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World Expo: Dubai

Question for Department for International Trade

UIN 88908, tabled on 16 November 2022

To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade, if she will make an estimate of the number of business contacts that were made at the UK pavilion during the EXPO 2020 in Dubai in each month of that event; and whether her Department adjusted its forecast of the number of business contacts that would be made during that event.

Answered on

22 November 2022

The UK pavilion recorded 1.1 million visits. To note ‘visits’ does not necessarily equate to separate individuals, who may have visited more than once. The number of individual visitors is not known.

Although not directly comparable, for planning purposes, the UK at Expo 2020 anticipated 10% of overall visits to the wider Expo event which was based on visitor attendance at the previous Expo. The organisers of Expo in Dubai announced 24.1m actual visits, whilst the UK registered 1.1m, equating to 4.6%. Our assessment is that this was due to the much larger scale of the Dubai Expo, and the site configuration which resulted in less overall footfall past the UK Pavilion.

The number of business contacts was not set or captured as a key success metric.

The cost to design the pavilion was £2.83m. The cost to build and maintain was covered under one contract and therefore these costs are being finalised as decommissioning (including dismantling) of the pavilion has only recently been completed.

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