Why doesn't London have a city tax?

[flowerysock]

Booking a city break to somewhere that has a city tax and it certainly doesn't put me off going there. Wondering why London can't have this?

What is a city tax?

as in a tourist tax. A small charge per night added to tourist accommodation that goes back into the council funds so that the locals aren't paying premium rates of council tax to maintain things like bins being emptied that require doing more frequently due to the high number of tourists.
responsibletourismpartnership.org/tourist-tax/#:~:text=Edinburgh%20Tourist%20Tax%20In%20Scotland%2C%20Edinburgh%20City%20Council,Edinburgh%2C%20including%20hotels%2C%20B%26Bs%2C%20short-term%20lets%20and%20hostels.

Totally agree.

They talked about a hospitality tax in Cornwall a while back. Even £1-2 a night could make for an enormous fund for all sorts of things - improvements to the environment, access to beaches or even just cutting the bloody grass across the county.

I think it would be a good idea. Just come back from Sardinia and we were charged Euro2 per day, per person. It's put on the hotel bill, so assume something similar could be done in London.

www.gate1travel.com/italy-travel/city-tax.aspx

It's also called a tourist tax.

I was wondering why we don't have it in the U.K.. it seems to make sense I'm contributing this tax in the places I'm going to so why not the other way around in London/other cities.

Hmm... Does London have a high proportion of tourists to residents? It sounds like an idea that makes sense somewhere like Venice or Cornwall, but London is a thriving centre of business in its own right, not overwhelmed by tourists. In fact, what about business visitors - would they be included too?

I'm not against the idea, but not convinced either. I suppose the running costs could eat up a lot of the £2/night (or whatever it would be) as well.

Really @MaryWM I couldn't get away from tourists when I worked in London! And I worked in a boring bit.

Maybe because visiting London is already expensive and they don't want to put people off coming. It's possibly one of the reasons some cultural venues (eg British Museum, National Gallery etc) are free - it helps balance the high expense of visiting London and makes it more appealing.

There's an issue with only applying it to hotel stays because it can drive people to stay in rented accommodation/AirBnB etc instead, which exacerbates the shortage of residential homes for locals because it's more profitable to rent to holidaymakers. Or people will stay outside the city and 'commute' in, which reduces expenditure in the city itself and has a knock-on effect for employment etc.

If you're paying for accommodation and food and drink in London, plus the cost of getting there, you're not going to be put off by a couple of quid a day tourist tax, although I'm not sure London needs one.

Devon/Cornwall, the Lake District and other places that end up rammed with tourists who are generally served by low paid seasonal workers who struggle to pay high rents would probably benefit more though.

In the south west, they could use it to reduce the water bills for permanent residents, as these are currently very high due to the cost of maintaining the long coastline, which attracts and benefits tourists.

Well, depends where you go, I suppose. Some areas are definitely crowded in the summer, like the South Bank, West End, Camden Market etc. I've worked in plenty of zone 1 areas with no visible tourist presence, though. And then there's all the suburbs - if you take Greater London as a whole, the proportion that attracts significant numbers of tourists must be pretty small. I wouldn't have thought that we were having to lay on extra bin collections to cater to tourists. My general sense is that London can quite well absorb them, and does well out of the money they spend during their short stays.

I worked in the square mile. We often had tourists trying to get into our building literally coming into reception to be denied entry. They were everywhere outside the building too in the peak tourist season. I worked in a landmark building so maybe that made it worse but it was not that amazing that it was worth how many were there were. People used to lie on the floor outside trying to take the best picture!

I get the idea of Cornwall other other smaller places having it as well actually. I can't see how anyone affording a holiday to London couldn't afford a smallish tax contribution to the city though.

A tourist tax would absolutely have to apply to all AirBnB, hotel, B&B, holiday rentals etc. Even camping. Look at how places like France and Spain manage it - it's a few Euros per night in high tourist areas including cities.

It's such a simple idea plus it keeps the focus of both the cost and the benefits on tourism and would really make a huge difference in many places around the country.

London is the top most visited city in Europe (2019), and 4th in the World, behind Bankok, Singapore and Macau (Chinese visitors I assume), some 20million international visits per year. So, yes, it does get A LOT of international tourists. Paris is very close behind, but Rome only gets 10million, which really surprised me.

The real reason is that the UK doesn't have the infrastructure to be able to tell who should be here and who shouldn't. Never has had, and never will have.

That's why the Windrush folk were fucked over.

(In the US, cities have the powers to raise taxes and do. This is in additional to state taxes. But then unless you are in a very odd geographic situation, you aren't going to do your shopping 500 miles away just to save 1% or so tax.)

These cities all sound like places that get a lot of business visitors, as befits large international centres of business. Is it appropriate to apply a tax to business visitors in the same way that a small city, town or province might apply it to leisure tourists?

This is an area ripe for unintended consequences. Cornwall enacting a "tax" on visitors who then stay in Devon and pop into Cornwall for the day for a start.

London is Europes only megacity. And even then it's a bit diddy compared to the big boys.

The bottom line is there are regions of the country that - for whatever reason - are never going to be able to maintain a GDP/per-capita income to match other areas. So we either accept the need for a supra-regional (i.e. national) mechanism for spreading wealth around, or we don't.

And as a country - in particular a country with a very loud and occasionally forceful section that insists on democracy - it's clear we've opted for the "don't" route. Just we aren't very honest about it.