.jpg?ssl=1 "“Hospitality was let down today”: the UK’s top chefs react to the Autumn Budget")
For chef Tommy Banks, who runs a number of restaurants and other food businesses, the measures were nowhere near enough as he said in a post: “Hospitality was let down today.”
He described the severity of the situation: “Over the 20 years I’ve been in the industry, this is without doubt the hardest time it’s ever been to operate… In WhatsApp groups I’m in, I’m seeing restaurant owners saying, ‘We’re closing tomorrow. We’re going to make everybody redundant.'”
He cited problems like the rise in the national minimum wage, which has increased by 48 per cent. “At the same time, employers’ national insurance has gone up by 162 per cent… imagine you’ve got a couple of hundred staff, it’s half a million quid”.
This joins the compounded issues of the past few years, including Brexit, Covid and the energy crisis, where businesses didn’t benefit from an energy price cap, plus food inflation has added to that strain.
“The model is broken,” he says. “Businesses cannot absorb these costs. Customers cannot absorb price increases; they’ve got less money too”.
“The only thing you could do is to reduce VAT in hospitality, like they do in every other European country… If they don’t do that, we are looking at huge closures, huge job losses and potentially an industry that will be decimated forever,” Banks added.
Founders of The Go To Food Podcast, Freddy Clode and Ben Benton, were most disappointed by the lack of recognition for the industry. “Walk around Borough Market, Soho, Shoreditch and look at what’s drawing the crowds. It’s the restaurants, pubs, cafés, the afternoon teas – our food culture. Our industry is one of the things that makes this country such an extraordinary place to visit.”
Despite the disappointment, Banks doesn’t see this as the end: “We’re going to have to make so much noise that it’s deafening… Let’s not let this industry die on our watch,” he adds.