Judging by the comments of the pubs code minister at the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group’s Christmas bash last night Wednesday 4 December), they don’t have a clue.
To stand there and tell us how the industry plays such an important role in providing employment for young people, providing jobs for the disadvantaged through fantastic initiatives like Only A Pavement Away and being such important assets to communities will have left more than a few in the room aghast.
Aghast at the utter inability to understand what the hospitality sector, let alone the wider business community, is desperately trying to hammer home.
For those that might have missed it, (like the Government), the increase in employers' national insurance contributions, the lowering of the threshold for national insurance contributions, along with the increases in minimum wage and cuts in the relief on beer duty has left the pub and bar sector reeling.
Serious challenges
As a result, many businesses, if they can survive the increases in the first place off the back of four years of hellish trading, are scrapping plans to invest and create jobs and actually looking at decreasing employee numbers.
All of which appears to have sailed over the head of Justin Madders and his Government buddies.
He did admit the sector faces some serious challenges, but doesn’t seem to realise that a fair proportion of those challenges are created by his colleagues, who are stubbornly refusing to back down in the face of economic reality
And to add insult to injury, he went on to praise the cut in duty, equivalent to one p off a pint. The impact of which was rather succinctly summed up by JW Lees boss William Lees-Jones, who said the duty cut reduced overall cost to the brewery sector by 95m, while the extra burdens of national insurance etc added 450m to the sector.
So cheers for the help guys.
Wider economy damage
The tragedy is, this is a new Government has set out its stall and to admit fault now would be hugely damaging to it’s authority. So rather than risk a blow to that, it’s prepared to pigheadedly throw a sector to the wolves and the consequences, and damage to the wider economy, be damned.
So sadly, the hospitality industry finds itself stuck between political posturing and economic reality.
Unless the Government grows up and accepts it’s made a mistake, I can’t see anything changing.
But hey, at least we got a penny off the pint….
