Seven years is a long time – particularly in hospitality. Thinking back to 2018, when UKHospitality was created, feels like time travelling to another era. Hardly surprising when you recall the seismic events that have afflicted this sector, the economy and the world, in that time.

 

It's an amount of change that would have felt unrealistic across a 20-year span, let alone just a matter of years. What has remained steadfast and constant is UKHospitality’s guiding principle of providing a strong and united voice for the sector. 

 

As a sector that generates £140bn in annual revenue, provides jobs for 3.5 million people and is a critical part of regenerating our towns and cities, bringing that voice of hospitality to the highest levels of government is critical.

 

Whether that’s in Westminster, Holyrood, Senedd or Stormont, our united voice is more important than ever as our sector faces challenges that, for many, are more existential than during the pandemic.

 

I have always felt incredibly grateful that the sector has consistently seen the value of having a powerful and truly representative trade body and the support our members give us enables us to do what we do best – represent you and your interests. 

 

I’m delighted that support continues to grow, with our membership continuing to swell with new members. Whether that’s independent pubs, hotels and restaurants or UK-wide operators, we continue to strengthen our member representation across the entirety of hospitality. 

 

And hospitality continues to change. What we see up and down our high streets and town centres are venues that have adapted to change their offer throughout the day, adapting to changing consumer demand.

 

That means we all have an increased stake in the wider visitor economy – across hospitality, leisure, tourism and travel. We’re adapting our work to recognise that too, and the strategic affiliate relationships we’ve built up over the years allow us to truly speak on behalf of the visitor economy in the UK.

 

From the Professional Association of Self Caterers UK and the B&B Association to the Association for Indoor Play and Hostelling Scotland, we’re strengthening and broadening our work at every opportunity. 

 

That includes our services to members. In addition to the expert advice, guidance and insight we already offer, we’re significantly developing our services when it comes to people, skills and professional development. 

 

The hospitality Sector-based Work Academy Programmes (SWAPs) we’re rolling out is a big part of that. These are hospitality-specific training programmes, backed by the government, which will help bring jobseekers into the sector, having been trained in a real-life working environment and been taught vital skills and competencies they need to succeed in hospitality. 

 

Crucially, these will be people that are enthusiastic about a career in our sector and its ability to develop their careers. It’s starting in 26 areas around the country, following five pilots last year that achieved an 80% success rate, and this is just the start of a programme that we envision being rolled out across the country, the sector and businesses. 

 

When it reaches its potential, we believe it could save the hospitality sector around £6m each year. That’s because this training is government-funded and has the ability to replace existing onboarding training programmes run by businesses, currently out of their own pocket. This will deliver real, tangible benefit for operators and save money. 

 

Growing our services around workforce, skills and professional development is critical, because hospitality is a people business. Without our teams delivering fantastic service, making amazing food, and creating all-round brilliant hospitality experiences, we’re not able to do what we do best. The impact we have for our customers is significant, but what we deliver for our own people and our communities is profound. 

 

The qualities our sector has in abundance are the ones that make us the most socially productive sector in the UK – it’s our ability to impact every part of the country, offer career opportunities for everyone, regardless of their background, and drive social mobility. 

 

The Social Productivity Index we produced this year proves all of that with independent data, and it has resonated with every audience that has engaged with it – ministers, politicians and officials alike. Many understand there is much more to growth than just what a sector delivers in pounds and pennies. Yes, that’s important, but banking, fintech and life sciences don’t benefit every part of society like we do. 

 

As your voice, we’re going to continue to bang the drum for our sectors enormous delivery and potential – both economically and socially. We’re going to keep making the case that costs need to come down and regulation needs to be slashed, if that potential is to be truly realised. 

 

It’s our members that collectively enable us to have that strong voice, and we intend to keep using it to make sure hospitality is heard. 

This sector likes to think it knows about brands, and that’s because it does. McDonald’s was in the Interbrand Top Ten last year, beating Disney and Facebook. A clown beating a mouse and, well, a clown is decent going when you consider that one is known as the Happiest Place on Earth. You can decide which one. 

 

The flags in this sector are so entrenched in the public psyche that they represent not just burgers, or a good time, or formative childhood experiences. They even represent US foreign policy in the mind of the guest. A brand overreach, you might think, but then a mobile McDonald’s was rolled out for Donald Trump on his trip to the Gulf. It’s not all boycotts and unfortunate memes. There is upside.

 

Starbucks and KFC also hold their own and have done for many decades, leading you to wonder what the industry can possibly learn about franchises. It turns out that, much as the Starbucks logo has kept many a design house in matcha lattes with its evolution, franchises are also growing and maturing.

 

Simon Chaplin, senior director, pubs and restaurants, Christie & Co, told attendees at Propel’s Excellence in Pub & Bar Retailing Conference this week that 70% of the largest restaurants brands had sites under the franchise model, which has seen a 28.6% increase since 2014. He added: “Lenders are keen to support lending on a franchise brand; there is a [central operation], they supply staff training, open the box and off you go. Yes, you have to give back in terms of fees, but you sleep better at night.”

 

In the pub sector, Chaplin described the model as “manachised” but said that, with 2,500 pubs in the UK under the model, “we see this growing as people look to share the responsibility”. And the responsibility is extensive. Simon Emeny, chief executive of Fuller’s, described a career in which he loved delivering hospitality but felt the sector had suffered years of being treated as a cash cow for successive governments. 

 

Appetite for the industry remains. Chaplin said that deals were “ahead of this time last year”. He added: “There are fewer viewings, but more offers and as interest rates fall activity will accelerate. We’ll see increased M&A activity as opportunistic buyers come into the sector. Private equity will start to invest in opportunities – those companies have money burning a hole in their pocket and some are coming to the end of their hold periods and have already extended from five to seven years. There could be more consolidation, and if you have the team behind it, there are some great properties out there, if you have the money to spend.” 

 

If you do. But for an industry with the aspiration – and, with costs growing, the need – to grow, franchising is looking more attractive.  Anna-Marie Mason, divisional director of Mitchells & Butlers premium division, said “never say never” when considering the structure. Branding looks different across the sector. At one end, Harry Gurney, managing director of Cat & Wickets Pub Company, said: “People ask me what Stuart Broad does in the business and the answer is ‘bugger all’, but he brings great PR and profile.” 

 

The role of data and net promoter score is growing when generating the kind of customer loyalty that drives the kind of repeat visits brands enjoy. Mark Bentley, business development director at HDI, said: “Where we see the greatest value is where people understand their customers’ behaviour, not just basing it on gut feelings and hunches but understanding where they buy their clothes and what charities they support gives you that critical insight.” Chris Hill, managing director of Urban Pubs and Bars, added: “We’re more interested in our Google scores and our reputation.” Public House Group founder Olivier van Themsche countered: “We don’t learn our audience or do any analysis – we just do what’s right.”

 

For those without his confidence, brands can be a quick route to customer loyalty. For those who don’t fancy a McDonald’s, it’s not as simple as it was. JD Wetherspoon has announced that putting pubs into hotels is part of its growth strategy, and Chaplin commented: “We’re talking to a lot of operators who have one hotel or ten or 15, where if they can get that bar or restaurant right, they can compete.” They included, he said, Holiday Inns.

 

And here is where the old model of quick service restaurant franchises, so familiar to this sector, rubs up against hotel land, which is a global beast that hasn’t got where it is today by being welcoming and hospitable. McDonald’s has one brand and sticks with it. The hotel sector has evolved into huge brand stables. Marriott International has more than 30 brands and just paid $335m for the CitizenM flag. Not the real estate – just the brand. 

 

Marriott and its competitors need plenty of brands to offer to yes, the guest, but also the real customer – the owner. The loyalty programme has hundreds of millions of members. These two areas are where the whole of the company value is centred. One hotel contract lawyer this hack spoke to thought it highly likely that Holiday Inn parent IHG would riddle its contracts with clauses prohibiting its owners from putting a Wetherspoon in next to reception. At the very least, they would want many, many people, bedecked in sharp suits, at any discussion. 

 

Sir Tim Martin, founder and chair of Wetherspoon, said: “People love the words ‘brand and marketing’ because they think you’ve unleashed a mystical thing, but it’s not that easy. It’s whoever puts in the work, puts those thousands of components together, who gets the results.” And for this market, it will be whoever untangles the thousands of components in a successful modern franchise environment to unleashes that growth.

My maternal grandmother was a great pub-goer, commandeering her own seat close up against the bar in the Northcote, Leytonstone, and on Saturday nights, without fail, catching a 58 bus across east London to meet her friend in The Boleyn, East Ham.

 

Less mobile in her later years, my parents took her for lunch in the car to country pubs in Essex. She would have been very miserable without the pub. That’s something I’ve inherited from her, at least.

 

It was one of those trips that produced a famous comic episode in the family story. The chosen venue was poorly lit, and coming out of the sunshine, my grandmother made her way towards a seat at a free table and missed it – plonking her not inconsiderable bottom on the lap of a surprised gentleman quietly enjoying his pint.

 

This popped into my mind the other day at an online Drinking Studies Network seminar, where sociologist Tom Thurnell-Read was talking about his research into the part pubs can play in easing loneliness, especially among older people.

 

He mentioned the obstacles they often face on a pub visit: background noise that makes it hard to hear and those low sofas that have become fashionable. They’re comfy all right, but once you’re in, how are you going to get out? 

 

We can all think of others. The gloomy corner, the like of which did for my grandmother, and which makes it hard to read the menu – especially when that menu is printed in a small and ornate font. Or menus chalked on a board, so you have to climb out of your seat and walk across the bar to get within visible range.

 

Or the way certain pubs, in maximising their covers, have shifted the toilets up several flights of stairs and through a maze of corridors to the degree, in one brand, that it’s become a running – or rather, clambering – joke. Of course, these places provide a disabled toilet on the ground floor, too. The problem is that disability, sadly, carries a stigma.

 

As we age, our abilities naturally diminish. Objectively, many older people face the same challenges as disabled people without identifying themselves as such. True, they’ll claim a disabled parking badge for the car, as my parents did. But in the supposedly classless conviviality of the pub, you don’t want to signal your disadvantageous difference by heading to the door with the wheelchair on it.

 

The whole population is aging. The health of hospitality relies increasingly on the “grey pound”. But are operators fully aware of the difficulties these potential customers encounter? And are they doing enough about it?

 

“My sense was some venues took all this on board – noise, lighting and so on especially,” says Thurnell-Read. “A Castle Rock pub local to me, where I did a focus group and interviewed the manager, made it clear that on weekday mornings, the lights were up and the music was low, precisely because of older patrons. 

 

“There was also an informal table service agreement, a readiness in staff encouraged by the manager to read the customers and know when to say, ‘you go and get settled, we’ll bring these over’. All very well handled.”

 

In a recent KAM newsletter, managing director Katy Moses details another positive example – a restaurant rammed on a Monday lunchtime thanks to the steps it’s taken to make older customers feel at home.

 

She worries, though, that this is more of an exception than the rule, noting that the “golden years demographic”, as she calls it, is not only visiting pubs, bars and restaurants less frequently than it used to do, but the decline has been steeper than in the general population – 26% compared with 20% over the past decade.

 

This is quite shocking, especially when, as Moses does, you consider the spending power of an older generation that continues to play an ever-greater role in the wider economy.

 

KAM has published a report, titled Golden Years, which points to the “clear and fixable barriers” encountered by these guests, from having difficulty reading menus to simply feeling “too old” for the place.

 

There are places designed for young folk, of course, but many more found their businesses on being inclusive to all, and in the way that age creeps up on you, it seems to me that older customers are taken for granted until the day they suddenly decide that the trouble of going to the pub just isn’t worth it any more.

 

Nothing would have stopped my grandmother, though, once you’d got her inside the door. She really didn’t mind whose lap she sat on if she’d got a sherry in front of her. But, and this may be a blessing, not everyone is like my grandmother.

What do these restaurants have in common: Selekt Chicken, Chicos, Chicken Valley, Wonder Bird, The Chicken Shop, Slim Chickens, Wingstop, KFC x 2, Pepe’s Piri Piri, Nando’s, Dixy Fried Chicken and Chesters?

 

They are all pretty much located in one high street, a few minutes’ walk from my house in north London. This is ridiculous, right? Surely we have reached peak chicken? The market has certainly been on an incredible growth trajectory, with the number of chicken restaurants increasing by 30% over the past four years in the UK, according to Meaningful Vision, which last year alone recorded a 6% uplift in the category, led by the capital, where outlet numbers grew an impressive 21%.

 

There have been a plethora of brands expanding their existing presence and others entering the market – including a batch from the US and elsewhere. Popeyes, Wingstop and Slim Chickens have announced serious expansion plans over recent months that will add hundreds of outlets to their current estates. There has also been the much-anticipated return of Chick-fil-A, which will be joined at some point by Church’s Texas Chicken, which is planning to launch here in the next two or three years, with up to 500 sites.

 

These sorts of aspirations undoubtedly helped push up the price of the sale of a majority stake in the UK franchise of Wingstop to US private equity giant Sixth Street, placing a valuation of the business at a reported £400m. Highlighting the global rise of chicken is the fortunes of McDonald’s, which has been suffering from its lesser exposure to poultry. McDonald’s chief financial officer Ian Borden told analysts last year that the chicken category is twice the size of beef and that it’s growing much faster. Its menus have had an on/off relationship with chicken tenders and burgers over recent years, but it now knows it needs to stake a proper claim on this dynamic part of the fast-food market. 

 

It will have noted that five of the 11 fastest growing US food brands on the Technomic Top 1,500 restaurants list sold chicken. McDonald’s sells $25bn worth of chicken globally each year, equal to its sales of beef, but rival KFC does $34bn worldwide sales of just chicken. No surprise that as its overall sales are suffering, McDonald’s is actively building out its chicken menu – with a return to selling tenders and chicken wraps and a greater push behind its Chicken Big Mac and McCrispy. 

 

Despite the incredible growth seen in the market to date, I reckon there is still plenty more mileage in the fried chicken phenomenon in the UK. Harneet Baweja, founder of the Gunpowder restaurant business, agreed when I sat down with him in Spitalfields Market to enjoy lunch from his newly opened Fortune Fried Chicken kiosk, which serves an authentic Thai version of a chicken burger with accompanying fiery spices and sauces. He said: “The perception is that it’s healthier and less fatty than beef. In the multi-cultural UK, everybody eats it. Caribbean and Asian cultures don’t eat all meats, but everyone consumes fried chicken, even the French! And it tastes so good. It’s soul food.”

 

Chicken also has price on its side versus beef. Prices of cattle have been soaring, with record levels for beef reached in April. In the US, this has been fuelled by drought, sending cattle numbers to a 70-year low. Donnie King, chief executive of Tyson Foods, the largest US meat packer, recently stated: “Beef is experiencing the most challenging market conditions we’ve ever seen.”  

 

The more keenly priced chicken has proven particularly attractive to price-sensitive youngsters. Wingstop has cleverly targeted the younger grouping in each of its global markets, with rap music at the heart of its UK operation. The idea has been to focus on youth communities and encourage youngsters to hang out in its restaurants rather than seeing them as an inconvenience to be shooed away once they’ve finished eating.

 

There might already be 13 chicken restaurants in my local high street, but the way sales of the birds are flying, this does not look unlucky for any of them, and far from being a saturated market, I would not bet against further brands joining them in my locale.