Bars and restaurant businesses would be ‘naïve’ to think government will cut VAT again, says UK hospitality leader

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

The UK’s hospitality sector won’t be getting its much-demanded VAT cut, the boss of UKHospitality has said. Kate Nicholls, CEO of the trade body, said during a panel discussion at the annual Northern Restaurant and Bar show at Manchester Central that she was ‘not confident at all’ that there would be any temporary relief for business owners in the pipeline. “Firstly, it was temporary, so the government is pretty firm on the fact, and Rishi Sunak is quite stubborn with the way he works things through,” she said. “‘It was temporary, I reversed it, none of you said thank you, none of you said it was good enough’. “If you were to go back to five percent, that’s eight billion pounds.

It’s an eight billion pound bill. In the context of everything else that’s going on, I cannot see politically, given all the pressures that they’ve got, how they can justify doing that. Read more: Manchester International Festival reveals 2023 programme “He was very adamant that it was temporary, it’s been reversed, if he did it again it would be open season and everybody would ask for it.

Politically, I just don’t see how he can do it at this point in time. “We will keep campaigning on it, and we do keep campaigning for duty free sales for overseas visitors.

Our valuable overseas visitors are not coming back, they’re down about a third in terms of their spend, they’re going to Paris and Milan instead. “But you’ve got to be politically pragmatic when you’ve got public sector finance in such a state.