Alison McGovern stood up in front of an audience of operators, employers and trainers from across the sector and with a straight face waxed lyrical about how important the sector was to the labour market.
She told us she recognised the industry employed 2m people and was primarily made up of small and medium sized businesses.
Vital role
She highlighted how vital the role of hospitality was in tackling employment and economic problems in deprived coastal areas, and she acknowledged how important the industry was in developing people, offering life skills, careers and the opportunity to “build a better life”.
All of this sounded great, a ringing endorsement from a senior Government minister on the importance of the hospitality sector as a source of employment and economic benefit.
Yet, amid all the praise and lovely words and endorsing, the elephant in the room went ignored and unacknowledged.
While this Government is praising the employment opportunities offered by this sector, and apparently is doing all it can to pull levers to help the sector boost those opportunities, it’s also the same Government that is cutting the sector down at it’s knees with punitive employment taxation and crippling business rates rises.
Additional costs
The much-maligned Budget, which has seen the Chancellor heap many thousands of pounds of employment costs onto small and medium sized businesses in hospitality and elsewhere went unspoken.
No questions were asked - no mention of the fact that since the Budget, most hospitality businesses have said they will be actively looking to cut back on recruitment, employment and investment.
So, if McGovern was serious about wanting to work with the industry to boost employment and growth, perhaps rather than focusing on the fact that Job Centres are a bit rubbish, she should be having a word with Rachel Reeves about whether that NIC employer rise was perhaps the best move they could have made.
