Hospitality bosses were blindsided late on Wednesday by the news that Andy Burnham plans to give English mayors the power to tax hotels and other accommodation. UKHospitality, the industry trade body, reckons a 5% levy across England would cost 33,000 jobs, knock £2.2 billion off GDP and add at least £100 to a typical family holiday.

While this policy was contained in the previous government’s King’s Speech, this doesn’t quite seem to be living up to Burnham’s promise to “be better”, a collaborative listener, or a “circuit-breaker” from previous governments.

Dubbed the Overnight Visitor Levy by the Labour government, and a tourist tax by its opponents, it is really a tax on sleeping away from home. If you go to Edinburgh for a business meeting, stay in Salford to appear on the BBC, have medical reasons to travel, need emergency housing, or are renovating your kitchen, you will still have to pay. Not everyone who uses a hotel or an Airbnb is a tourist, but don’t worry: refugee shelters are excluded.

Labour has dressed this up with the usual fluffy language that surrounds bad ideas. Helen Godwin, Mayor of the West of England, said that “we should grab the chance to take more control of our future with both hands.” Naturally, taking back control is a good thing when it involves higher taxes.

European advocates for such levies are at least more honest about their real motivations. For years, locals in Barcelona and Majorca have daubed “tourists go home” on buildings during the summer, while protesters have likened the influx of foreign visitors to an invasion. These protests are often linked to housing, litter, and other local government problems. Venice charges day trippers €5 or €10 on busy days, with the city authorities stating that the fee is to “deter tourism”. Clearly, raising prices dampens demand.

Like Burnham’s argument at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday that spending money on housebuilding will save money, albeit on housing benefit, the Overnight Visitor Levy relies on another piece of circular economics: tax tourism to grow tourism. London Mayor Sadiq Khan calls the capital’s visitor economy a “huge success story”, so naturally City Hall wants to charge visitors up to 5% more to promote it as a tourist destination.

Manchester has trialled a miniature version. Since 2023, many hotel guests have paid £1 plus VAT per room per night. It’s a trivial charge for the rich, but rather more noticeable at the cheap end. The levy has been credited with helping Manchester’s visitor economy since it was imposed, but tourism was still recovering from Covid then, and two of the biggest additions to the city’s cultural offer were Aviva Studios and Co-op Live. The former grew from The Factory, backed under George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse, while the latter was developed through hundreds of millions of pounds in private investment by Oak View Group and City Football Group. Neither Burnham nor his levy are responsible for the two.

Scotland has similar levying power, which has led to 5% in Edinburgh and 7% in Aberdeen before VAT. Meanwhile, a capped levy of £1.30 per person per night will be introduced in Wales in April. Though it might be claimed fairly that the money can go on theatres or street cleaning, really it just frees up spending in other areas. Northern Ireland does not have a levy.

This is what devolution looks like: a mess, with different schemes in different nations and different charges in different cities. All the while, politicians raise the cost of living and dissuade tourism and enterprise through death by a thousand cuts, then hope citizens will thank them for “promoting” London, Edinburgh or Manchester. These might all be great cities, but their greatness owes more to the people who built things, opened businesses, or created art, rather than whichever pettifogging politician has discovered a new way to raise money for their city’s marketing teams.