When the Government’s entrepreneurship adviser, Alex Depledge, declared that Britain does not “need any more restaurants”, I’ll confess my first reaction was disbelief. My second was to reach for the data. And my third, after reading it, was a conclusion both simple and troubling: she has misidentified where entrepreneurship in this country actually lives and in doing so, is making it harder for it to survive.
Let me start with the basics. Hospitality employs 2.6 million people in the UK, 7.1% of the entire workforce. It generates £69.5 billion in gross value added. It contributes £54 billion in gross tax receipts annually. It is, by any reasonable measure, not a peripheral cottage industry but a cornerstone of the British economy. But here is the figure that should stop the Government’s entrepreneurship adviser in her tracks, one drawn from the House of Commons Library research briefing on hospitality, published in January 2026, which she may not yet have had the opportunity to read: 99.6% of hospitality businesses are SMEs, and 97.7% are small businesses. An adviser appointed to clear the path for more small enterprises might reasonably be expected to know that one of the most entrepreneurially dense sectors in the entire UK economy is the one she has just publicly dismissed.
But the argument I want to make goes beyond the statistics, important as they are. It goes to something more fundamental, something that Depledge, for all her intelligence and commercial experience, appears to have overlooked entirely.
Every business deal that gets done in this country, every investment secured, every partnership formed, every client relationship built, happens somewhere and through human contact. It happens over a coffee, over lunch, over dinner, at a networking event, at a conference, at a drinks reception. The hospitality sector is not separate from the high-growth economy that the Government’s adviser wants to build. It is the connective tissue of it. You cannot scale a clean tech company, close a venture capital round, or sign a manufacturing partnership without, at some point, sitting across a table from someone in a room that a hospitality business has made possible.
I want to give a concrete example of what smart support for hospitality entrepreneurship actually looks like, because it is already happening, just not by government. On our own university campus, we work with Aramark to provide catering for students, staff and events. Given the natural variation in demand across term time, Aramark does something rather clever: it brings in small, independent food truck operators on a rotating basis, giving them seven or eight hours a day of guaranteed footfall, exposure to a large and diverse customer base, and the kind of commercial experience that no business incubator programme can replicate. The result is a richer, more varied food offering for our community, and a genuine launchpad for small hospitality enterprises.
Pubs are doing the same. The Compton Arms in Islington, ranked in the UK’s Top 50 Gastropubs, has built its reputation on offering kitchen residencies to emerging independent food businesses, giving them a platform, a customer base, and the commercial experience to grow. It is not a charity model; it is a smart one. The chefs behind Four Legs did their residency at the Compton Arms and went on to open The Plimsoll. Walk into any good pub offering food, and you will find a similar story, Thai kitchens operating out of the back, independent suppliers stocking the bar, local producers on the menu. These are ecosystems of entrepreneurship that the Government’s own adviser appears not to have noticed.
Aramark and the Compton Arms have understood something that the Government has not: supporting small hospitality businesses is not charity. It is smart commercial strategy.
I would gently invite the Government’s entrepreneurship adviser to conduct a simple experiment. Consider a single working day. The morning coffee picked up on the way to the office supplied by an independent café, almost certainly an SME. The biscuits and drinks laid on for the first meeting of the day. Lunch, whether grabbed at a local restaurant or catered in. Networking event with colleagues or clients. A family dinner that evening. Count how many of those touchpoints involve a hospitality business. Count how many of the people who made those moments possible are employed in a sector she has suggested we do not need more of.
The Government says it wants to champion the industries of tomorrow. So do we. There is no disagreement about the importance of clean technology, advanced manufacturing, or the creative sector. But the framing of hospitality as somehow standing in the way of that ambition is a false choice and a damaging one. An economy that neglects its sixth largest employment sector, that has already seen restaurants shed 22% of their casual dining sites since 2020, and that continues to pile on costs through National Insurance increases and business rates reform, is not building for the future. It is hollowing out the present.
Britain’s hospitality sector does not need to be told it isn’t wanted. It needs a government and an entrepreneurship adviser that understands what it is and what it does well enough to support it properly.
Zoe Adjey
Zoe Adjey has over 25 years of experience in the hospitality, events, and education sectors.
Senior Lecturer at Royal Docks School of Business and Law, university of east London, in Hospitality and Events Management, Zoe is developing the IoHT Practice-Based Centre, which bridges academic expertise with industry practice through real-world projects and partnerships.
Originally from Northern Ireland, she brings a unique blend of industry experience and education to her work. She is a sought-after media expert on hospitality industry issues, providing regular commentary for major national outlets including ITV News, BBC Radio 4, LBC, The Telegraph, The Independent, and The Metro. Her expertise spans workforce challenges, immigration policy, restaurant economics, pricing, tipping culture and service standards, and the hospitality sector’s economic impact and resilience.
She develops international partnerships and works with organisations, mentoring aspiring hospitality professionals in their early careers. Previously, she developed training and leadership programmes with Caprice Holdings, and at Westminster Kingsway College, she led college restaurants and curriculum teams.
