim VAT charged in respect of agency staff working within NHSScotland.

The rules were previously changed for 2008-09 to remove the ability for NHS bodies to reclaim VAT on agency fees for medical staff. This is being further restricted in that NHS bodies will no longer be able to reclaim VAT on any other agency staff except for nursing from 2009-10. These restrictions may have a more significant impact with the additional change in respect of the removal from 1 April 2009 of a concession granted by HMRC that currently allows employment businesses to exclude the wages element from the calculation of VAT on the charges they make.

Subject to approval of the Parliament to the Scottish Government''s Budget Bill and the Local Government Finance Order for 2009-10, the additional funding for the capital city supplement will be included within the general revenue grant provided to the City of Edinburgh Council and will therefore be subject to the same conditions as apply to that general revenue grant.

The consultation paper will be published by 30 January 2009 and will remain open for a period of three months.