SOUTH NORFOLK MP Richard Bacon has hit out at the Government for its failure to stop tourist attractions receiving huge grants on the basis of vastly over-estimated visitor numbers.

Mr Bacon, a member of the Commons public accounts committee, was speaking as the committee's report into the failures behind the Navan Centre in Armagh, Northern Ireland, was published.  The living history centre received £5.2 million over eight years but failed to attract anywhere near the 160,000 visitors it had forecast.

Mr Bacon said: "Like the Millennium Dome and the Royal Armouries Museum before it, government grants to the Navan Centre were provided on the basis of 'phantom' tourists who never materialised, and taxpayers' money was poured into a badly planned project that was clearly never going to be commercially viable".

Based at Navan Fort in County Armagh, the Navan Centre's aim was to bring to life the ancient history of Ulster, but it managed to attract an average of only 33,000 visitors in any year. The Centre closed in 2001 when its four-year funding package ended.

Mr Bacon added: "If a business could be run on optimism alone, then the Navan Centre would be an astounding success.  In future, ministers must make sure that the planning of such attractions is based on past experience and sober realism, so we are not left with any more expensive monuments to wishful thinking".

29 September 2005

PAC REPORT: The Navan Centre
PARLIAMENT: MP slams 'lucky dip' Dome deal