The Year Since the Budget
One year ago this month, the 2025 Autumn Budget arrived with a bill the sector has been working out ever since. UKHospitality estimated the combined impact at £322.5 million in additional employment costs: the rise in employer National Insurance contributions and the increase to the National Living Wage landing together on kitchens already running at compressed margins.
Most venues absorbed it. Some by cutting staff, or hours, or midweek service. Some not at all.
The next Budget is October 28. Twenty-four days away.
What the year cost
The sector has been closing throughout 2026. Not in one wave, but in the slow attrition of kitchens that ran out of room. Whitbread took every Beefeater and Brewers Fayre site permanently off the map in September, with around 3,800 jobs. Spaghetti House entered administration in May after 70 years in London, with 101 redundancies. The Caterer has been tracking the independent closures week by week: rooms that tried to hold on and could not.
The less visible losses are the harder ones to count. The kitchen that stopped opening on Mondays. The pub that cut its food service to four days. The venue that did not replace the sous chef who left in the spring, because the margin on a Tuesday no longer justified the payroll. Those decisions do not appear in an administration filing. They appear in the shape of the rota and the hours posted on the door.
The Caterer's own tracking noted that hospitality has borne a disproportionate share of job losses since the last Budget. That framing matches what operators have been living with throughout the year.
The ask before October 28
UKHospitality has now published modelling with a specific number: 2,076 closures projected for the sector this year if the 2026 Budget delivers no sector-wide business rates solution. That forecast exists because the Budget window is close and the case for acting in it is time-limited.
The business rates ask is specific. Extend the relief that already applies to pubs and social clubs to the wider sector: restaurants, hotels, and the venues that were largely excluded from the 15 percent pub relief announced in January. A sector-wide fix at the Budget would change those bills from April.
The VAT ask is still on the table alongside it. Eight hundred operators put their names on a public letter to the Prime Minister this year asking for a cut from 20 to 10 percent. Both asks land in the same place: the margin underneath the fixed cost structure that venues carry every week, regardless of how many covers they did.
The government has already moved in the right direction. The pub rates relief matters. The commitment to business rates reform ahead of the 2029 revaluation is on record. What the sector is watching for on October 28 is whether that direction accelerates, or whether another Budget passes with the structural problem deferred again.
What runs in the meantime
The venues still open tonight have made it through twelve months of the year that Budget built. We run rooms across Sussex: the Castle Inn, Tollgate, the Bull on the Green, the Berwick. A year of higher employment costs, a spring rates revaluation, food inflation still running. The businesses are open. They are not running as freely as they were in 2024.
Around 4pm today, when the shape of this evening becomes clear, the tables that will not fill go on Halfseat: food at half price, drinks at full, a real cut of the booking fee going straight to the venue. The model does not change with the Budget. The empty seat costs what it costs to leave cold, at whatever rate the Treasury sets.
But the kitchen that fills its quiet nights consistently is better placed to still be here on October 29, whichever way the Budget goes.
Twenty-four days.