With the hospitality sector hemorrhaging personnel in an effort to stay afloat, Butlins CEO Jon Hendry Pickup has queried the chancellor’s growth objective, arguing that the country cannot “tax ourselves to success”.
The chief executive of one of the UK’s leading leisure brands has added his voice to the now seemingly endless list of business critics of last year’s autumn Budget.
Speaking on CityAN’s Boardroom Uncovered show this week, Butlins chief executive Jon Hendry Pickup said that the combination of the lowered threshold for employers’ NIC contributions along with an increase in the National Minimum wage made the price of new employment too high, and that the combination essentially amounted to a “tax on jobs.”
“That growth lever that they talked about just before the election…I’d like to see that being the number one focus, because we’re not going to tax ourselves to success,” he said. “We need to make sure that we’re able to stimulate growth. We need to be able to invest, to grow our business, to develop the proposition, to build skills for our team. I’d like to see more of that first and foremost.”
According to the latest UKHospitality estimates, a staggering 89,000 jobs have been lost from the UK’s pubs, bars, hotels and restaurants since the Budget, a figure which represents over 53 per cent of all job losses nationwide.
To that end, whilst Pickup said that he understood the chancellor faced a “difficult time” in balancing the public finances, the sheer “number of people who’ve come out of hospitality [is] disappointing.”
“I’d like to be able to tell people the truth about the fact that we’ve got to make tough decisions,” he added. “We’ve got a demography that says we can’t just have fewer and fewer people paying tax and rents.”
Industry needs a pick-me-up
Jon Hendry Pickup said… “We need to make sure that we’re able to stimulate growth. We need to be able to invest, to grow our business, to develop the proposition, to build skills for our team. I’d like to see more of that first and foremost…
