There is a special silence that falls over a once-bustling restaurant as the last orders come in and out, the candles are extinguished and the chef sits outside smoking a cigarette and contemplating bankruptcy. It’s the sound of a little dream dying. And right now that silence is becoming deafening across the UK.
I’ve just returned from dinner at a very nice neighborhood bistro in west London, where somewhere between burrata and lamb the owner, a man who gave up a cushy banking job to chase the romance of eating people, has confessed that he’s closing in September. Not because no one is coming. They are coming. They eat. They tip. You order the second bottle. But mathematics, he sighed, is no longer mathematics.
The story is the same in every zip code. UKHospitality estimates we have lost around one pub or restaurant every day over the past year. The numbers on Hospitality Rising are even bleaker: Chefs are leaving, dining rooms are going dark, websites are being sold to coffee chains and vape shops. And yet our Chancellor has decided that this fragile, brilliant and world-leading sector really needs a massive kick-start.
Let’s count the bruises. From April 2025, the employer’s social insurance increased to 15 percent. The threshold at which companies start paying has been cut from £9,100 to £5,000, which is a fancy way for the Treasury to say that employing every waiter, glass polisher, kitchen porter on Saturday morning is significantly more expensive. Add to that the rise in the national living wage to £12.21 an hour, the shrinking wage relief for businesses from 75 per cent to a paltry 40 per cent and the stubborn refusal to cut hospitality VAT on anything similar to our European competitors, and you have what UKHospitality has calculated as an additional annual burden on the sector of £3.4 billion. Three point four. Billion. With a B
To which Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer basically shrugged their shoulders and said: tough. Go ahead. Be more productive. Use AI. Yes, really, the Prime Minister actually suggested that artificial intelligence was the answer to the face-to-face working crisis. Has the man ever tried to get a chatbot to choose the Picpoul de Pinet over the Sancerre, or deal with a four-person group of accountants splitting the bill seventeen different ways?
I am generally not a conspiracy theorist. But I’m starting to wonder if this is pure incompetence or something darker. Because if you sat down with a blank piece of paper and consciously tried to design a package of measures that guaranteed the burning of independent restaurants, you would end up more or less exactly where this government ended up. Hammer the labor costs. Hammer the real estate costs. Reject the only tax cut, the VAT, that would actually make the difference. Drive out the free-spending non-doms who used to keep Mayfair running, propose extending the smoking ban to pub gardens and street tables, and then make it even harder to recruit from abroad. Great.
The reason for this is probably because restaurants are a luxury, frequented by people who can afford them and staffed by people who don’t vote Labor. Easy political target. Of course wrong. Our industry employs 3.5 million people, more than half of them under 30, many of them in their first real job. You’ll learn skills not taught in any classroom, nimbleness, politeness and how to talk an angry German tourist out of a complaint about the size of the shrimp. Killing restaurants doesn’t punish the rich. It punishes the boy from Croydon who wanted to be a sommelier, the Polish chef who made a life here, and the landlady whose pub still kept her village alive.
And here’s the point that Reeves can’t seem to grasp: hospitality doesn’t just feed us. It drives tourism, it props up high streets, it fills supply chains from dairies in Cornwall to breweries in Yorkshire to the vineyards in Kent where their colleagues love to be photographed. When a restaurant closes, the butcher, the laundry, the taxi driver, the florist feel it. You don’t just lose a place to eat. You lose an entire ecosystem.
I had hoped, foolish though I am, that this Labor government would understand that. Finally, many of its members claim that they occasionally dine out, although it is believed that most of them come from public funds using Deliveroo. But policy after policy has revealed either a deep ignorance of how a small business actually works or an active hostility toward anyone who puts themselves at risk instead of patiently waiting for a public sector pay raise.
The lights are going out on our main streets. The chairs are stacked. The wine is sold at cost price. And when asked, our Chancellor only utters the platitude that growth takes time.
That goes for dying too, Rachel. This also applies to dying.
