The Country That Fired Its Own Sales Force
Britain’s Parliament says events are trade, not tourism. America is running the same experiment.
Committee reports do not normally stop my morning. This one did, because it is the first time a major government has written down, in its own hand, the argument this publication exists to make.
Rachel Parker runs the Events Industry Alliance, the trade body that speaks for Britain’s exhibitions and trade shows, which makes her the industry’s designated diplomat in Westminster. American readers can think of her as Britain’s Tommy Goodwin, playing the role he plays in Washington for the Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance. On the ninth of December last year she sat before a panel of British MPs and said the thing diplomats are trained never to say out loud. “Our biggest challenge is that the government do not understand what we do,” she told them. She was in that room because her industry had asked Parliament to take a look at it. Six months later, the government proved her point. Britain’s national tourism agency cut its business events team from nine people to two and shut down the program that helped attract international conferences and trade shows to the country. The team responsible for selling a £33.6 billion industry to the world is now smaller than the staff of a good florist.
This morning, Parliament hit back. The report it published is short, unanimous, and unusually blunt, and it lands on an argument this publication has been making since its first issue: conferences and trade shows are not tourism. They are trade. Filing them under tourism is a category error, and Britain has been paying for the error in lost business.
Here is the whole story in one breath. An industry asked its government for attention, got it, and watched the government defund it mid-conversation. Parliament has now formally objected, demanded the cuts be reversed, and proposed moving the entire sector out of the culture department and into the trade department. What follows is the report translated into plain English, the numbers that drive it, the American version of the same story, and an honest assessment of whether any of it will matter.
The report, translated
A select committee is Parliament’s inspection unit: a cross-party group of backbench MPs whose job is to check the government’s homework in a given area. The nearest American equivalent is a Congressional oversight committee, with two differences that matter. British select committees exclude ministers and almost always publish unanimously, so a report carries cross-party weight rather than a majority-party stamp, and the government is required to respond in writing within about two months. This one, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, chaired by Dame Caroline Dinenage, oversees everything from museums to football. And the agency it just defended, VisitBritain, is simply the Brand USA of the United Kingdom, with one distinction: VisitBritain is a true arm of the state, funded directly by the government, while Brand USA runs on visa fees and private matching money. So Britain gutted its own agency directly, where America diverted money its visitors had already paid, two different mechanisms arriving at the same empty desk. In late 2024 it tried something unusual and invited the industries it covers to nominate themselves for scrutiny. The business events sector raised its hand. That detail matters, because it means Parliament did not discover this industry on its own. The industry lobbied its way into the room, then made its case well enough that the committee gave it a standalone report rather than a footnote.
The word to translate next is the one in the report’s title. Business events means conferences, conventions, exhibitions, and trade shows: the rooms where industries meet to do business. Not concerts, not weddings, not the Olympics. The report’s central claim is that these gatherings function as trade infrastructure. A trade show is where a country’s exporters meet the world’s buyers. The Farnborough Air Show is not competing with the beaches of Cornwall for the same visitor. It is competing with Paris and Dubai for the aerospace order book.
The recommendations follow from that logic, and they deserve to be stated plainly, because this is what the report actually asks the government to do. Reconsider the cuts at VisitBritain and keep funding the overseas promotion of British events, an investment Robert Wright priced for the committee at a few hundred thousand pounds a year, set against a sector returning £33.6 billion. Move responsibility from the culture department to the Department for Business and Trade, with a cross-government structure behind it. Publish a standalone national business events strategy, aligned with the government’s industrial strategy, and create a sector-led National Business Events Council to help steer it. Set published expectations for ministerial attendance at priority events, with regular public reporting on who actually showed up, because Parker told the committee that an early yes from a senior minister sets off a chain reaction: international ministers accept, exhibitors commit, delegations grow. Review the accumulating costs pushing events offshore, the travel authorisation fees, the air passenger duty, the hotel VAT, the looming business rates and a proposed overnight visitor levy, and accelerate the regional transport investment Faye Dyer illustrated with the Liverpool to Manchester railway. And ease the friction at the border, through a mutual recognition agreement with the EU covering the qualifications of the workers who build the shows, and an annually updated visa guide for the organizers who book them. Eight asks in total, none of them ruinous by Treasury standards, and the strangest of them is the attendance register. Westminster, a town that runs on convening, just turned showing up into a formal policy recommendation.
The numbers, in plain English
The economics deserve their own paragraph, free of drama. Business events generate £33.6 billion a year for Britain, more than half of the £61.7 billion produced by the entire events industry. The people who attend them spend more than double what leisure tourists spend. Nearly four in ten of these events happen outside London, which makes the sector one of the few economic engines that actually reaches the rest of the country. Nor is this an industry in decline asking for rescue: it grew 17 percent between 2022 and 2023, far outpacing the economy around it. The problem is the ground it stands on. David Tremmil of UKEvents told the committee flatly that Britain has become an expensive place to stage events, and on cost the country ranked 113th out of 119 in the World Economic Forum’s index of travel cost competitiveness, which is the polite way of saying it has priced itself near the bottom of the world table while dismantling its own sales operation.
The competition, meanwhile, is organized. Ireland and Germany both published national business events roadmaps this year, each with a plan running to 2030. Britain has no equivalent document and, as of June, almost nobody employed to write one. Rival destinations have started citing British visa friction in their pitches to steal events away. Even forklift licences, which crossed the Channel without comment before Brexit, are no longer recognized in Europe, and trade shows are built by people driving forklifts.
The industry Britain already owns
Here is the detail that turns the whole thing from negligence into farce. The global trade show business is run from London. Informa, the largest exhibitions company on earth, sits in the FTSE 100 with £3.55 billion in revenue and fourteen thousand employees, and it got that big by swallowing its rivals: UBM for £4 billion in 2018, Tarsus in 2023, and with it, eventually, Cannes Lions itself. RELX, another FTSE 100 giant headquartered in London, owns RX, the exhibitions house formerly known as Reed. Behind them stretches a bench of London-based operators, Hyve, Clarion, CloserStill, dmg events, that between them produce trade shows on every continent. If trade shows were an Olympic sport, Britain would own the podium.
Which sharpens the indictment. These companies earn the vast majority of their revenue abroad, staging their growth events in Las Vegas, Dubai, Shanghai, and São Paulo, and there is nothing wrong with that; it is what global companies do. The problem is what it reveals. Britain produces the executives, the intellectual property, and the shareholder returns of the world’s gathering economy while fielding a two-person team to win the actual gatherings for British soil. The country that houses the boardrooms is losing the show floors. A government that understood its own economy would notice that it holds a genuine national champion industry, the way Germany holds automobiles, and would fight for the home fixtures. Instead it filed the whole thing under tourism and cut the staff.
America is running the same experiment
Readers on this side of the Atlantic should not feel superior, because Washington ran the identical play a year earlier and with better fireworks. In July 2025, the budget reconciliation bill cut the federal match for Brand USA, the national destination marketing organization, from $100 million a year to $20 million. The Senate vote deadlocked at 50-50 and Vice President Vance broke the tie. The bill was signed on the Fourth of July 2025, which means the United States defunded the agency that sells America to the world exactly one year before the 250th birthday that agency existed to promote. Brand USA then did what gutted organizations do: it cut 15 percent of its staff, killed its GoUSA TV channel, and shrank its flagship campaign from roughly 25 countries to 10.
The rescue attempt is following the same slow arc as Britain’s. A bipartisan bill called the VISIT USA Act, introduced last November, would restore the full $100 million for two years, and it has fourteen co-sponsors from both parties. It has also gone nowhere, in part because Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate committee that controls its fate, has long opposed the program on principle. Hanging over all of it is a harder deadline: Brand USA’s entire Congressional authorization expires in September 2027, meaning the organization is fighting for its funding and its existence at the same time. And the clock has partly run out already. The travel lobby projected the country’s great triple bill, the 250th anniversary, the World Cup, and the 2028 Olympics, at nearly 40 million visitors and more than $100 billion. Two of the three are no longer in the future. The 250th has come and gone, the World Cup reaches its final whistle in less than two weeks, and the marketing agency meant to convert both spent them at a fifth of its former budget. Only Los Angeles remains, and Congress has still not moved.
Here is the difference between the two countries, and it is the part worth sitting with. Britain filed business events in the wrong drawer. America never filed them at all. Brand USA is a leisure marketing shop that sells national parks and road trips; conferences and trade shows have never had a dedicated federal home, a national strategy, or a Cabinet-level owner. The American industry does have its own Rachel Parker: Tommy Goodwin, who built the Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance into the sector’s unified voice in Washington and was named its first president and chief executive this spring, has spent five years making the same argument on the Hill that Parker made in Westminster, on behalf of an industry his alliance counts at 2.6 million American jobs and over $400 billion in annual spending. What Goodwin does not have is what Parker just got: a legislature willing to put the argument in an official report. Britain’s Parliament is now arguing about which department should own the sector. In Washington, no committee has ever asked the question. The British report, whatever its fate, at least establishes on the record of a G7 legislature that the question exists. The American industry, which is many times larger, might reasonably wonder why its own Congress has not. Translate the committee’s eight asks into American, a restored Brand USA, a federal home for business events, a Cabinet secretary walking the show floor in Las Vegas, and you have a bill nobody in Washington has drafted.
The mayors already know
There is one level of government where none of this confusion exists, and it is worth pausing on, because it explains everything above. Mayors understand the gathering economy perfectly. They have to, because the money lands on their books. A convention’s economics are contained almost entirely inside city limits: the hotel occupancy tax, the convention center rent, the airport traffic, the restaurant shifts. A national treasury sees a trade show as diffuse receipts dissolving into general taxation. A city hall sees it as a payroll event with a date on the calendar, which is why cities compete for conventions the way they once competed for factories.
The proof is in the budgets. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, a single county body funded by room taxes, is running a $460 million budget this fiscal year and collected a record $383 million in room taxes the year before. That one Nevada authority outspends Brand USA’s entire national budget roughly three times over, and outspends its gutted federal match by more than twenty to one. Its board is not a mystery either: eight local elected officials sit on it alongside appointees of the resort industry, because in Las Vegas the people who govern the gatherings are the people who collect the tax. The city even measures what the nation ignores, tracking that convention visitors spend around $1,681 per trip against $1,262 for leisure travelers, the same business-visitor premium the British committee had to explain to its own government.
Britain follows the identical pattern. The committee’s star venue witness, Faye Dyer, runs ACC Liverpool, a convention center owned by the city of Liverpool, which means the hearing amounted to municipal government explaining the gathering economy to national government. That is the real shape of the problem in both countries. The sector’s natural champions are mayors, and mayors do not sit in national cabinets. The knowledge exists inside the state; it is simply stored at the wrong altitude. What Parliament’s report asks, in the end, is for Whitehall to see what town halls have always seen, and the same request is waiting, unasked, in Washington.
What happens next
Now the honest part. Select committee reports are advisory. The government must respond within roughly two months, but it is obliged to do nothing, and its behavior so far suggests it intends to do exactly that. When the committee asked about the VisitBritain cuts in June, the minister’s written reply amounted to a shrug: the tourism agency got a flat budget and made its own choices. The two-person team still stands. The department still holds the file. Anyone reading this morning’s report as a policy change rather than a policy argument is reading it wrong.
But arguments on the parliamentary record have a way of compounding. Every venue and convention bureau bidding for international business now carries an official document declaring its sector a trade asset starved by its own government. Every future spending review happens with that document in the file. And every industry in every country now has a template: Britain’s event professionals did not wait to be noticed, they applied for Parliament’s attention and got a report that says what they have been saying for decades.
Rachel Parker told Parliament the government does not understand what her industry does. Parliament has now agreed with her, in print, and Washington has spent a year demonstrating the same misunderstanding at larger scale. On both sides of the Atlantic, the business of bringing people together is discovering that it is a trade weapon its own governments keep leaving in the drawer. The two people left at VisitBritain’s business events desk are, for the moment, the entire British apparatus tasked with proving otherwise. Their American counterparts do not exist.
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