Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast.

Me, Simon Caller. It's Wednesday the 9th of July and I'm looking forward to a good old argument today

because I'm with my good friend Henry Murison. He is the chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse

Partnership. You've probably heard his work if you want an opinion on HS2, that

very troubled rail project, then Henry is your man. But Henry, you've also been looking at some

research on tourism taxes. What does it tell us? So IPPR North have done some work with

more in common, the polling organisation that's shown wider support for increasing the number of our taxes, not the volume of them, how much it goes to local leaders.

Because in this country, unlike other parts of Europe, and in fact, the United States, actually, almost all of our tax revenue goes to central government.

And that means whether it's our local councils or our metro mayors like where we're sitting here in Greater Manchester,

they don't have enough firepower to make their own decisions.

And it also means that often they don't share in the success they have.

So if you're a successful mayor that grows your economy, we're in the productivity growth capital of Britain here in Greater Manchester,

you don't actually see your budget go up.

Whereas if you were in a city like Barcelona and you were booming, then as the local mayor,

you would suddenly have more taxes to spend, which would give you a strong incentive to grow that

economy. Moving from the local authority framework to what it's got to do with travellers,

you are in favour of higher taxes on tourists.

So I'm a believer that we should have a locally collected tax and at the moment you have a voluntary

system here in Greater Manchester and the city centre but also across and Liverpool that generates

several million a year actually and that's been spent on improving the street

scene, for example, in Manchester, in marketing the destination. But it's also very particularly

attracted, not just the MTV Awards, but now the Brit Awards next year, using that money

...