Focus on Hospitality & Catering
Open for business… or not P
The UK hospitality industry took a huge hit during the coronavirus pandemic, with announcements of redundancies and chains closing being made on an almost daily basis. Here we provide a reminder of how the industry has been affected during the last few months.
ubs, restaurants and other eateries were ordered to close with immediate effect on Friday, March 20.
After months of only being able to offer a takeaway service, the hospitality industry reopened for business on Saturday, July 4. Customers were understandably cautious about eating out initially and to help ease people’s fears Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced the Eat Out to Help Out scheme to run throughout the month of August. The scheme meant that on Mondays, Tuesdays and
Wednesdays throughout August, diners could receive 50% discount on meals and soft drinks up to the value of £10. The Treasury hailed the scheme as a success and stated that more than 100 million meals were eaten during the scheme. The main aim of the scheme was to help support the 1.8 million jobs in the hospitality sector, but with big names such as Premier Inn, JD Wetherspoon and Pizza Hut all announcing thousands of job losses in September, it seems the scheme did little to combat redundancies.
The latest blow to the hospitality sector came on Thursday, September 24 when pubs and restaurants were told they must close at 10pm and only provide table service to help curb the spread of coronavirus. This led many to wonder whether the Eat Out to Help Out scheme was partly responsible for the steady increase in coronavirus cases during September.
| 50 | November 2020
Now the hospitality industry is calling on the government to do more to help. More than 100 UK hospitality businesses have written directly to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and have said that without additional and urgent support many businesses will not ‘survive the bleakest of winters’ and that hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost. The letter describes how the latest restrictions only ‘made the fight to survive even harder’, adding that prior to them being introduced half of all hospitality businesses already did not believe they would survive beyond the middle of next year.
The signatories urge the Prime Minister to provide more government support, asking for employee contributions for the hospitality sector to the Job Support Scheme to be removed and to provide a package of grant funding for those businesses that face restrictions being brought forward. The letter also says, that to plan and rebuild beyond the winter that the VAT cut and business rates holiday must be extended through 2021 and beer duty cut. At this moment in time, it’s anyone’s guess what the UK’s hospitality sector will look like when we emerge out of the other side of the coronavirus pandemic.
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