Editor’s Viewpoint: Barking at the Moon: Has Hospitality Become Invisible to This Government?

By Peter Adams, Editor, CLH News

Do you ever feel like you are barking at the moon? Welcome to my world. And I suspect, reading this, you feel exactly the same.

I follow many sector spokespeople and organisations on social media, and I share their absolute frustration at how the hospitality and on-trade sector is being treated by this government.

The anger reverberating around our industry right now is wholly justified. Chancellor Rachel Reeves stood at the despatch box to deliver her Spring Statement and did not utter the word “hospitality” once. Not once.

This is the sector that employs around 3.5 million people. The sector that contributes billions in tax revenues. The sector that animates every high street, every town centre, every community in the land.

And it is the sector that has been hit hardest by this Chancellor’s budgets, now bracing itself for a brutal double whammy: soaring staffing costs and business rate rises, all while footfall continues its stubborn decline.

Night Time Economy Adviser Sascha Lord was rather blunt on social media, asking simply why this Chancellor appears to hate hospitality so much — and pointing out that her budgets have already cost the sector an estimated 120,000 jobs, the vast majority of them belonging to young people.
This is where it becomes deeply personal for me. As a frontline operator for many years, I know intimately the value that hospitality has always offered young people.

Hospitality is, and always has been, the ultimate meritocracy.

Anyone — often without a single formal qualification — can go from the “post room to the boardroom”, and the sector has many fine examples.
You can walk in the door at sixteen and, through graft, personality and ability, work your way to running an operation.

That has proved invaluable — life-changingly so — for those from backgrounds where university, whether through circumstance or choice, simply isn’t an option.

Hospitality gave those young people their first foot on the employment ladder.

It gave them on-the-job learning. And it gave them something that no classroom easily replicates: social skills, discipline, patience, and genuine confidence.

The ability to deal with the public, to think on your feet, to be part of a team under pressure.

The 8.5% rise in the minimum wage for 18-20 year olds to £10.85 an hour, combined with the National Insurance changes, is now causing employers to think very hard about taking on young, inexperienced staff. Some firms are already reducing their hiring.

Industry leaders and analysts are increasingly warning of a “lost generation” of youth employment — and I fear they are right.

I am so very sad to see this demographic suffer the most as a direct consequence of government policy.

And please — spare us the weasel words about investing in training.

That will not “butter the parsnips”. The jobs were already there. The on-the-job training was already there, embedded within those jobs.
Training people for a sector that cannot afford to employ them is an exercise in futility. Without jobs, training is pointless.

Sector organisations and spokespeople are shouting from the rooftops. UKHospitality, the BBPA, the NTIA — they are all making the same arguments, loudly and clearly, with data to back them up.

A VAT cut for hospitality — a proven economic lever that stimulates demand, protects jobs and ultimately grows tax receipts through economic activity — remains stubbornly off the table.

Business rates reform feels equally distant, and the political cost of ignoring hospitality may yet be higher than the government imagines.
So yes — barking at the moon. But we will keep barking. Because this sector is too important, too vital, and too resilient to be written off by political indifference.