Hospitality is the UK’s canary in a coalmine sector. Because when pubs, bars and restaurants start to struggle, you know trouble is not far away for the wider economy.

So with the Budget just days away, UKHospitality is redoubling its continuous campaigning efforts on all fronts, urging the Government to put in place the sort of measures that will help avoid further troubled times for our industry, and instead enable hospitality to lead a full recovery of the UK economy.

We are eager to see the Chancellor use 6 March for a Budget that will mean hundreds of hospitality businesses survive, protecting thousands of jobs, and facilitating the rapid growth our sector can achieve.

One of the ways he can do that is through a thorough overhaul of the unfair business rates regime, something that is now urgently needed, with the Chancellor having announced in his Autumn Statement a damaging 6.7% business rates rise that increases bills for two-thirds of this sector’s trade. For those who manage to survive that blow, they will say farewell to the cash they had planned to invest, as it will have to be used to pay those higher rates.

So UKHospitality continues to press the Government to cap business rates increases in 2024. While in a perfect world it would freeze business rates completely, like it did the small property multiplier, we may instead have to settle for the 3% lower rate of inflation forecast for April lessening the impact of the increase.

Remember how the 12.5% VAT rate for hospitality provided welcome relief for thousands of businesses during the pandemic, saving many of them from closure? We would like to see that – or an even lower rate – brought back for hospitality, leisure and tourism businesses. It would undoubtedly be an effective way to boost tourism and buoy jobs.

Those, then, are two pretty big asks of the Chancellor, and while not wanting to appear greedy, we’ve one more: to address wages. April’s National Minimum and Living Wage rises are set to have a hugely damaging effect on most of the businesses in the hospitality industry. We strongly believe, therefore, that those businesses and the Government should share the burden, which could be achieved with a cut to the lower rate of employers’ NICs to 10%.

Which brings us to non-monetary measures that UKHospitality considers beneficial to hospitality and thus the wider economy. Our planning regime, for so long trussed-up in suffocating red tape, needs to be unbound, so that it’s no longer a frustrating impediment to the growth of hospitality businesses. We’re proposing a fast-track planning system that sees low-level schemes and developments approved automatically – the sort of applications that don’t affect trading hours, are valued under £25,000 or which involve expansion of less than 50 square metres.

Or how about a ban on upwards-only rent reviews? Plus, as part of the Government’s regulatory reform programme, changes to the alcohol licensing regime?

We believe that the measures we are calling for – fiscal or non-fiscal – are quite reasonable asks, and many MPs agree – during a recent debate in Parliament, MPs from across the political spectrum recognised just how important hospitality is to the health of the UK economy. Indeed, they backed much of what we’re asking the Chancellor to deliver in his Budget, giving particular support to our VAT rate cut request.

Of course, the more voices we’re able to add to our requests, the more powerful they are and the more likely they are to be heard. So we’re urging hospitality businesses to write to your local MP ahead of the Budget, creating what we hope will be a collective message too powerful to be ignored. Already, more than 450 have done so, and we’re hoping hundreds more will before the Budget.

Instead of being well on the way to recovery by now, too many hospitality businesses are going to the wall. Sadly, the canary is ailing, which does not bode well for the wider UK economy. And if that poor bird is to sing again, the Chancellor and his Budget really must deliver the goods.

Kate Nicholls, chief executive, UKHospitality