Government Business

The Westminster Collection (TWC) is a unique business tourism marketing collective that serves to remind the world that Westminster, in the heart of London, is still the pre-eminent business tourism destination with an abundance of excellent venues, hotels and services that cannot be beaten.
    
The mix of historically, architecturally and culturally significant buildings that provide the baseline for TWC venues and members are second to none.
    
These range from historical palaces such as Banqueting House in Whitehall to the contemporary and wholly secure facilities of The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre (QEIICC) on Broad Sanctuary in the very heart of Westminster’s parliamentary and governmental organisations. The Collection also features charities, associations and academies whose striking and solid buildings in key locations have been sustained, beautifully restored, refurbished and upgraded into some of the most up-to-date quality facilities in London today.
    
The Church is also well represented with three landmark properties that have established themselves as venues for all manner of important events, as well as acting as centres of ecclesiastical governance. The Collection also includes an excellent selection of award-winning hotels, each with their own distinctive personality, attributes and style.  
    
New to the Collection, but as interesting to those looking for a venue of distinction and character, are the Private Member’s Clubs that through TWC can offer their exciting selection of facilities for functions and receptions.

The QEIICC
The leading venue for government events, The QEIICC is uniquely situated in the shadow of Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and the London Eye. A premier purpose built venue, it offers the finest facilities to meeting planners and combines modern comfort with the very latest in technology, including internet access and wireless PC connection throughout the Centre.
    
The QEIICC has four main auditoria, seven conference rooms and over 20 smaller meeting rooms across seven floors. Catering for 2-2,500 delegates, the conference rooms and smaller meeting rooms can be used in a variety of combinations to meet the needs of each specific event.
    
The catering is provided by Leith’s at the Centre who can cater for as few as five and up to a maximum of 930 for a silver service dinner.
    
The in-house AV department, Interface, offers solutions to all audio visual requirements including staging and set design, presentation design, production management, data and video production, live camera recording, lighting design and worldwide satellite links.
    
The Centre is renowned for the experience and professionalism of its staff, the quality and reliability of its services, its high level of security and use of leading-edge technology.

Major players
Gone are the days when you could just open the spare rooms in your very large building that were no longer fully required for the original purpose it was built, throw in a few audio visual props and conference chairs and consider this was enough to bring in the business you wanted. Today it is a very different environment with very high expectations, standards and levels of commitment required in abundance on all fronts.
    
Take the financial commitment alone. A survey of TWC members carried out in 2009 revealed that, between them, in excess of £125 million had been spent on capital investment and refurbishment programmes during the past five years.   
    
An earlier survey of members established that turnover for The Collection, at that time, amounted to over £70 million with as much as a third of that again assessed as having been turned away due to incompatibility, or unavailability, or both.
    
TWC members, therefore, are major players in maintaining the all important business tourism revenue that is vital to Westminster and London’s economy. The economic impact benefit, as a result, is substantial and measured as three to four times greater than that derived from leisure tourism.
    
And the concept for TWC, officially launched in October 2003, was simple. It was to ensure that primary facilities and venues in Westminster marketed themselves collectively to ensure that the location in which they sat, that was such an integral part of why they were sought after in the first place, got a dedicated and independent voice within a membership environment that brought them results.
    
Now, with close to 60 carefully selected venue, hotel, associate and affiliate members that represents the strength of what Westminster can offer the event organiser and planner, TWC is an established first point of contact and one-stop-shop for these important services.
    
TWC has seen sustained growth of its membership with a new ‘Affiliate’ category also created to allow organisations such as, Westminster Kingsway College, The London Apprenticeship Company and The Society of London Theatre to complement the Westminster brand and the full membership.

For more information
Visit www.thewestminstercollection.co.uk
or contact René Dee at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it