The warning lights are flashing. As a sector, we are staring down the barrel of losing more than 100,000 jobs by the Budget in November. This isn’t a distant, abstract forecast; it is a reality.

 

In the last month alone, our sector has shed 10,000 jobs. That’s 10,000 people whose livelihoods have vanished, 10,000 families facing uncertainty and 10,000 examples of the real-world impact of punitive costs imposed by the government.

 

Since last year’s Budget, which saddled our sector with an extra £3.4bn in annual costs, we have been navigating a cascade of compounding challenges. The lowering of the employers’ national insurance contributions threshold has been particularly damaging, dragging 774,000 of our valued part-time and flexible colleagues into a new tax bracket. These are the very people who provide the dynamism and adaptability our sector is known for.

 

It's clear hospitality is being taxed out. The relentless cost pressures are forcing good businesses to make impossible choices: cutting staff, reducing opening hours, raising prices and shelving vital investment plans. This goes against the very grain of our industry. We are creators of opportunity, the cornerstone of our high streets and the beating heart of our communities. We exist to welcome people, to invest in our teams and to drive local and national growth. But we cannot do that with our hands tied behind our backs.

 

Faced with this crisis, UKHospitality has taken our #TaxedOut campaign to the highest levels of government. In the past two weeks, I’ve met with the chancellor, hosted a roundtable on business rates with Treasury ministers and businesses, met with the new food and tourism ministers and hosted the leader of the opposition, shadow chancellor and shadow business secretary for a hospitality roundtable.

 

The UKHospitality team and our members have also hosted countless meetings with MPs in parliament and on-site at venues. At all of these meetings, our asks of the government are clear and focused: we need three critical interventions at the Budget, to provide essential support to the sector and begin to reverse the damage done from damaging cost increases.

 

We need the government to lower business rates through the maximum possible discount for all hospitality properties under £500,000 rateable value, fix national insurance contributions to boost and safeguard jobs and cut VAT to drive investment and regeneration opportunities. More than 1,000 hospitality businesses, teams that work in the sector and members of the public have written to their MP, backing our campaign and these asks.

 

So too have some of the most respected names in the sector, from celebrated chefs like Tommy Banks, Matthew Burgess (Mat Black) and Paul Askew to industry trailblazers like Jon Lake, managing director of Chopstix, Caroline Ottoy, managing director of WatchHouse, and Alex Large, co-founder of Brother Marcus. We've even been joined by former professional cricketer and publican, Harry Gurney, and more are lending their support each day.

 

We want you to be part of it, too! We are making it as simple as possible for you to lend your voice. Hospitality teams can now access and share our new campaign tool to show the direct impact on their livelihoods via this link. For business owners and leaders, you can write to your MP and invite them to visit your establishment to see the challenges firsthand here.

 

As the leading hospitality trade body, we are taking your views, concerns and preferred solutions directly to the decision-makers that need to hear them. Our members are the heartbeat and driving force of our work, and the larger our representative voice, the stronger it is. 

 

If you haven’t already, you can you can join UKHospitality as the voice of hospitality to strengthen that campaign even further, as well as influencing policy decisions at the highest level, accessing expert insights and guidance and connecting with peers through exclusive networking events and opportunities.

 

It’s clear that if businesses continue to be taxed out, the impact on the sector will continue to be devastating, and it will prevent us from achieving our potential of creating jobs, driving economic growth and supporting our communities. 

 

But it’s not too late to change course. The government has a choice to make at the Budget in November: continue with policies that cost jobs and stifle growth, or work with us to unleash the full potential of our incredible industry. Together, we can make the changes hospitality needs to survive and grow. 

Among the themes at Propel’s Multi-Club Conference and summer party this year, innovation, bravery and creativity stood out against a backdrop of headwinds facing the industry. It goes without saying that we are facing turbulent times, and in the face of the doom and gloom, the halls of the Oxford Belfry were echoing with industry voices talking about the need to embrace change – placing emphasis on the importance of people and culture, all while moving ahead with fresh ideas and innovation.

 

Ed Devenport, co-founder and chief executive of Incipio Group, made a compelling case that innovation is not optional. In today’s high-cost, highly competitive market, it’s the key to survival. Bravery doesn’t have to be blind, after all. Yes, it’ll involve plenty of gut feeling, but also an objective assessment of the risk being taken. That’s where the role of data becomes pivotal, as the facilitator of bold choices and innovation.

 

This doesn’t only mean tracking revenue and profit day-to-day. To take the true pulse of the business, leaders need to unlock a deeper understanding of both guests and teams as their sentiment shifts over time. Alongside the sales numbers, this is the data that informs sharper decision-making and helps cultivate the conditions for new ideas to thrive.

 

We were further reminded of this by Tom James, managing director of Bill’s, who noted that creativity and cultural energy are critical. Teams that feel empowered radiate that energy outward, creating an infectious sense of momentum that guests can feel. The impact of these cultural changes cannot be understated for Bill’s, which saw a doubling of Ebitda in FY24 from FY22 – with the relentless celebration of every win its site teams experienced. 

 

According to Tom, taking feedback, laying down expectations with teams, communicating the results that can be expected from change and celebrating wins all helped to improve results and staff retention. The core of these decisions? Having a data setup that allows you to flag issues with guest and employee satisfaction early, helping you be agile and confident when making decisions.

 

Ensuring that you have these systems in place, allowing you to take feedback and action it – the learning loop shortens dramatically. Suddenly, risks feel less like gambles and more like informed steps into the future. Take, for example, Bill’s £5 bottomless pancakes offer, which on paper, seemed a huge risk. But through measurement, refinement and persistence, led to swathes of guest advocacy. The bravery remains, but it is strengthened by evidence.

 

This holistic approach to insights and data was another underpinning note to Caroline Ottoy, managing director of WatchHouse’s discussion, as she highlighted the importance of tracking guest engagement in parallel with sales performance. This approach reflects the correlation between how revenue may be the outcome, but guest connection is the driver. WatchHouse’s expansion not only within the UK, but also into international territory, has seen an effective utilisation of artificial intelligence and other insight tools in order to deliver an experience that is bespoke to the markets they deliver in, all while possessing the textbook best-in-class experience at the core of WatchHouse.

 

After all, experience is the product and is increasingly shaped not just by what happens across the pass or behind the bar, but by how operators anticipate guest needs, personalise journeys and resolve problems before they manifest.

 

Chief executive Richard Lewis’ reflections on Redcat Pubs’ journey acted as an excellent counterpart to this sentiment – ultimately, clarity matters when you’re managing complexity. When operating several diverse business models, simplification is not about stripping things back for the sake of it but about sharpening focus on your core proposition – the thing that guests recognise and return for time after time.

 

The risk is that passion and creativity get spread too thin, with each concept drifting without a clear anchor. By systematically tracking performance across formats – not just on financial outcomes but also on reputation, guest mix and engagement – the businesses gain a framework to make the hard calls about where to double down and where to refocus. Clarity of vision must be rooted in more than instinct; it should be illuminated by clear signals.

 

The day was abuzz with positivity, even as parts of our industry navigate uncertain times. Today’s consumers are dealing with more difficult choices in terms of where they spend their money. According to 125 Data and Insights, while 38% of people said they have cut back on midweek meals out, only 6% have cut back on special occasion dining.

 

Hospitality is an industry defined by human connection, and more and more emphasis is placed on experience above all – especially for those big celebration dates. With the backing of strong insights, we are able to forge ahead, build incredible teams, craft innovative ideas and deliver those exceptional experiences, just when it matters most.

It was Richard Everard, of the Leicestershire brewing dynasty, who first gave me the clue. In the tumultuous years following the 1989 Beer Orders (legislation introduced to increase competition between brewers, wholesalers and pub retailers), the clever money was on Britain’s family-owned regional brewers being squeezed out of the market by global brewing on one side and independent pub companies on the other. Salvation lay, informed consensus insisted, in abandoning the vertically integrated model, the tied house system, and a ruthless focus on either brewing or retail.

 

The smart-arse trade journalist had a simple question for these firms teetering on the edge of the dustbin of history: beer or pubs? It didn’t take Richard Everard long to answer that one. “Property,” he said, meaning the real estate his firm had built over many decades – all those buildings on all that land that had rooted the business in the very soil. Providing, he went on to explain, security and prosperity for the generations of Everards that were to come.

 

He hadn’t exactly answered the question but revealed a deeper motivation for family brewers that would ensure the pundits were wrong, at least in a surprising number of cases, for a surprising length of time. Although we should add that the long generation game has been played most successfully when it also embraces innovation.

 

Everards Brewery is one of ten companies of traditional pub-owning brewery stock that appeared in the top 25 most profitable hospitality businesses over the past three years, according to Propel’s new Profit Growth Tracker, unveiled at its summer conference last week. I was genuinely surprised to see so many there, bearing in mind the many exciting dynamic entrepreneurial operators that have sprung up. 

 

Perhaps least surprisingly, Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) and Fuller’s head the list within the list. M&B is most distant from its roots now. As a regional division of Bass in the 1990s, it was still based around Cape Hill Brewery in the West Midlands. When Bass was broken up at the turn of the century, the M&B name was eventually given to the extensive managed house estate.

 

Fuller’s is one that answered the beer or pubs question, but only three decades later when it sold its brewery to Asahi. Fuller’s beer brands remain an important part of the identity of the group. Wadworth comes next. Work has just begun converting its former brewery, that magnificent edifice in the centre of Devizes, into 102 flats, while the company continues to brew on a much smaller, more efficient, plant – a strategy that several other family brewers have taken, choosing pubs but brewing too, on a smaller scale.

 

Count Everards among them, with its splendid beer hall and brewery on the outskirts of Leicester, and Wells & Co, also on the list, with its equally impressive Brewpoint headquarters in Bedford, plus Hertford’s McMullen. Each of these has benefited from releasing cash to invest in its estate while being able to produce a wider, more flexible, range of beers to satisfy the modern drinker. Camerons has taken a rather different course, holding on to its large brewery in Hartlepool but taking on a lot of contract brewing and packaging while developing the beer-led Head of Steam bars alongside its tenanted estate.

 

Marston’s has finally answered “pubs”, of course, having finally handed over its brewing operations to Carlsberg, while Young’s made the same decision nearly 20 years ago now. That leaves Cornwall’s St Austell as the only one in the list that’s stuck to the traditional family brewer format of a full-sized brewery serving a mixed estate of managed and tenanted pubs.

 

So, each of these brewers can tell a different story of their evolution since the Beer Orders, a different route to survival and success that has often involved some bold innovation to adapt to a changing marketplace. Yet we can perhaps also argue that they have a common foundation, a history grounded in freehold property, all those bricks-and-mortar pubs and the land they’re built on.

 

It’s a still controversial view of mine that the Beer Orders were an attempt by a state concerned about the British brewing industry’s low profitability in a globalising economy to release the potential locked up in those vast, sprawling pub estates. The result was chaotic and unpredictable, in the way the details worked out. British brewing was prised open to international capital, but the country’s family brewing heritage was not entirely destroyed. In their own time, some of these firms have found less drastic ways to realise the profit potential in their estates, and we are now seeing the fruits.

Every chef knows the quiet genius of the Gastronorm pan. Before it came along, kitchens were chaos. Containers came in all shapes and sizes, designed for one piece of kit and useless in another. Trays that fit the oven didn’t fit the fridge. Storage was clumsy, workflows were inefficient and waste was high.

 

Then, in 1964, the Gastronorm sizing standard was introduced. Suddenly, one container could move seamlessly from fridge to prep bench to combi oven to dishwasher. Suppliers and manufacturers aligned around a shared system and professional kitchens became faster, safer and more consistent. A simple standard unlocked efficiency across the industry. Our data, however, is still stuck in the pre-Gastronorm era.

 

Think about the number of systems the average multi-site operator uses today: EPOS, recipe databases, labour scheduling, allergen trackers, menu management platforms, delivery aggregators and finance software. Each of them holds the same core information – products, recipes, prices, locations – but each in its own format.

 

That’s the equivalent of a kitchen where every tray, pan, and shelf comes in a different size. Nothing fits. Every time you want to move something, you need to decant it, repackage it or bodge it into place. It works, just about – but it’s slow, costly and prone to error.

 

The consequences are painfully familiar. Menu changes that should take minutes take weeks. A price increase has to be keyed into half a dozen systems, with inevitable mismatches along the way. Allergen information gets trapped in silos, leaving operators exposed, and whole teams are reduced to acting as digital “kitchen porters”, retyping and reconciling the same data across multiple platforms. It’s a hidden tax on the industry – wasted time, wasted money and wasted potential.

 

Hospitality isn’t unique in facing this challenge – but we are unusual in tolerating it for so long. Other industries have already had their “Gastronorm moment”.

● Retail has GS1 barcodes, giving every product a universal identity.

● Finance has SWIFT and IBAN, making cross-border payments seamless.

● Travel has IATA standards, allowing airlines, airports and agents to work off the same playbook.

 

These standards didn’t emerge by accident. They came from industries recognising that competing on the basics is a waste of energy. Standardisation creates the foundations on which real differentiation and innovation can flourish. Why should hospitality be any different?

 

A common data model is hospitality’s missing Gastronorm. With one shared structure, operators and suppliers could:

● Roll out menu changes or price adjustments instantly across every system.

● Guarantee allergen and nutritional accuracy across all guest touchpoints.

● Onboard new suppliers, partners or digital platforms in days rather than months.

● Deliver a consistent guest experience, whether on a delivery app, a digital menu board or in-restaurant.

 

The benefits aren’t theoretical; they go straight to the P&L. Faster pricing and menu agility means higher margins. Better allergen accuracy reduces compliance risk. Less duplication and rekeying frees teams up to focus on growth. And consistent digital data underpins the seamless, trustworthy guest experiences that consumers increasingly expect.

 

Just as the Gastronorm pan freed chefs to focus on food instead of fitting containers, a shared data model would free operators to focus on customers instead of wrestling with systems.

 

The lesson from Gastronorm is clear: standards only deliver value once they’re adopted collectively. A single manufacturer making its own tray size wasn’t enough. The breakthrough came when the industry as a whole aligned – and everyone benefited.

 

That’s the challenge and the opportunity in front of hospitality today. We can carry on as we are, endlessly reshaping and rekeying data into containers that were never designed to fit. Or we can recognise that it’s in all our interests – operators, suppliers, and technology providers alike – to agree on a common model.

 

This is the future we are working towards at Openr. But no single business can achieve it in isolation. It will take collaboration across the sector to create the equivalent of Gastronorm for our data.

 

The rewards are obvious: lower costs, fewer errors, faster innovation and stronger guest experiences. Without a shared data standard, we’ll keep working harder than we need to, repacking and reshaping information that should already flow. With it, hospitality can run as smoothly and consistently as the best-designed kitchen line. The Gastronorm pan transformed professional kitchens 60 years ago. Isn’t it time our data caught up?