Hospitality Sector

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I am sad to say that the number of payroll employees in this country has fallen by 149,000 in the past year. We now have unemployment inching up towards 5%, with youth unemployment much higher than that. Why do I mention that in the context of a debate about hospitality? It is because a disproportionate number of jobs—tens of thousands—have been lost in this sector. It is absolutely fundamental to employment, along with the retail and care sectors. It is a shame that hospitality was not deemed worthy of a chapter in the Government’s industrial strategy, because if it had been—or, indeed, if the Government had an employment strategy—they would not have done what they did in the Budget.

The hospitality sector is incredibly important. It is important to me personally, as it happens; like many others, I had my first job in hospitality. Actually, it was where I spent most of my career before I became a Member of Parliament. More importantly, hospitality is important to my constituency, as it is to just about every constituency in the country. In my case, it employs around 2,000 people across some 200 establishments, including a number of historic heritage pubs.

Hospitality is important to our nation partly because of all those jobs, but also because an important part of the hospitality sector is overnight hospitality, which is fundamental to tourism, which in turn brings in such important export earnings. I do worry that with all this talk of tourism taxes, it is starting to sound like people think that tourism is, in some way, a problem to be mitigated. Tourism does have issues, of course, but fundamentally, tourism—especially inbound tourism—is an exceptional opportunity to be grabbed.

It is not just about the number of jobs; it is about who those jobs are for. This sector is a key source of first jobs and jobs for people coming back to the labour market, including those who are the very furthest from work. I think of some of the great work done by hospitality businesses—including by one of my old employers, Greene King—with people leaving the criminal justice system, for example.

Of course, we are talking disproportionately about part-time workers. The sector has suffered terrible blows from the big increase in business rates, and the two effects through national insurance contributions, both in the rates and in the threshold, have disproportionately affected part-time workers. We hope for some relief in the delayed Budget when it eventually comes, but there is something Ministers could do now ahead of the Budget to mitigate the situation. I am talking about the Employment Rights Bill.

I know that zero-hours contracts have had a sort of totemic importance for Labour Members ever since their last leader made it so, but we have to get past the idea that a zero-hours contract is necessarily trying to exploit workers; it is not. The NHS has many bank workers in hospitals on zero-hours contracts. Students will often work on zero-hours contracts so they can stay in their jobs, even when they move between home and university. The two things the Government could do to mitigate the situation are to lengthen the reference period to reflect seasonality and to make sure that it is an opt-in right, rather than something that has to be offered repeatedly.