I have been around long enough to remember when a good restaurant could still turn a profit on a 15% food cost and a 25% wage bill. Nearly fifty years in, from scrubbing pans as a young commis to building businesses that have collectively added more than a billion pounds in revenue, I have seen governments come and go, and I have learned one immutable truth: hospitality survives on optimism and dies by a thousand small cuts. This Budget, I am afraid, hands us another very sharp knife.

Let me speak plainly, because I have sat across too many restaurant tables watching owners do the numbers on a napkin and realise the sums no longer work. The permanent lower multiplier for business rates from April 2026 is welcome in principle. Nearly £900 million a year sounds generous until you open the Valuation Office Agency letter that arrived the week after the Chancellor sat down. My phone has not stopped ringing since. A pub client in Buckinghamshire saw their rateable value leap 31%. A central London brasserie is staring at a 19% increase. A boutique hotel group I advise is looking at an average 72% hike across its estate. The promised 5p discount in the pound is swallowed whole and then some.  Kate Nicholls OBE Chair UK Hospitality (https://www.ukhospitality.org.uk/the-team/ ) is right: hearts are sinking.

Wages are the other inescapable pressure. I am the first to say that everyone who turns up and gives their all deserves a proper living wage, and the rises to £12.71 for over 21s and the sharper bumps for younger workers are morally correct. But the Treasury thinks hospitality is a cash rich sector that can simply absorb another 6.8% on the wage bill without consequence. Most independents I know are already operating at 34% to 38% labour cost. Add the employer National Insurance changes that are still bedding in from last year and now these new increases, and many will cross 40% before the daffodils are out. That is the point where covers get cut, sections get closed on quiet nights, and eventually the shutters come down for good.

VAT staying at 20% is the wound that keeps on giving. I opened my own restaurant, Monteginos, back in 1991 and we paid 17.5% then. Food to take away is zero rated, yet the moment a customer sits down, and we warm the plate, the state takes a fifth. It makes no sense, never has, and the refusal to grant even a temporary reduction feels almost personal now. The Australians have a 10% GST on hospitality, and their venues are booming. We persist with 20% and wonder why two restaurants a day are still closing.

The contract catering and foodservice world, where I spent over three vibrant decades feeding and looking after some of the biggest corporate accounts in the UK and Northern Europe, is just as exposed. Those contracts are written on tight margins and even tighter client budgets. When the wage bill jumps again in April, the choices are brutal: renegotiate downwards, absorb the hit and watch profitability evaporate, or walk away from the tender altogether. The free apprenticeship funding for under 25s in SMEs is genuinely helpful, but it does not cover the rent on a central production unit or the energy bill for a high volume corporate kitchen.

I have mentored dozens of young operators over the years, through Uncommon Sense Ltd ( https://finduncommonsense.com/coaching-mentoring/ )and right now I am telling them the same thing I was told when I was starting out: control what you can control. Tighten the rota, retrain rather than rehire, renegotiate every supplier line, build direct relationships with farmers, turn the lights down a little, tell better stories on the menu so people feel they are buying an experience rather than calories. All of that still works, but it only buys time. What this sector actually needs is structural change: a business rates system that reflects footfall not fantasy 2017 values, a VAT rate that does not punish people for sitting down, and an employment tax regime that remembers hospitality is the country’s largest private sector employer of young people.

Until those arrive, we keep smiling, keep the standards high, and keep the doors open for one more service. That is what we have always done. But speaking as someone who has spent a lifetime trying to make this industry thrive rather than merely survive, I have to say this Budget feels like another chapter in a very long book titled “Missed Opportunities”.

The lights are still on in thousands of restaurants, bars, pubs, and canteens tonight because the people inside them refuse to give up. I just wish the people writing the rules showed the same resilience and belief in what we do.