Britain’s pubs, bars, and restaurants may have notched up a rare quarter of growth, but the hospitality industry’s revival remains on a knife edge, with an average of 11 venues a week closing over the past year.
An average of 11 hospitality venues a week have closed over the last 12 months, according to the latest Hospitality Market Monitor from CGA by NIQ.
While the third quarter of 2025 brought a flicker of optimism, the cost crisis and looming Budget threaten to snuff it out. At the end of September, the UK counted 99,296 licensed venues – still 572 fewer than a year earlier, amounting to 11 closures a week. The sector now stands 14.2 percent smaller than in March 2020, when COVID first hit, with 15,812 venues lost in just over five years.
Yet, there’s a glimmer of hope. The number of licensed premises rose by 0.6 percent in Q3, marking the first quarterly rise in a year and only the third since mid-2022. With Christmas trading just around the corner, operators are daring to hope for a stronger finish to the year – if, that is, the Chancellor’s Budget doesn’t tighten the screws further.
“High costs and fragile consumer confidence have created a very difficult trading environment for hospitality in 2025, and these numbers show the toll they have taken on venues,” commented Karl Chessell, director at CGA by NIQ. “Against that backdrop, a modest rise in sites in the third quarter shows the sector’s impressive resilience.”
Pubs and bars rose 0.1 percent over the year, while restaurants and food-led outlets slipped 1.7 percent – echoing the CGA RSM Hospitality Business Tracker, which shows pubs outpacing restaurants every month of 2025 so far. The monitor points also to a small but meaningful recovery among independent operators, who saw growth of 0.9 percent in Q3 after years of heavy attrition. Despite losing nearly a fifth of their sites since 2020, these entrepreneurs are proving there’s still appetite for new openings, even amid high costs and weak consumer confidence
“Well-run businesses continue to expand and the confidence of independent venues is particularly encouraging,” concluded Chessell. “These businesses are working exceptionally hard to navigate multiple challenges, and as the Budget nears they will be hoping for respite on their disproportionately high costs. Government support can help to nurture these green shoots of recovery, but failure to act risks thousands more closures and job losses.”
However, one quarter rise in a year and just three in three years suggests a problem far bigger. The costs of running hospitality businesses – the government taxes, the business rates, the uncontrolled energy prices – together with the strangling burden of over-regulation and red tape is the real problem.
Hospitality knows how to operate and drive economic growth; it seems the government and local councillors don’t.
Shoots to kill
CGA analysts said……. “High costs and fragile consumer confidence have created a very difficult trading environment for hospitality in 2025, and these numbers show the toll they have taken on venues……
