Gloomy weather forecasts raining on our parade, say stately homes
CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT THE BBC’s overly pessimistic television and radio weather forecasts are putting off visitors, the owners of Britain’s most beautiful stately homes have complained.
The Historic Houses Association sent a group of board members to the Met Office and the BBC to complain that forecasters were adopting a needlessly negative tone and dissuading people from sharing the delights of their estates.
The association even tried to organise a survey of its members to see if the Met Office’s projections were matched by reality.
However, the exercise – over the August 2015 Bank Holiday weekend – was a wash-out, amid torrential rain, and consigned it to failure.
The association is planning another survey to discern whether the Met Office’s forecasts are too pessimistic.
James Birch, its president and the owner of Doddington Hall near Lincoln, told that the association had “lobbied for better weather interpretation” from the Met Office and the BBC and had asked them to be “more even handed about your forecast”.
He said: “Weather forecasters, as a result of natural human behaviour, are gloomier about the weather than the actual outcome. People look at the weather, see that it says ‘patchy showers’ and decide not to go out.”
Mr Birch believes that it would be fairer if forecasters said there was a “tiny risk of rain, it will be nice most of the day”.
He said: “That has quite a negative effect on particularly domestic local tourism. So we have lobbied the Met Office to be slightly more optimistic.
“We have written to them. One of our board members who also sits on one of the tourist committees has actually been to the headquarters of the Met Office.
“A group went to the Met Office to have a chat to see if they could give them a warning or two.”
He added: “We would like them to be cheerier but I can’t promise they have got any cheerier. We are thinking about it [a new survey] in 2017.
“We have a national problem that everyone thinks it rains in England and in fact it does not rain that much. If you bicycle as I used to do it is amazing how infrequently you get rained on.”
A BBC source said: “People don’t necessarily think of all sunny/dry weather as good or rainy/wet as bad, and we are mindful of that in our language”.
Weather forecasters had been encouraged to “present information as clearly as possible and provide our audience with ‘usable weather’ information they need to go about their day.”
This meant that forecasters were able to say there would be “some welcome rain for gardeners” after a lengthy dry spell.
Other examples included “Although it will start damp, it will brighten” and “You might catch a shower but it will be a mostly dry day with sunny spells”.
A BBC spokesman added: “The public values BBC Weather for its clear, timely and accurate forecast information across online.”
A spokesman for the Met Office – which has a contract to supply the BBC with its weather forecast until the spring – added: “The Met Office is trusted to give the best possible guidance television, radio and on the weather by the public and we forecast the weather without bias.
“As the UK’s national weather service, we have a responsibility to warn about the potential for disruption caused by the heavy rain, gales, snow etc, but we also highlight fine weather when it is expected.”
Mr Birch also said that visitors were more interested in family photographs in stately homes than looking at the masterpieces in houses that were like “museums”.
He said: “If you go into a room full of Reynoldses, Stubbses or Canellettos, the one thing [visitors] will look at are the family photographs on the table. You always want lots of family photographs – that brings the place alive.”
The Historic Houses Association represents 1,600 of the UK’s finest stately homes, including Castle Howard, Bleinheim Palace and Chatsworth.
Mr Birch renewed his call for the Government to offer more tax breaks to encourage owners to spend more on their maintenance.
More of the homes’ owners were now seeking to exploit commercial opportunities as fewer of them considered this to be “vulgar”.
He said: “There was a postwar generation who thought it was slightly vulgar to open your house, and that generation just disappeared.
“You have just got to get on with it. Weddings are the most obvious thing, film locations, corporate events, retail, farm shops.”