Tommy Banks VAT plan targets smaller UK venues
The Yorkshire chef wants a tiered hospitality VAT cut capped at businesses turning over under £50m a year, a narrower ask than Tom Kerridge's sector-wide campaign.
A Tommy Banks VAT plan calls for a 13% rate on hospitality businesses with annual turnover below £50m, rather than a flat cut across the sector. Banks runs the Black Swan at Oldstead, Roots in York, the Abbey Inn in Byland and the General Tarleton near Knaresborough, all in North Yorkshire.
Hospitality currently pays the standard UK VAT rate of 20%, the same rate applied to most other goods and services. Banks's proposal would carve out a lower band for independent and mid-sized operators, leaving larger chains on the existing rate.
A tiered Tommy Banks VAT plan
A narrower VAT cut, built to survive the Treasury's own arithmetic rather than a petition count.
Research behind the Tommy Banks VAT proposal, carried out by Bournemouth University Business School and Hospitality Voices, estimates the net cost to the Treasury of a 13% rate restricted to businesses below the £50m threshold at £3.2bn to £3.6bn a year, a fraction of what a sector-wide cut would require.
Banks has framed the threshold as a response to criticism levelled at earlier VAT-cut campaigns. "One of the biggest criticisms of our campaign has been: why do bigger businesses, like McDonald's, need a VAT cut?" he said. "It's a fair challenge."
He has tied the proposal to three aims: protecting jobs at smaller operators, supporting venues he describes as central to their communities, and backing youth employment specifically, noting that close to 40% of the hospitality workforce is aged 16 to 24.
Where this sits against #VATsTheProblem
The proposal sits alongside, rather than against, #VATsTheProblem, the campaign led by chef Tom Kerridge calling for a permanent 10% VAT rate across all of hospitality regardless of business size. That campaign has gathered close to 400,000 petition signatures. Banks says he backs Kerridge's campaign too, but regards his own threshold-based version as the more targeted route to the same relief.
Banks has also called on Prime Minister Andy Burnham to act on earlier promises of hospitality tax relief, saying: "Since taking office, he has been worryingly quiet on VAT."
The dual push comes against a backdrop of sustained closures across British pubs and independent restaurants, which operators have linked to rising costs and a VAT rate that has not moved despite years of lobbying, including a separate open letter from 800 hospitality businesses pressing Burnham on a flat 10% rate.
Where #VATsTheProblem aims for mass public pressure through scale, the Tommy Banks VAT plan is built to survive a narrower cost-benefit argument inside the Treasury. Whether either reaches the next Budget depends less on signatures than on which version ministers judge they can afford, a question sharpened by a separate study on Germany's hospitality VAT cut, which found little of the saving reached menu prices.
