CONSERVATIVE
New Forest East

SCOTLAND – FOOT & MOUTH DISEASE - 17 July 2001

SCOTLAND – FOOT & MOUTH DISEASE - 17 July 2001

Dr Julian Lewis: If she will make a statement on the impact of foot and mouth on tourism in Scotland?

[SUPPLEMENTARY:] I am reassured by that response [from the Minister of State], but has he found in Scotland, as we have in the New Forest, that one effect of the crisis has been that many tourist centres and businesses that have never been closed have been shunned by people wrongly thinking that they were closed? Will he do everything in his power to advertise the fact that tourist centres in Scotland are not closed, in many cases never have been closed, and should be visited at every opportunity? The tourism industry – certainly in the New Forest, where foot and mouth did not even break out, and, I am sure, in Scotland – has been desperately hard hit.