𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

The hospitality industry is staring down the barrel of destruction and no amount of spin from Westminster can hide it. Years after the worst of the pandemic, wounds remain raw and the damage is still evident. For many publicans, restaurateurs, small hotel and cafe owners, the reckoning hasn’t ended. I’m still paying off a bounce-back loan – five instalments of £800 a month, five more reminders that the socalled “recovery” is a cruel joke.

We were crushed by lockdowns, forced to shut, forced to borrow, told we’d get through it. Yet here we are, hurtling toward industry oblivion. Customer wallets are emptier than ever, people’s priorities have shifted – even a pint out feels like a splurge – and our tills stay silent more often than not. On top of that, we’ve been hammered by tax after tax.

Costs that in many European countries, like Germany, Spain, and others, are a fraction of what we have placed on us, and a VAT rate double that of many of our neighbours. We also had the energy crisis.

If your electricity or gas contract expired, you were looking at bills 300%-plus higher. My small backstreet pub went from paying £1,500 to £5,000 a month in electricity alone.

I endured that for a year – it nearly cost me my livelihood – and they still remain north of £2,000. And now business rates are being cranked up like some medieval torture device – another punitive squeeze on our throats.

But it’s the hypocrisy and lies that really hurt. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has the gall to claim she’s “backing small business and hospitality” as she promises business-rate relief.

And yet, while announcing the “cuts”, the government revalued most of our properties and scrapped the rate relief many of us relied on. According to analysis by the trade body UKHospitality, an average pub’s business rates will have increased by 76% by 2028/29, and an average hotel’s by 115%.

In comparison, the rates bill for a distribution warehouse – the type used by online giants such as Amazon – will have increased by only 16%, an office building by 7% and a large supermarket by only 4%.

No wonder pub operators are bracing for mass closures. And that’s not all. The minimum wage increases and national insurance contribution hikes from the first Budget from Reeves had already forced my business to find an extra £25,000 a year.

For a small backstreet pub, that’s brutal. Her latest Budget slaps on another £15,000 a year in extra costs. Wages go up, fair enough, but where does that money come from?

If you can’t raise prices (because customers don’t have the cash), you cut staff and you cut shifts. That’s what I’ve had to do. That’s what many of us in the hospitality industry are doing.

And, yes, it means jobs go, shifts vanish and opportunities die – all in the name of paying ever higher bills. Under Labour’s watch, hospitality is being strangled.

There is no breathing room left, no path to growth, no sign of relief and, for many, no way back. This is not just about businesses, it’s about the hundreds of thousands of people for whom hospitality was their first job.

Not everyone became a millionaire but many got through university, paid bills and earned honest money. Now those chances are disappearing, one laid-off shift at a time. The future looks really bleak.

The blame doesn’t lie with inflation or with global supply chain woes – no, it lies squarely at the door of governments that pretended to support hospitality while plunging a knife into its back.

They told us they were helping, they promised relief – all the while quietly rewriting tax rules, and revaluing properties. It’s a total betrayal of a once proud backbone of local economies now reduced to closure after closure. Politicians need to hear this: we are not statistics, we are not corporate assets, we are people and communities, and this endless squeeze finishes in collapse.

Ministers, if you want to help, act. Suspend these draconian tax and business rate rises, reinstate meaningful relief, stop the abstract “multipliers” and “rateable values” talk, cut VAT like much of Europe has, and remember who you are cracking down on… ordinary people, ordinary businesses and ordinary jobs.

When pubs are gone, with them goes community, culture, opportunity. What is left behind are memories of good times past. And you can’t collect taxes from a shuttered-up pub.

Adam Brooks is landlord of The Three Colts pub in Buckhurst Hill, Essex