Dear Sir Keir,

 

In the not-so-distant past, prior to becoming party leader and then prime minister (congratulations, by the way), you were our supportive constituent MP and could have been considered a regular at our wonderful venue, tucked away in Somers Town. You may not remember, but we did meet fleetingly on a few occasions, and I couldn’t help but feel you understood the plight of small businesses and even the local pub.

 

I’ve watched with a sense of foreboding over the last few weeks as media hype and speculation had us believe that the Budget would be unkind to small business and hospitality, but I held back from joining that frenzy and chose to live in hope that you would deliver on your promise to drive change, support small businesses, understand the community value of pubs and protect the working person. 

 

Your government could have delivered real change, a true reset. You could have generated the much-needed tax revenue by creating a fairer tax system with parity. What you chose was the quick and easy smash-and-grab option with some straight-line projections that do not take account of the real-world situation your constituents and wider nation find themselves in. 

 

The taxes you levied on businesses were focused on taking more from small and medium businesses that employ a high proportion of people in relation to revenue. You could have levied taxes on big businesses that have high yields, high margins and move revenue out of the UK. But instead, your government went on the offensive against the small and medium-sized enterprises that are the heart of the UK economy, the growth engine and substantial contributors to the exchequer. 

 

I’ve run The Somers Town Coffee House for 13 years. Over that time, I’ve paid my taxes and renumerated my team well, and when times were hard, was the last person to get paid – quite often reducing my income well below any form of minimum wage. I love what I do, I wouldn’t change it for the world. Running a hospitality business, and particularly pubs, has a real sense of purpose and genuineness. We literally earn money making people happy. We have survived a major fire, covid, the credit crunch, the cost-of-living crisis and austerity. It is a resilient, successful business, and the chancellor’s Budget has put that and a team of 30-plus at risk. 

 

Your taxes penalise small businesses employing local people and that elevate and provide services for local communities. What your policies do not provide is any form of parity with online conglomerates and multinational businesses – something, by your own admission, that needs to happen. 

 

I’d like to draw a comparison at the heart of your own constituency. The Somers Town Coffee House is within 300 metres of a national brand of supermarket. The revenue of the shop is ten times higher than the pub. 

 

Business rateable value – supermarket: £65,500 versus pub: £138,000. While the relief of 75% was a stay of execution, the savings were simply transferred to utility companies, whose costs remain high (especially as they charge higher rates to hospitality due to “risk”). These electricity prices have not dropped, but you are reducing our relief to 40% on a bill that is already disproportionately high. It will cripple pubs and hospitality businesses that are already struggling with higher costs.

 

As for national insurance contribution and the lowering of threshold, this one is the real sting in the tail. As the pub business has grown (because of well-trained incentivised team and continuous investment), we have created more jobs at all levels and, in turn, paid more tax contributions. On the other hand, over our 13-year tenure, the supermarket has decreased the need for employees through automation of tills while generating greater revenue in a far more tax efficient circumstances – a pattern that will continue as they automate warehouses and distribution. The lowering of the national insurance threshold is an incredibly large bill for small service businesses to foot. It’s essentially a £600-plus levy on each person you employ per year. For our business, this is going to represent a £54,352 bill, with the incremental tax gains of increased national minimum wage and the new threshold. This is for one relatively small pub! 

 

The impact of the above is so far reaching. We use local suppliers, provide jobs and are a hub for the local community that you yourself have used frequently. These increases will close pubs and other small businesses. The intention to gain more tax revenue will have the opposite effect with zero receipts. 

 

We need change and quickly. My request is simple. We don’t want handouts or “support” – we want parity that supports small businesses and the 3.2 million people who work in hospitality. On a personal level, I just want fair pay for the work I do and the risk I take in running a pub. As a small business in your constituency, this is the true detail and impact of this year’s chancellor’s Budget.

 

Yours faithfully, 

 

Anthony Pender

 

The biggest cheer from the Commons benches, accompanied by the frenzied waving of order papers, came when chancellor Rachel Reeves, delivering her first Budget, announced that duty on draught products would be reduced by 1.7%, “which means a penny off the pint price in the pub”.

 

No doubt the excited MPs will be rushing down their local, only to find their hopes of cheap beer dashed and a £5.20 pint of “the usual” has not been slashed to £5.19 after all. This must, by now, be some kind of parliamentary in-joke. Chancellors delight in telling drinkers their beer will be cheaper when everyone knows it won’t. It’s like a free lie they know they aren’t going to be grilled about by Nick Robinson on the Today programme.

 

Of course, when added together by brewery accountants, those pennies add up to something more significant. But for the pub, it’s more symbolic than substantial. Like the promise to finally reform business rates (but not yet) – a nod from government that says we’ve heard you, we understand your plight – even while battering them with a hike in employer’s national insurance that meant hospitality operators spent Halloween in a frightful state, bashing away at their calculators and spreadsheets to work out who they can afford come April.

 

Grilled by Nick Robinson on the Today programme, Reeves was unable to deny that the national insurance increase was a “tax on jobs” since she’d previously described it as just that, meaning there’s no guarantee the measure will be able to do the heavy lifting in raising that £40bn for the government coffers. What else could she do, she asked. Well, there’s corporation tax and a wealth tax that will target companies that can afford it, rather than hitting marginal businesses such as tenanted pubs. But heigh-ho, let’s get back to the beer.

 

Duty, and especially beer duty, is a political as well as an economic measure. You could say that about the whole Budget, of course, but the price of beer is something everyone, supposedly, understands. A chancellor who shows she cares about the pint in the pub signals that she cares about ordinary folk, or “working people”, as they’re now called.

Contrast that with the misfortune of the late Alistair Darling, whose duty escalator of 2008-13 ended with his face being splashed on “wanted” style posters in pubs across the land that declared he would not be served – in the extraordinarily unlikely event that he’d turn up.

 

Yet promises of cheaper beer at the bar are never, ever fulfilled. Duty adjustments do affect the pint in your hand, but they work in more subtle ways. For instance, the Budget also quietly enhanced small producer relief (formerly known as progressive beer duty) and announced a consultation on access to the pub market that could revive the notion of guest beers in tied houses.

 

This idea originated in the 1989 Beer Orders, when it had the relatively weak effect of allowing, typically, a family brewer’s cask ale on the bar of a national brewer’s pub. This time around, it may benefit the plethora of small local brewers that have sprung up in the past 20 years, giving them another route to market.

 

As for the pubs – mostly tenancies in the big pubcos, I’d imagine – it’s unlikely to mean cheap beer, but it may be an opportunity to broaden the offer a little. Might this affect a pub’s ability to survive and thrive? Not much, perhaps. But because they are marginal businesses, the hopes of an independent operator often rely on working these little concessions, making the most of them.

 

I’ve been watching the fortunes of beer in the sub-3.5% ABV duty band that came into force in August 2023. In fact, I’ve been drinking them where I see them, in the interests of research. Quality varies a great deal, and I worry that existing brands may be devalued when they are reduced in strength by more than one or two tenths of a percentage point.

 

But there are some great 3.4% cask beers out there now, usually at the hoppier end (though milds are a natural fit), and there’s so much more scope to produce something interesting at this strength rather than with the previous sub-2.9% band.

 

I must write more about how tweaks in duty have an impact on the drinks themselves (wine is another interesting example). It seems to me, though, that this is another opportunity for pubs to squeeze a little more profit out of their beer offer. It’s not much, I know, but until the day I’m made chancellor, it’s all I’ve got. Good luck out there.

 

As another half-term draws to a close, it seems like an appropriate time to talk about the family dining occasion in hospitality. When I was growing up in an “economically challenged” household in Caterham, Surrey, eating out as a family was incredibly rare. But when we did get to go out together, it was always for a special occasion and was treated as one. The rule was that my brother and I could pick a restaurant to go to each year on our birthdays. I chose Chiquitos – which, at the time, was on a retail park near Croydon – five years in a row. My brother preferred Pizza Hut by Caterham Valley roundabout.

 

Fine dining, they were not, but family meals out were some of the best times of my childhood. Both my tastes and economic situation have changed dramatically since those days, but I still look back on those annual family meals out and feel a little misty-eyed. Eating out together as a family is one of the great joys in life and is proven to be good for family relationships and mental health of all concerned.

 

KAM’s first Family Dining report was released in 2022 and was so popular that we’ve done it again. We’ve just spoken to more than 1,000 parents or guardians with nought-12 year olds in their household to share their family dining experiences, wants, needs and frustrations – and there are a lot of the latter! Whether you like kids in pubs and restaurants or not, families are very good for business. In fact, they’re vital to the hospitality industry – but do we look after them enough?

 

Pre-pandemic, family dining occasions made up 57% of restaurants’ revenue. There are eight million households in the UK with children in them, and KAM research shows that 47% of households “eat out” with kids at least once a week (that includes coffee shops, cafes, quick service restaurants etc), with families visiting hospitality venues 1.4 times per week on average, spending £55 per visit on average. This equates to £4,015 on family dining per household, per year. Not an insignificant amount by anyone’s standards, though I can hear my mum turning in her grave at that amount!

 

But, despite the average total bill spend on family occasions being up (probably driven by increased prices), there’s been a significant drop in the number of family dining occasions taking place versus our first report in 2022. Why? Well, the cost-of-living crisis and increased costs (and therefore prices) can shoulder some of the blame, but we must also turn the magnifying glass inwards and admit that we just aren’t always providing an experience that is worth a family leaving their house for to spend their hard-earned cash.

 

As part of KAM’s 2024 Family Dining report, we asked what the top frustrations are for families when eating out. Long wait times came out as number one, and I couldn’t agree more. There are few things worse than being out in public with a hungry child (or a hungry me, to be honest). Inattentive or unfriendly staff was the second most mentioned problem, and then the environment being too noisy or chaotic. And finally, my personal frustration, there being a lack of interesting child-friendly menu options. I have long been a campaigner for better kids’ menus – it blows my mind that we still see beige food with little or no nutritional value on menus for the people who are at crucial stages of development.

 

And it seems that the average parent agrees with me. According to our 2024 report, 41% want more nutritional food available on kids’ menus, 37% want less fried food (I’d like to see this on adult menus too) and 51% of parents we spoke to would like the option to have a half-size/smaller version of adults’ meals for kids (this idea is especially popular with adults with older kids).

 

What makes a great venue for family dining? Well, the answer to that question depends on who you ask. For the parents, reasonable prices, cleanliness, a kid-friendly atmosphere, a kid-friendly menu and friendly/attentive staff come out as the top five. For the kids themselves, tasty food, an atmosphere I can have fun in, friendly staff, fast serviceand fun desserts are all winners.

 

Nutritional value aside, most parents just want to keep their kids happy when eating out, but they also don’t want to waste food – or money. Keeping families happy really is a juggling act (now there’s an idea) – but if we can get it right, the reward for hospitality (and for parents) is huge. 

 

During a meal out with my daughter at Restaurant Clairefontaine in Luxembourg, I realised that the solo dining businessman on the next table was very discreetly conducting a conference call with his earphones in, using a hushed voice, and his mobile phone propped up on the bread basket.

 

I’ve a phobia against irresponsible and intrusive phone usage in public spaces, but this was a masterclass in how to handle devices with no impact on anybody else. We’d exchanged a bit of a banter during the meal, and after his work call, he seamlessly resumed his cheese course and ordered another glass of the surprisingly good locally produced wine. Beyond our bit of chat, he seemed very comfortable dining on his own. He was not going to miss out on the opportunity of enjoying a meal out in a smart restaurant just because he was travelling alone on business.

 

He certainly earned my respect, as I’ve always been a massively reluctant solo diner. The rather too self-conscious aspect of my character has me feeling the eyes of the whole restaurant are bearing down on me. The perception of pitying the friendless guy who can’t find anybody to dine out with has been sufficient to put me off such ventures. I do wish I was more confident like our friend in Luxembourg – particularly when travelling away on business.

 

Apparently, increasing numbers of people are joining him and dining alone, according to research from OpenTable, which found that over the last two years, solo-dining reservations had risen by as sizeable 14% in the UK and even more so in the US, where the increase is a hefty 29%. In Japan, it’s risen 23% versus the 18% recorded six years ago. The ageing population in Japan and the rise of single households has led to solo dining and drinking becoming part of the country’s culture and the phenomenon has its own name – ohitorisama. 

 

Helping cement this scenario are the ramen brands that have been popping up, which involve stalls separating diners and almost giving everyone their own cubicle. This all seems a bit extreme, but they are proving popular as one particular brand. The ramen specialist Ichiran is opening locations around the world. What is a more palatable Japanese export are the sushi bar-type concepts that have diners seated at the counter facing towards the chefs and with their backs to the dining room.

 

Bar counter seating in restaurants was a relatively rare sighting in the UK, but the rise of the open kitchen has now assigned a premium to these seats in many establishments. They are prime territory for solo diners, and the explosion in the number of establishments offering such seating is no doubt contributing to the rise in people eating alone. 

 

This will hopefully bring about an embrace of solo dining and end the days of demonising the activity. Jason Atherton is helping the cause with his recent overhaul of Pollen Street Social, which has been replaced by Mary’s. It is named after a regular solo dining customer, who would pitch up unannounced and sit in the same seat at the bar counter to enjoy a small steak and a martini. When it switched to a formal tasting menu-only restaurant, she never returned. The reworking of the Michelin star venue is a reflection of this more casual approach to dining that will welcome single customers such as Mary.

 

Further acknowledgment of the trend could be seen with the backlash faced by Alex Dilling at the Café Royal restaurant, when it was widely reported that he was charging solo diners double the regular amount for his tasting menu as they were taking a table for two and causing him to lose money at his modest 11-table dining room. He subsequently defended himself by claiming he had been misreported and was, in contrast, welcoming of solo diners.

 

For a reluctant dine-alone like me, the Café Royal might be a step too far to dip my toe into the soloist waters, but as the trend is increasingly taking hold and virtually every new restaurant opening now includes a quota of seats at the bar counter, I’m now sorely tempted to give it a go – especially when travelling away on business.

 

After all, I’m probably the country’s biggest advocate of bar stools. I’m never more comfortable than when sat at the bar, having a beer or two alone, wherever that might be in the world. Occasionally chatting to the servers and to fellow drinkers perched at the bar makes for a wonderful experience, in my opinion.

 

For the chefs and restaurant serving staff out there who spot the self-conscious diner at the counter seating looking like he wants to be anywhere else, then please just hand him a menu, tell him nobody is watching and remind him that everybody is doing it nowadays.