BOOM – or bust?

Uncertainty is now the key word for this year’s summer season in Dorset.

While early bookings for many holiday businesses have been healthy the rising costs of living may force many to not now take a holiday at all.

Dorset councillors were told that the crisis could work either way for the county – either with an increase in visitors, or less than in a ‘normal’ year and at this stage was difficult to predict.

The council’s officer overseeing preparations for the summer, Graham Duggan, says work has already started in preparing for the months ahead, whatever it brings, although the operation and finance for dealing with visitors has been scaled back because it was initially believed that visitor numbers would be less than in 2020-21, with the virtual disappearance of Covid restrictions once again making foreign travel easier.

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He told the council’s place resources scrutiny on Thursday that weekly meetings between councils, tourism staff, highways and the police as well as other partners, were already monitoring visitor numbers and were prepared for almost every eventuality.

Sherborne councillor Jon Andrews said he feared that scaling back the operation might be a mistake with the squeeze on incomes possibly resulting in more day trippers, rather than those staying for longer.

“With the financial crisis many people won’t be able to afford to go abroad, or to holiday in this country, but I believe there could be more day-trippers so I don’t think it’s wise to scale back on our summer 2022 operation, because we may need it,” he said.

“If we only have a limited budget, what are we going to do. Stop the service?”

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Mr Duggan told him that although the budget was smaller the experience from two years of partnership working to deal with increased visitor numbers meant that there was now a better ability to foresee problems and react to it with various organisations working together.

Chesil Bank councillor Mark Roberts said he hoped that more would be done this year to stop “wild camping” which, at one point, had resulted in around 100 families camping illegally on the Chesil beach.

He said the situation could be helped by making it easier for local farmers to, temporarily, use some of their land to set up camp sites, but many of the regulations worked against them and made it difficult to achieve.

He was told that the new public protection orders did have a provision for dealing with camping on some beaches with the ability to issue fixed penalty notices if people were causing a nuisance.