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The future is bleak for UK pubs, cafés, restaurants and hotels – according to the latest redundancy figures from the Office for National Statistics.
Hospitality has lost 89,000 jobs since October 2024 – that’s 53 per cent of all job losses in the UK, concentrated in just one sector.
UKHospitality is warning that the number could rise to 100,000 by the time of the next Budget – which is likely to be in November, less than three months away. Its chair, Kate Nicholls, described the scale as “staggering.”
It is staggering – but it is also telling.
Hospitality is not simply one sector among many. It is the frontline barometer of how ordinary people are living.
When they have money in their pockets, they go out for a meal, a pint, a gig.
When they don’t, those trips are the first thing to go.
The fact that more than half of the nation’s job losses are in this industry is a clear signal that living standards are still in freefall.
Inflation remains stubbornly high at 3.8 per cent. Energy bills have not eased. Disposable incomes have not recovered. The result is fewer punters, shorter opening hours, and an accelerating cycle of job losses.
Businesses themselves are being crushed from the other side.
The rise in the minimum wage, the increase in employer National Insurance contributions, and soaring energy and supplier costs might be manageable if they were balanced with targeted support. But this government has chosen the opposite path.
The 75 per cent business rates relief scheme that sustained venues through the pandemic and its aftermath was scrapped in March. In its place came a 40 per cent relief, capped at £110,000 per business. The result has been devastating. Analysts estimate it has dropped an extra £215 million in tax bills on the sector.
For a small pub, the annual rates bill has jumped from under £4,000 to more than £9,000.
Add in the other cost increases, and the margins collapse.
That is how respected operators like Oakman Inns, in business for nearly two decades, fell into administration this summer. That story is not a one-off. It is the canary in the coal mine.
Yet the Treasury boasts of helping pubs with al fresco dining licences and duty tweaks on draught pints.
It points to its “Small Business Plan” with its portals, growth services and digital advisory schemes.
None of these pay the gas bill. None of them keep a pub open on a Tuesday night when only three customers walk through the door.
The contrast between rhetoric and reality could not be sharper.
The pattern here is consistent and, I would argue, deliberate.
Independent businesses are being hollowed out.
Large chains, with the capital to absorb higher costs, will survive and expand.
Delivery platforms, taking their 30 per cent cut, will flourish as dine-in shrinks.
Developers will be free to buy up closed venues and convert them into flats or offices.
The likes of Greene King praise licensing reforms, while small bar owners like Manchester’s Mark Wrigley go without their own wages to keep staff employed. That contrast is the story of this policy environment in miniature.
The loss is not only economic but cultural.
Pubs and cafés are not middle-class indulgences. They are part of the country’s social infrastructure – the spaces where communities gather, celebrate, commiserate, and connect.
They are warm rooms on cold nights, often the last civic spaces left.
To allow them to close at the rate of eight per week is to commit a form of cultural erasure.
The industry is not silent about what it needs. Under the banner of #TaxedOut, it is demanding a VAT cut to bring Britain into line with European levels, a reversal of the NICs increase, and restoration of the 75 per cent business rates relief that was withdrawn in March.
This is not a wishlist; it is survival.
And it makes a mockery of the government’s claim to be supporting small businesses.
The truth is inescapable.
Hospitality is telling us what the wider statistics confirm: the economy is failing where it matters most – in the lives of ordinary people.
A Labour government that claims to represent working people cannot keep ignoring this reality.
Until living standards rise, the jobs will keep vanishing, the lights will keep going out, and Britain’s cultural life will be managed into elimination – one pub, one café, one job at a time.
Share this post:
Half of UK job losses are in hospitality – and it means prosperity is plummeting
Share this post:
The future is bleak for UK pubs, cafés, restaurants and hotels – according to the latest redundancy figures from the Office for National Statistics.
Hospitality has lost 89,000 jobs since October 2024 – that’s 53 per cent of all job losses in the UK, concentrated in just one sector.
UKHospitality is warning that the number could rise to 100,000 by the time of the next Budget – which is likely to be in November, less than three months away. Its chair, Kate Nicholls, described the scale as “staggering.”
It is staggering – but it is also telling.
Hospitality is not simply one sector among many. It is the frontline barometer of how ordinary people are living.
When they have money in their pockets, they go out for a meal, a pint, a gig.
When they don’t, those trips are the first thing to go.
The fact that more than half of the nation’s job losses are in this industry is a clear signal that living standards are still in freefall.
Inflation remains stubbornly high at 3.8 per cent. Energy bills have not eased. Disposable incomes have not recovered. The result is fewer punters, shorter opening hours, and an accelerating cycle of job losses.
Businesses themselves are being crushed from the other side.
The rise in the minimum wage, the increase in employer National Insurance contributions, and soaring energy and supplier costs might be manageable if they were balanced with targeted support. But this government has chosen the opposite path.
The 75 per cent business rates relief scheme that sustained venues through the pandemic and its aftermath was scrapped in March. In its place came a 40 per cent relief, capped at £110,000 per business. The result has been devastating. Analysts estimate it has dropped an extra £215 million in tax bills on the sector.
For a small pub, the annual rates bill has jumped from under £4,000 to more than £9,000.
Add in the other cost increases, and the margins collapse.
That is how respected operators like Oakman Inns, in business for nearly two decades, fell into administration this summer. That story is not a one-off. It is the canary in the coal mine.
Yet the Treasury boasts of helping pubs with al fresco dining licences and duty tweaks on draught pints.
It points to its “Small Business Plan” with its portals, growth services and digital advisory schemes.
None of these pay the gas bill. None of them keep a pub open on a Tuesday night when only three customers walk through the door.
The contrast between rhetoric and reality could not be sharper.
The pattern here is consistent and, I would argue, deliberate.
Independent businesses are being hollowed out.
Large chains, with the capital to absorb higher costs, will survive and expand.
Delivery platforms, taking their 30 per cent cut, will flourish as dine-in shrinks.
Developers will be free to buy up closed venues and convert them into flats or offices.
The likes of Greene King praise licensing reforms, while small bar owners like Manchester’s Mark Wrigley go without their own wages to keep staff employed. That contrast is the story of this policy environment in miniature.
The loss is not only economic but cultural.
Pubs and cafés are not middle-class indulgences. They are part of the country’s social infrastructure – the spaces where communities gather, celebrate, commiserate, and connect.
They are warm rooms on cold nights, often the last civic spaces left.
To allow them to close at the rate of eight per week is to commit a form of cultural erasure.
The industry is not silent about what it needs. Under the banner of #TaxedOut, it is demanding a VAT cut to bring Britain into line with European levels, a reversal of the NICs increase, and restoration of the 75 per cent business rates relief that was withdrawn in March.
This is not a wishlist; it is survival.
And it makes a mockery of the government’s claim to be supporting small businesses.
The truth is inescapable.
Hospitality is telling us what the wider statistics confirm: the economy is failing where it matters most – in the lives of ordinary people.
A Labour government that claims to represent working people cannot keep ignoring this reality.
Until living standards rise, the jobs will keep vanishing, the lights will keep going out, and Britain’s cultural life will be managed into elimination – one pub, one café, one job at a time.
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