Y
oung people and part-time workers are among the biggest victims of stealth taxes on employment that have cut nearly 10,000 jobs a month off pub and restaurant payrolls this year. UK Hospitality, an industry lobby group, claims that a total of 89,000 jobs disappeared in nine months as a result of increased costs imposed by Rachel Reeves’s first budget last year, with fears there might be more to come soon.
Speaking as someone whose first part-time job was in a pub, long ago while I was still at school, I feel for today’s young folk. They are being denied the fun of finding out about work in a social setting, making friends and a few quid at the same time. Free beer sometimes helped too.
Here and now, as a shareholder in half a dozen hospitality businesses, this week’s dismal news makes me wonder if the great British boozer is dying a slow death from neglect. That might be good for our waistlines but bad for society because digital and solitary entertainments mean more people are becoming socially isolated. Or just lonely and sad, to put it in plain English.
Along with a church, a corner shop and a Post Office, most suburbs and villages had a pub when I was a 16-year-old pot boy at the Dove in Hammersmith. Perhaps I should explain that role had nothing to do with distributing cannabis and was all about collecting empty pint pots, which piled up rapidly in that riverside hostelry back in the 1970s.
