There’s a kind of silence that descends on a busy restaurant when the last orders come and go, the candles are dimmed, and the chef is in the back with a cigarette and thinking about bankruptcy. It feels like a small dream is dying. And right now, across Britain, that silence is becoming deafening.
I’ve just returned from dinner at a wonderful neighborhood bistro in west London, where the owner, a man who quit a cushy banker’s job to pursue his love of catering, admitted somewhere between burrata and lamb that he’s closing in September. Not because no one comes. They are coming. They eat. They tip. They ordered a second bottle. But math, he sighed, no more math.
The story is the same for all zip codes. UKHospitality reckons we lost almost one restaurant or bar a day last year. The statistics for Hospitality Rising are grim: chefs leaving, dining rooms going dark, sites being flogged for coffee chains and vape shops. And yet our Chancellor has decided that what this fragile, bright, world-beating industry needs is a big kick.
Let’s count the bruises. From April 2025, the National Insurance employer jumps to 15 percent. The threshold at which businesses start paying has been reduced from £9,100 to £5,000, which is the Treasury’s fancy way of saying that every waiter, every glass polisher, every Saturday morning kitchen porter is now too expensive to employ. Throw in the National Living Wage rising to £12.21 an hour, business tax relief slashed from 75 per cent to 40 per cent, and a stubborn refusal to reduce hospitality VAT to anything like our European rivals, and you have what Hospitality counts as an additional £3.4 billion. Three-four points. Billions. With B.
Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer have shrugged and said: it’s tough. Get on with it. It is more productive. Use AI. Yes, in fact, the Prime Minister actually suggested that artificial intelligence was the answer to the problem of former workers. Has this man ever tried to get a chatbot to recommend Picpoul de Pinet with Sancerre, or deal with four accountants splitting the bill seventeen ways?
I am not, as a rule, a conspiracy. But I’m starting to wonder if this is incompetence or something dark. Because if you sit down with a clean sheet of paper and deliberately try to design a policy package that is guaranteed to burn down independent restaurants, you can end up where this Government has ended up. Hammer labor costs. Hammer the cost of the building. Reject the one tax cut, VAT, that would move the needle. Banish the expensive non-residential areas that used to keep Mayfair famous, propose extending the smoking ban to include gardens and tractor tables, and make it harder to rent abroad. Magnifique.
The reason, perhaps, is that restaurants are luxury, frequented by people who can’t afford it, with employees who don’t vote. An easy political target. It’s wrong, of course. Our sector employs 3.5 million people, more than half of them under the age of 30, many in their first proper job, learning skills that have never been taught in a classroom, grafting, respect, and how to attract a German tourist who is angry because of a complaint about the size of prawns. Killing restaurants doesn’t punish the rich. It punishes a child from Croydon who wanted to be a sommelier, a Polish chef who made a life for himself here, and a wife whose name keeps her village alive.
And here’s the bit that Reeves can’t seem to grasp: hospitality isn’t just about serving us. It powers tourism, improves high streets, fills chains from Cornish dairies to Yorkshire breweries to Kentish vineyards that its colleagues love to shoot. When the restaurant closes, the butcher hears it, the laundry firm hears it, the taxi driver hears it, the florist hears it. You don’t just lose a place to eat. You lose the whole ecosystem.
I was hoping, fool that I am, that this Labor Government would understand that. Many of its members, after all, say they enjoy the occasional dinner, although one suspects that most of them arrive via Deliveroo with the public purse. But policy after policy has revealed a profound ignorance of how small business really works, or a hatred of anyone who made their own decisions instead of waiting patiently for a public sector pay rise.
The lights go out on our high streets. The seats are packed. Wine is sold free of charge. And our Chancellor, when asked, only makes the point that growth takes time.
So is death, Rachel. So is death.
