Hammond: "The GSLP Have Been A Tourism Catastrophe"
The GSD says the Government should be "careful" when it speaks of facts when it comes to tourism.
A statement from the GSD follows below:
The fundamental fact, illustrated in their own publication, the annual tourist survey, is that in no full year of GSLP administration have they achieved the equivalent in tourism expenditure as were attained in 2010 and 2011 under the GSD. There policies have failed and in the six years up until 2018 for which figures are available, the economy has lost out by hundreds of millions of pounds.
Trevor Hammond said: “Despite the millions spent on a bridge and glass walk way, the latter of which has suffered from a total lack of maintenance almost since the day it opened. This lack of maintenance illustrates so much about this GSLP administration. Build lots, spend lots but forget basic maintenance requirements. Whatever Government might say about its marketing strategy, it has failed to get tourists to spend their money in Gibraltar. Even having introduced a charge for access to the upper Rock, a sensible measure which should guarantee tourist spend money, the Government has still failed to achieve tourist expenditure figures comparable with those under the last GSD administration.
“The analysis we’ve conducted is easily represented graphically with the vertical axis representing tourist expenditure in millions of pounds, the horizontal axis the year, and the bars representing tourist expenditure in each year. From 2012 to 2018, the GSLP years, we have presented two bars, a pink one representing actual expenditure and a red bar for inflation adjusted expenditure. It can easily be seen that even in 2018, the most successful year under the GSLP, inflation adjusted expenditure was still under than £240M, more than £40M short of the 2011 figure. The GSLP have been a tourism catastrophe and no amount of spin can disguise this fact when their own figures expose just how poor their performance has been.”
