When the government’s business advisor Alex Depledge declared that Britain “no longer needs restaurants”, my first reaction was one of disbelief. My second step was to grab the data. And my third, after reading it, was a conclusion both simple and troubling: It has misjudged where entrepreneurship actually lives in this country, and is thereby making it harder for it to survive.
Let me start with the basics. The hospitality industry employs 2.6 million people in the UK, 7.1% of the total workforce. It generates gross value added of £69.5 billion. It contributes £54 billion in gross tax revenue annually. By any reasonable measure, this is not a sideline business but rather a cornerstone of the UK economy. But here’s the number that should stop the government’s business advisor. It comes from the House of Commons Library Hospitality Research Report published in January 2026, which she may not have read: 99.6% of hospitality businesses are SMEs and 97.7% are small businesses. An adviser tasked with paving the way for more small businesses could reasonably be expected to know that one of the most entrepreneurial sectors in the entire UK economy is the one she has just publicly rejected.
But the argument I want to make goes beyond the statistics, important as they are. It’s about something more fundamental, something that Depledge, for all their intelligence and commercial experience, seems to have completely overlooked.
Every deal done in this country, every investment secured, every partnership, every customer relationship created, happens somewhere and through human contact. This happens over coffee, at lunch, at dinner, at a networking event, at a conference, at a drinks reception. The hospitality sector is not separate from the high-growth economy the government adviser wants to build. It’s the connective tissue of it. You can’t scale a clean tech company, raise a venture capital round, or secure a manufacturing partnership without, at some point, sitting across the table from someone in a room made possible by a hospitality company.
I want to give a concrete example of what smart support for hospitality entrepreneurship actually looks like, because it’s already happening, just not from the government. On our own university campus, we work with Aramark to ensure catering for students, staff and events. Given the natural fluctuations in demand over the course of the semester, Aramark is doing something pretty clever: It’s bringing in small, independent food truck operators on a rotational basis, giving them guaranteed traffic seven or eight hours a day, exposure to a large and diverse customer base, and the kind of commercial experience that no incubator program can replicate. The result is a richer, more diverse food offering for our community and a real launching pad for small dining businesses.
Pubs do the same thing. The Compton Arms in Islington, ranked in the UK’s top 50 gastropubs, has built its reputation by offering kitchen residencies to emerging independent food businesses, giving them a platform, customer base and the commercial experience to grow. It is not a charity model; It’s smart. The chefs behind Four Legs completed their residency at the Compton Arms and then opened The Plimsoll. Walk into any good pub that offers food and you’ll find a similar story: Thai kitchens operating from the back, independent suppliers stocking the bar and local producers on the menu. These are entrepreneurship ecosystems that the government advisor apparently failed to notice.
Aramark and the Compton Arms understood something the government did not: supporting small hospitality businesses is not charity. It’s a smart business strategy.
I would kindly invite the government’s business advisor to conduct a simple experiment. Consider a single workday. Morning coffee was delivered on the way to the office from an independent cafe, almost certainly an SME. The cookies and drinks were provided for the first meeting of the day. Lunch, either at a local restaurant or catered. Networking event with colleagues or customers. A family dinner this evening. Count how many of these touchpoints affect a hospitality business. Count how many of the people who made these moments possible are employed in a sector she suggested we no longer need.
The government says it wants to work for the industries of tomorrow. Us too. There is no doubt about the importance of clean technologies, advanced manufacturing or the creative sector. But portraying hospitality as somehow standing in the way of this goal is a wrong and harmful decision. An economy that is neglecting its sixth-largest employment sector, where restaurants have already lost 22% of their food service operations since 2020, and which continues to drive up costs through Social Security increases and business rates reform is not prepared for the future. This undermines the present.
There is no need to tell the British hospitality industry that he is unwelcome. It needs a government and a business advisor who understands what it is and what it does well enough to support it properly.
