Hospitality Sector

Andrew Griffith Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House regrets the combination of catastrophic choices made by the Government causing the closure, downsizing and lack of hiring by pubs, restaurants, hotels and hospitality businesses across the United Kingdom, with an estimated 84,000 job losses over the last 12 months and an average of two site closures per day in the first half of 2025; further regrets the Government’s policies that have led to this such as the omission of the hospitality sector from the Government’s industrial strategy, increases in the cost of pavement licences, the reduction in retail, hospitality and leisure business rates relief from 75 per cent to 40 per cent for 2025-26, the increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions to 15 per cent and the lowering of the secondary threshold to £5,000, and measures in the Employment Rights Bill which will make hospitality employers liable for the behaviour of customers and others; and calls on the Government to publish a dedicated strategy for the sector, to consult with hospitality employers prior to any future changes to the National Living Wage, to amend the Employment Rights Bill to protect seasonal and flexible employment practices vital to the sectors’ contribution in providing a ladder into employment for young and often excluded groups and to introduce targeted support measures to prevent further business closures, job losses and damage to local communities.

From the great British pub to the family-run restaurant, from the small seaside bed and breakfast to world-leading hotels, hospitality businesses are the beating heart of our communities, our high streets and our economy. Yet today, under Labour, they are hurting like never before. We were promised a Government for jobs, for opportunity and for prosperity. What have we got instead? A concoction of catastrophic choices causing a lack of hiring and the closure and downsizing of pubs, restaurants, hotels and hospitality businesses across the nation; a jobs tax that goes out of its way to savage the part-time, entry-level opportunities that hospitality offers in abundance; soaring business rates; and over 300 pages of additional job-killing red tape.

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

My hon. Friend might have been like me: the first job I ever had was as a porter, and then a barman, at the Crown and Mitre hotel in Carlisle. These are opportunities for people who are coming into the labour market for the first time or trying to get back into the labour market. The hospitality sector offers opportunity to people who otherwise have none, and that opportunity has come under devastating attack from this Government.

[Andrew Griffith]

My right hon. Friend is exactly right. Opportunity is a word we are going to hear again and again, because of the huge contribution that the hospitality sector makes to the economy and to getting people on the ladder of opportunity with their first job in life.

[Mr Richard Quigley (Isle of Wight West) (Lab)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Griffith]

The hon. Gentleman is trying to get his first opportunity, and I will give him that. We are going to have a good debate, and I will make some progress after this.

[Mr Quigley]

Does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that, under the Tories, a pub closed every 14 hours? That was 10,000 in total, so whether it is 14 hours or 14 years, the Tory party cannot be trusted with the economy.

[Andrew Griffith]

All I can suggest, and I say this in all seriousness, is that the hon. Gentleman should spend a lot more time in local pubs in his constituency, because the people there will talk about the horror show that is the Employment Rights Bill. They will talk to him about the soaring business rates, the reduction in relief under this Government and the national insurance job tax—that swingeing £25 billion attack on the private economy.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

If we are going to exchange numbers, does my hon. Friend agree that it is shocking that over 1,000 pubs and restaurants have closed since the autumn Budget, and that 84,000 hospitality workers have lost their jobs? That is one in every 25 since the autumn Budget alone—and that was when the autumn Budget was actually in the autumn. Does he agree that that is having an impact on our high streets and the very viability of our local town centres and that it needs to stop? The Government need to stop holding our hospitality sector responsible for everything that happens in the local economy.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. We must keep interventions short. We have close to 50 people trying to contribute today.

[Andrew Griffith]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. It is about the numbers, and it is important that we should be instrumented. This is a sector that is extremely well instrumented, and groups such as UKHospitality do a great job at calling out the impact. But it is not just about the numbers, because behind every one of those numbers is a story: a family, a striver, a risk taker, an entrepreneur, a community or a high street whose life is being sucked out of it by this Government. Hospitality is where the character of our nation lives, in the welcome of a restaurant host, the laughter in a dining room and the clink of a glass, and it is the fact that that life that is being extinguished that is so tragic.

[Dr Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth) (Con)]

One thing that is not picked up in the figures is the fact that cafés and businesses up and down Hinckley and Bosworth are having to reduce the man-hours that people are working to reduce their staffing costs because of the taxes that are being put in place. This is a real problem. Does my hon. Friend agree that we are not getting the growth that we want in this country because people are having to deal with this toxic concoction of legislation and tax?

[Andrew Griffith]

I do agree. My hon. Friend puts it extremely well. It has been an enormously difficult summer. The weather should have been a tailwind, but the tailwind was not significant enough to offset the headwind of the impact of that jobs tax. And who does it hit? Labour Members say that they stand up for opportunities for young people and the most vulnerable, but the change to national insurance thresholds in particular—the reduction from £9,100 to £5,000—has hit the part-time workers, the young mums trying to balance the responsibilities of family life and the young people trying to get their very first step on the ladder.

In her first Budget, the Chancellor said that she had made her choices. Well, we warned her, businesses warned her and even the Office for Budget Responsibility warned her, and what has happened? As my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) said, 84,000 jobs have been lost in hospitality since the Chancellor took office. That is a Wembley stadium’s-worth of livelihoods shredded by this Labour Government, affecting the most vulnerable in society, those trying to juggle other commitments and young people trying to have their first shot in the world of work. If this Government are about protecting working people, I have to say they have a very odd way of showing it. It is not just us saying this. Last month, Kate Nicholls, the chair of UKHospitality, said:

“More than half of all job losses since October occurring in hospitality is further evidence that our sector has been by far the hardest hit by the Government’s regressive tax increases.”

[David Mundell (Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale) (Con)]

On that point, does my right hon. Friend agree with my constituent, Stephen Montgomery, who is the director of the Scottish Hospitality Group, that the very circumstances he is setting out have brought the industry to the brink, and that unless the Government start listening, it is going to go over a cliff edge?

[Andrew Griffith]

As it happens, I was in Edinburgh yesterday, talking to representatives of the hospitality sector and the hard-pressed tourist sector, and they made exactly the same point to me.

This is unnecessary. It did not need to be this way. And to what end? An increase in the jobs tax to fund tax cuts for Mauritians and cookery classes for illegal migrants, or to let the bloated public sector work from home another day a week? If proof were needed of where hospitality ranks in the priorities of this Government, we need look no further than the pages of their own industrial strategy, because in 160 pages of closely typed text and hundreds of thousands of words, the word “hospitality” features just three times, one of which was a typo where they misspelt the word “hospital”. Let’s be frank, their attitude to hospitality is lamentable, and the bad news just keeps coming.

No Government that understood business would ever come forward with the Employment Rights Bill. Tony Blair did not. Gordon Brown did not. It is 330 pages that prove this Government are not serious about growth. They have zero appreciation for the seasonal and flexible work that suits the workers and the hospitality and tourism businesses alike. They are conscripting pub landlords into an attack on freedom of speech with a banter ban on overheard remarks—not harassment, but remarks that somebody could construe, misdirected at them, as offensive.

Any small business owner will say that the two words they fear the most in the English language are “employment tribunal”, yet the Government want to legislate to grow even further the half a million cases that are already in the employment tribunal backlog. There is no point concocting and cooking up additional workplace rights if people cannot find a job in the first place. That is why the top five business groups in the UK—almost exceptionally—wrote an open letter saying that the impact on growth will be deeply damaging and lead to job losses and recruitment freezes. That is here right now; that is what is happening on our high streets and in our communities across this country thanks to this Government damaging the hospitality sector.

[Graham Leadbitter (Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey) (SNP)]

I agree with the hon. Member on the point about employer national insurance contributions, but in the Press and Journal today—one of the august daily papers in Scotland—there are reports that highland hoteliers are struggling to recruit. The large part of the blame for that is laid at the door of Brexit, and the current immigration policy does nothing to help the highlands and islands in Scotland. There is demand for a rural visa, which is fully backed by the Federation of Small Businesses—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. I remind Members that there are 45 of you wishing to speak. Interventions must be a lot shorter. I am sure the shadow Minister has got the hon. Gentleman’s point.

[Andrew Griffith]

The ability of people to find work in this wonderful sector, which provides those wonderful opportunities is, yes, a function of access to the labour market, but it is also a function of an employer’s ability to take that risk on somebody—to take a chance and give them that opportunity.

I think we would all agree—occasionally we hear positive noises from those on the Government Front Bench before they are reigned into line by their own Back Benchers—that it would be far better for our nation and our out-of-control public finances if the 9 million people of working age could seize the opportunity presented by sectors like hospitality, which offers flexible working and the chance to start a career, and could join the workforce, regardless of which constituency they come from. Almost uniquely, hospitality is a sector whose contribution to our constituencies is something of which each and every one of us—all 45 of us who wish to speak today—is proud. That contribution is why Conservative Members value the sector so strongly.

[Sorcha Eastwood (Lagan Valley) (Alliance)]

The shadow Minister talks about the 45 people wanting to speak. My first job was in hospitality. I want my young constituents in Lagan Valley to have the same opportunity, but does he agree that with these tax increases and not giving VAT cuts, it is so difficult for our hospitality businesses?

[Andrew Griffith]

I absolutely agree that we have to do everything we can to help. This is about tax and employment, because one of the characteristics that hospitality, tourism and retail share is the significant amount of employment they offer, but it is also about other taxes. It is about the tax system; that is why I referred in the motion and in my opening remarks to a concoction.

Take business rates, for example. From a business perspective, they are a terrible tax; they are paid before a business has made a single pound, and they get fewer and fewer services from local government in return. When we were in government, we shielded the sector with generous reliefs and exemptions, yet one of the first acts of this Government was to more than double business rates for many in retail and hospitality. I agree with Emma McClarkin, the CEO of the British Beer and Pub Association, who says that “punishing rates and regulations” are at the heart of why so many pubs are closing.

This Government do not get business—and no wonder: there are more alumni of the Resolution Foundation in government now than there are Ministers who have ever run a business. I think many of them had their first opportunity in hospitality, but very few of them, sadly, stayed there. Business is not about numbers on some page in a policy wonk’s pamphlet. We are talking about real people who took a risk, put their capital to work, gave their time and energy, and, as a result, grew our communities and the economy—people like those running the award-winning Tottington Manor in my constituency, Chalk restaurant in Wiston, the warm and welcoming Three Moles in Selham and the innovative Kinsbrook vineyard in West Chiltington.

It is not just hospitality businesses being ravaged by these state-imposed headwinds; thousands of businesses say they are being impacted and are at risk because of these measures. We are witnessing collapse on many of our high streets, and in the Minister’s own constituency of Rhondda and Ogmore, Porth has lost its last clothes shop because of rising costs imposed by his Government.

[Catherine Fookes (Monmouthshire) (Lab)]

Last weekend, I attended the reopening of a wonderful pub in my constituency: the Star in Llansoy. It was one of the 10,000 pubs that shut on the Conservatives’ watch, and it has now been reopened by the community. Does the shadow Minister agree that our policies are giving businesses confidence to reopen?

[Andrew Griffith]

My background is in business, and I celebrate anybody who succeeds and takes a risk in business, including the hospitality venue in the hon. Lady’s constituency. One of the innovations that the previous Government pursued was the community ownership fund, which I know from personal experienced saved or helped many hospitality venues. Sadly, it has lost its way under this Government.

I will conclude my remarks to allow as many colleagues as possible to speak. Let us be crystal clear about this. [Interruption.] There is nothing funny about this debate and what is happening in hospitality right now—people are losing their jobs. We cannot tax, regulate or spend our way to growth. Every pint pulled, every plate served and every bed made grows our economy: a job provided, a supplier supported, life breathed into a community. No Government are perfect, which is why it is often best for the state to stay out of the way. Yet under Labour, this vital, valued sector is being punished, not rewarded. This Government do not protect workers by destroying the businesses that employ them. They cannot claim to lead our country while draining the very life from so many communities.

British hospitality businesses deserve better. The Conservatives will always stand with those who dare to dream, invest, build and hire. We stand for every business, big and small, that is fighting to keep its lights on. We stand for every young person desperate for their first shot at work. Above all, we stand for the growth that this country so desperately needs.