It’s important not to mistake resilience in the wake of COVID-19 with long-term sustainability in the face of rising prices
Irrepressibly rising energy costs and inflation are set to hammer restaurants and pubs and their suppliers across the U.K., with the government apparently yet to learn the lessons COVID-19 could have taught it about the importance of adequate, timely financial support.
While Ofgem, the U.K. energy regulator, sets a price cap for household energy bills, no such limit exists for businesses, and October is typically the month in which gas and electricity providers renew long-term contracts for businesses like restaurants, pubs, bars, and suppliers, from butchers and grocers to brewers and bakers. Those contracts typically set energy prices at fixed rate, for one and sometimes more years.
At the moment, this is proving nightmarish. Energy suppliers insulate themselves against business closures using credit insurance. This means that if a client were to close, the supplier would be protected from lost earnings. But the surging gas and electricity prices — and the unpredictability of those surges — are increasing the risk to the insurers of providing that credit.
This has led the lobbies that represent restaurants and pubs to pressure the government for financial support, as they did during the COVID-19 crisis. The British Institute of Innkeeping says “almost two in three” of its members are seeing “price rises of more than 300 percent,” while warning that “one in three pubs will fail in the next three months.” U.K.
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