The unseen backbone of Britain: Why hospitality deserves better

The loss of 69,000 jobs is a severe blow to the hospitality sector and should be a wake-up call to the wider country. It shows an industry in crisis, with the potential impact reverberating far beyond the boundaries of pubs, restaurants, cafés, and hotels. Because hospitality is more than just a place to grab a drink or enjoy a meal. It is an industry supporting an intricate web of other businesses and industries which make up the complicated supply chain, from food and drink manufacturers through to laundry services, service providers, technology innovators, carpenters, builders, and more.

Additionally, the hospitality sector contributes around £62.6 billion in economic output in the UK and pays over £50 billion annually in tax.

Yet it’s not enough. The Government is continuing to display some of the well-documented traits that parents have when their children want to pursue a career in hospitality. There is this unfounded and lingering option that it isn’t a ‘proper’ industry with career prospects or longevity. It’s seen as a stopgap, something to do before your ‘real’ career starts, so it’s not really that important. Of course, we all know differently.

The hard-working cogs of the high street

Hospitality is an important part of the fabric of our lives. If Covid taught us anything, it was that despite all of our technology and ways to communicate virtually, people retained that core need for physical social interaction. While being online certainly helped many people from being completely isolated, screens are not enough; people like to socialise, to be together, to share and to create memories.

During this challenging time, our hospitality businesses were consistently there (as the laws allowed) to provide those spaces. Owners changed and adapted to meet these needs as best they could. Shutting down, transforming and reinventing into a delivery, takeaway, or meal box businesses. Then, once again throwing open their doors to allow people to commune together. All at great cost to the businesses, it should be added.

As we look to the future, we cannot have a conversation about how to bring life back to our high streets without including hospitality businesses. In an era where things like shopping can be done online or in purpose-built, out-of-town retail parks, people need more thank just a transactional reason to justify heading to the high street. They need experiences. Urban centres need to become destinations, places to stop and spend a few hours, somewhere which brings joy, vs somewhere to run errands. Hospitality businesses will once again be relied on to adapt, change and ultimately bare a disproportionate weight in this evolution.

However, relying solely on hospitality businesses won’t work either. Investment in cultivating mixed-use high streets will be critical. We should to learn from those areas where only restaurants, or only bars and nightclubs, have opened, which often start as busy and buzzy hubs before slowly deteriorating as the initial thrill wears off. Instead, we need a sustainable mix of daytime cafés, night-time spots, retail, events, and community space.

Look at how somewhere like Selfridges has successfully fused retail and hospitality. By bringing together different industries (fashion, food, restaurants, makeup, etc.) they have essentially created a self-contained destination which people could stay in all day. It’s worked for over 100 years. Or even the humble garden centre. Often, these offer so much more than just plants and soil, incorporating a place to eat, clothing brands, gifts, and more to keep people within the experience.

Is the resilience reaching its limit?

The hospitality industry is and remains remarkably resilient in the face of almost impossible odds. For UK restaurants, approximately 60% close within their first year and nearly 80% fail by year five. These aren’t signs of poor work ethic or lack of innovation — they’re symptoms of a broken system.

It remains functioning because the people in it are good at re-inventing businesses and ‘just getting on’. But one can only go so far, there is only so much re-invention one can do, and only so many knock-backs’ people can take.

The truth of the situation is there is a complete lack of Governmental support or funding available. What motivation is there to take the monumental leap of faith and risk to open a hospitality business if the outlook is high taxes, staff shortages, and tight margins. There are no meaningful grants, no startup incentives, and no coordinated effort to nurture hospitality entrepreneurs in the same what that other industries receive support.

This isn’t about politics; successive governments have failed to act. It’s about recognition that the industry, and all of the hardworking individuals that make it tick, matter. Entrepreneurs and owners of hospitality businesses need to be sure they can make money in the long-term to be able to hire and pay staff, suppliers, and invest in growth. They need to be able to sustain their businesses during the early days and months when the seeds of re-generation are just taking root. Taxing the industry so heavily is not going to help create the right environment to stimulate any of this. Instead, we need policies which give structural support, funding pathways, and tax relief to nurture our future restaurateurs, baristas, brewers, chefs, and operators.

Without them, the high street dies. The tourist economy shrinks. The social fabric frays.

What should the next chapter look like?

Firstly, we need to remove this notion that hospitality isn’t a ‘proper’ career and instead recognise it as the vibrant and incredible industry it is. Fuelled by passionate people and full of opportunities and people who bring together creativity, leadership and service in a completely unquestionable way. A place providing the opportunity for people to learn real-world skills, and where people can rise through the ranks.

Hospitality has the potential to be a pillar of the UK’s future economy. For that to happen, hospitality needs to stop being seeing as a sideline, but as a strategic asset which deserves support. We need to stop penalising those who are working to bring people together, to revitalise our highstreets, and building something which is worth stepping out of the house for.

At Harrison, we are proud to support the hospitality industry and all those behind it. Hospitality is being taxed out of growth and its time for policy to reinvent itself for the better and protect it for the future.