30/06/2026
campaign spearheaded by Tom Kerridge — backed by UKHospitality, the BBPA, and the British Institute of Innkeeping (BII)— is asking for one thing. Cut hospitality VAT from 20% to 10%, bringing Britain in line with France, Spain, and Italy. Right now we’re paying close to the highest hospitality VAT rate in Europe.
We’ve signed it. We’d ask you to as well, and to get your team and your regulars to do the same as it now heads for consumer launch.
This is one of the rare moments the entire trade — chains, independents, chefs, landlords, trade bodies who don’t normally agree on much — is genuinely united behind a single ask. That matters, and it deserves every signature it can get.
But here’s the honest bit, because this page has never been about telling you what you want to hear.
A VAT cut, if it happens, will not help the pub that’s struggling this month, next month or the following months to come.
HMRC’s own estimate puts the cost of this cut at £10.5 billion a year. That is not a small ask, and it is not a quick one. The earliest realistic moment for any change is the Budget in the autumn — and that’s if the campaign succeeds, which is a genuine if, not a certainty. Government moves slowly even when it agrees with you, and this government has not yet agreed.
So if you’re a landlord lying awake tonight wondering how you cover next week’s wages, this campaign — as right as it is — is not going to be the thing that saves you this month. It might not even be the thing that saves you this year.
“Sign it. Share it. Mean it. And then go back to doing the thing that actually keeps your pub open while you wait — because Westminster was never going to move at the speed your rent does.”
That’s not cynicism. It’s just the timeline, honestly stated.
The big chains and the Tom Kerridges of this world can absorb a long wait for a VAT cut. Plenty of independent operators reading this cannot, and that gap — between who the campaign helps fastest and who needs help fastest — is worth being honest about, not papered over with optimism.
Support the campaign with everything you’ve got. It’s the right fight and it deserves to win.
https://www.vatstheproblem.co.uk/
And in the meantime, keep doing what’s actually in your control — the marketing, the community, the relationships, the margin — because that’s the part nobody in Westminster is coming to fix for you, this month or any month.
Let us know in the comments is you have signed the petition and what a cut in VAT would mean for your business.
