The Restaurant Didn't Close – It Starved.

The economy of care

by Harriet Mansell

People seem consistently surprised when I tell them it is hard to make money in hospitality.

They see a ‘successful’ restaurant - a successful chef, a collective passion and smiling faces.

“But we didn’t realise you were struggling that much.”

Of course you didn’t.

The foundation of the entire business is that we take care of you. You shouldn’t feel the panic behind the room. You certainly shouldn’t know that the owner has been awake since four in the morning wondering how to make payroll.

You are supposed to feel welcome. So it is a fair question. The success of hospitality has always depended partly upon its ability to conceal what it costs to produce.

It’s just that every week another independent quietly disappears. Another chef announces that they can no longer absorb the rising costs. Another pub calls last orders for the final time. The explanations have become familiar: food prices, energy bills, inflation, National Insurance, staff shortages and the cost of employing the human beings without whom hospitality cannot exist.

Hospitality is officially in crisis. The sector has campaigned for years for a substantial reduction in VAT, but the argument still does not appear to have landed where it matters.

This summer, the government temporarily reduced VAT on children's meals and certain family activities. It was presented as support for families and high streets. Hospitality, however, is not asking for a short-term summer promotion in one corner of the sector. It is asking for the economic conditions under which it can continue to exist.

What I find particularly interesting is that the response came through the lens of welfare rather than productivity. Government recognised that families needed support to access hospitality, yet it failed to ask the equally important question: what do hospitality businesses need in order to continue providing it?

I would argue that one of the most glaring parts of the problem is that we have fundamentally misunderstood what hospitality is.

We treat it as leisure. A treat. A night out. We think of Michelin-starred chefs on television creating artistic tasting menus. We think of celebration, indulgence and discretionary spending. Something nice to have. Something people naturally abandon when money becomes tight.

Yet hospitality is one of the oldest systems of care human beings have ever created.

Long before there were restaurants, there was hospitality. Long before there were hospitals, there was somebody making broth for a sick neighbour. Long before there was social care, there was food shared within families and communities. Hospitality is cooking for people who need it, creating places where people gather. It is tending to one another, nourishing one another. It is one of the oldest expressions of human cooperation we have.

And we have made the political mistake of treating it like leisure and taxing and regulating it as though it were merely entertainment.

When a society makes feeding people, employing people and gathering together increasingly difficult to sustain, something begins to shift, and that thing is the behaviour of its citizens.

Money?

Money is a strange thing when you stop to think about it, a series of numbers that have meaning because enough people continue behaving as though they do.

Every day we exchange our time, labour, knowledge and skill for those numbers. We accept them because we trust that somebody else will accept them tomorrow.

Taxation rests on the same principle.

We don't pay tax because we are compelled to. We pay because we subscribe to the idea that we are contributing towards something larger than ourselves – infrastructure and welfare. It’s for the roads, the schools, hospitals, courts, public services. We accept that some of our income belongs to the collective because we believe the collective is, broadly speaking, working in our interests.

This social contract is one of the most remarkable ideas in political history. It rests on the belief that millions of strangers will willingly contribute to a shared system because they believe it is broadly legitimate and serves the common good.

So what happens when people begin to feel that the system no longer reflects the reality of their lives?

History shows us, however, that when enough people stop believing the system is working in their interests, they don't simply become dissatisfied. They begin searching for alternatives, and this is how new political movements emerge. It’s when alternative voices and cults emerge. And this is how old systems lose legitimacy. Not necessarily because people reject democracy itself, but because they no longer feel protected by the version of it they are living under.

Historical food riots, for instance, weren't simply irrational mobs descending into chaos. They were communities reacting to what historians call the moral economy - the belief that certain essentials should never become entirely subject to market forces.

The historian E.P. Thompson argued that many food riots were not spontaneous outbreaks of irrational violence, but moral protests against the belief that essential goods had been surrendered entirely to market forces. People weren't rejecting commerce. They were defending the idea that some things such as food and shelter should never become purely economic.

When people believe that the moral contract has been broken, politics becomes unstable remarkably quickly.

Food is never just food. It is nutrition, certainly, but it is also dignity, stability, community and political legitimacy. When access to food becomes detached from people's sense of fairness, unrest has followed with remarkable consistency. The French Flour War of 1775 was indeed the precursor to the French Revolution.

Healthy political leadership should create the conditions in which people, communities and businesses can flourish. A vibrant, respected nation is a productive nation and one that generates confidence, innovation, investment and, ultimately, future tax revenue.

It seems plain that the government have become too focused on managing short-term costs and not focused enough on investing in the foundations that make prosperity possible.

If I were handed the Treasury budget for a day, I'd ask one simple question:

What do we need to invest in today to create a healthier, more resilient Britain tomorrow?

It certainly doesn't begin by maintaining a tax system that places extraordinary pressure on labour-intensive industries, increasing the likelihood of otherwise viable businesses sliding towards insolvency, leaving the government to recover little or none of the tax it expected to collect in the first place and become one of the largest unsecured creditors when they eventually fail.

The economy of care

By the economy of care, I mean the parts of an economy whose primary purpose is not simply to generate profit, but to sustain human beings.

It includes feeding people, teaching them, nursing them, growing food, raising children, caring for older people, creating places where communities gather and building the relationships that allow societies to function. Some of that work is paid, and much of it is not, yet all of it creates value as without it, no other part of the economy can exist. It forms a vital link in the chain.

I think of it rather like the mycelium network beneath a forest. Largely unseen, yet constantly redistributing resources, signalling distress, supporting weaker organisms and connecting the entire ecosystem. Remove the network and, eventually, the forest begins to fail.

Of course, we pay tax because we have to. It is a legal obligation.

But modern democracies don't function simply because people fear prosecution. They function because most of us broadly accept the legitimacy of the system. We accept that a proportion of what we earn is exchanged for something larger than ourselves: roads, schools, hospitals, courts, public services and welfare. It is the architecture that allows millions of strangers to cooperate.

It’s an extraordinary system, until people stop believing it's working. And I noticed it first in my restaurant.

One of the cruellest illusions of business ownership is the bank balance. People imagine that because customers are paying for meals, staff are being paid and they occasionally see you taking your team out for a thank-you dinner, the business must be doing well. Owners know better.

The money arrives, but most of it never belonged to you in the first place. It belongs to HMRC. To your staff, your suppliers, your landlord. Your electricity company. Your insurance provider. Your EPOS system.

The account might show thirty thousand pounds, yet you know there is nothing. Every pound has already been promised away. I started thinking of it as the invisible bill. If I could just make enough to keep the doors open, then perhaps that would be enough, I would not see the money amount to anything, it was there on the screen and then it was gone.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that my restaurant was a microcosm of Britain's own balance sheet, and it made me ask.

When will Britain start taking itself seriously enough to respect itself?

Because that's what this comes down to. If you can’t pay yourself and your people, you don’t value yourself. If you can’t tend to your own health, you become unwell. If you can’t spend time in community, or with friends, you become isolated. If you can’t eat well, you become unwell.

And if you become unwell, your performance suffers. Eventually, the people who depend on you suffer too.

There is a reason airlines tell us to put our own oxygen mask on before helping anyone else.

It’s not selfish, it’s practical. If you cannot breathe, you cannot help the person sitting beside you.

I wonder whether Britain has forgotten that.

We look out at a world in crisis. We want to help, but how can we? As a nation. We speak about compassion, responsibility and our place on the international stage, yet we aren’t respecting ourselves enough to take a stand and put our health at the forefront.

If Britain isn't putting on its own oxygen mask first, then I have to ask: what difference can we realistically make?

Respect begins at home, it’s something we are taught. Care begins at home. And what is hospitality, if not the organised practice of care?

It is the industry that feeds us, comforts us, employs us, gathers us together and quietly holds communities in place.

If we cannot afford to sustain the people whose job it is to care for others, then perhaps the real crisis is the steady neglect of this economy of care, and then what follows?

What to do? It means thinking differently.

Hospitality VAT should be significantly reduced, not because restaurant owners deserve special treatment, but because labour-intensive industries cannot survive when every additional employee becomes another financial burden. Employer National Insurance should recognise the public value created by businesses that employ people rather than replacing them. Independent businesses that demonstrably strengthen their communities  - by employing locally, buying regionally, training apprentices, providing work experience, supporting vulnerable people or creating spaces for social connection -  should be rewarded through the tax system rather than treated exactly the same as businesses extracting value with minimal human interaction.

I would create a Community Care Credit. Imagine if every verified act of community care undertaken by an independent business could be offset against tax. Hosting bereavement groups. Providing apprenticeships. Running cookery classes. Supporting food banks. Offering free meals to isolated elderly residents. Purchasing from local producers. Creating warm spaces during winter. These things already happen, quietly, every day, because independent people, organisations and hospitality businesses care about the places they exist within and the people around them.

We ask independent business owners to employ people, train people, pay taxes, regenerate high streets and strengthen communities. Yet many have no occupational health support, no meaningful pension, no income protection, no safety net if they become seriously ill and no mechanism for stepping away without the entire enterprise collapsing around them.Why would the next generation choose that life?

If we genuinely want entrepreneurs, then we need to make entrepreneurship survivable.

Because ultimately this isn't an argument about restaurants. It's an argument about the kind of country we want to become and what we want to accomplish in the face of the global situation right now. It’s about what values we hold dearly.

Do we still believe there is value in places owned by people whose children attend the local school, who know their suppliers by name, who sponsor the village football team and quietly check on the elderly customer who hasn't appeared this week?

We've become obsessed with resilience and optimisation since the pandemic, yet resilience has never been created by systems alone  - resilience is created by relationships, shared experiences, understanding and compassion, being seen and held, in real life. Neighbours, practical skills, connections.  By communities capable of feeding, teaching and looking after themselves while remaining connected to the wider economy.

Perhaps that's the real lesson my restaurant taught me.

My restaurant didn't close because nobody cared. It closed because care had become too expensive to produce.

The encouraging thing is that economies are not acts of God. Neither are they weather systems that arrive without warning or disappear beyond our control. They are precisely human inventions. We designed them, and we continue redesigning them every time we change a tax code, rewrite a budget, reform a planning law or decide what kinds of work deserve reward.

The question, then, is not whether we can afford to support hospitality, it’s whether we still understand what hospitality is.

If we continue thinking of it as an industry, we'll carry on counting closures.

If we begin recognising it as part of the care infrastructure that underpins a healthy society, we might finally start asking a different question altogether.

Not, "How do we save restaurants?"

But, "What kind of country makes it possible for people to care for one another?"

I think that is the question Britain should be asking now.