Owners of some bars and restaurants say they fear for their future following the recent Labour budget. They cite increase costs from taxes, wage rises and environmental compliance.
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00:00Well, it's always very difficult because it depends who you believe.
00:04Quite clearly, the critics say that taxes did not need to rise, but the government of
00:09currently, the Labour administration under Keir Starmer, they claim to have found the
00:1422 billion black hole, which, of course, is still somewhat contentious.
00:19If we give the government the benefit of the doubt, then that has to be filled, so it has
00:23to come from somewhere.
00:24Now, of course, the difficulty is, who does this go to?
00:27And of course, the argument in Labour is that the board of shoulders should bear this load,
00:31as it were.
00:32Those are the wealthiest.
00:33Now, indeed, coming to the hospitality industry in particular, there is this difficulty because
00:38traditionally, they don't pay the highest wages.
00:42It's often very short term and casual.
00:44There's the issue then of increasing national insurance or the employer's national insurance,
00:49but also at the same time, which is kind of forgotten, dropping the threshold as to when
00:54you have to start it.
00:56So it's picking up a lot more people than it would have done.
00:58So for Labour, it might be paying at the start of their period in power, but gain later as
01:03some economic benefits develop.
01:05Well, I mean, if we again take the explanation, they're sort of fixing the foundation.
01:11So yeah, OK, they've got four and a half years to get this right.
01:14But the difficulty is that sort of given that things are sort of not, they were never going
01:19to increase as quickly or improve as quickly as they might have hoped or some might have
01:23hoped.
01:24We're going to have to sort of see some sort of, as I say, improving the economy and the
01:28feel good factor, because that's what people sort of vote for.
01:31And what about the response from the opposition?
01:33It feels very much like reform are getting all the headlines.
01:37The Conservatives, let's face it, they were pretty enfeebled that, you know, they've gone
01:40through some sort of pretty dreadful times and sort of umpteen sort of changes of leadership.
01:45What we've got to hope for, you know, for all of our sake, regardless of the politics,
01:49is that sort of the economy does improve, because if it starts to improve, we all feel
01:52better.
01:53And if there's more money going into the economy, we can then sort of start to fix the sort
01:56of the vital services that we all so depend upon.