The hospitality industry is worried about staff shortages, but will there be customers to serve?

PwC says CEOs are confident about the UK economy but ordinary Britons not so much, writes James Moore

Indoor hospitality venues have reopened but customers are nervous about the economy as well as Covid (PA)

The hospitality industry’s problems are by no means over, as the stories about firms offering their staff incentives to help them find the people they need as a result of a pronounced staff shortage clearly demonstrate.

But assuming the bonuses, gift vouchers, or whatever for getting friends to sit down for interviews work, will the newly minted employees find themselves with enough people to serve?

That’s open to question.

PwC, the big four accountancy firm and consultant, has found a great deal of optimism about the economy among the bosses it speaks to for its CEO survey. More than three quarters (77 per cent) expect things to improve over the next year, for example.

However, when it commissioned Opinium Research to look at the views of the general public on much the same subject, the results painted a starkly different picture.

A large majority of the 2,000 people who responded voiced concerns about rising unemployment (82 per cent), day-to-day living costs (80 per cent ), and low economic growth (77 per cent).

Those anxieties could have a real world impact. Just under a third (30 per cent) said they planned to visit leisure facilities less while just over a third (35 per cent) were expecting to reduce going out in the evening for social events. Some 32 per cent also said they expected to save more, which might come as something of a surprise given that those with the capacity to save have been doing a quite a lot of that with the pandemic having shuttered large parts of the consumer economy.

PwC says the latter trio of answers are a demonstration of economic insecurity in action. I would suggest that Covid-related caution may also be playing a role in the answers given by its respondents but I wouldn’t otherwise disagree.

If the results are borne out, and as ever it bears repeating that this is just one poll, the wave of money expected to crash over these shores in the wake of Boris Johnson’s increasingly shaky looking reopening mightn’t be as powerful as the some of the more excitable forecasters have suggested.

If that’s the case it won’t be long before the industry is calling upon chancellor Rishi Sunak to extend his special low rate of VAT for hospitality and maybe to offer other concessions while he’s at it. Eat Out to Help Out 2.0? Maybe not after getting his fingers burned with the first one. But you know what I mean.

The problem with this sort of widespread worry about the economy is that it can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. People fear it’s bad, act accordingly, and their fears become realised.

On the other hand, CEOs feeling good about these things could serve as a very effective palliative, especially if that makes them more likely to hire than they are to fire. It’s worth noting that predictions of peak unemployment by forecasters such as the Bank of England have been revised down.

What might help the cause is if businesses leaders were to try and inspire some of their confidence in the people who work for them. PwC suggests investing in training, and skills and that isn’t a bad idea. It’s the sort of investment that people can see and touch, that says we feel good about things and we want to prepare you and our company for it. Pay rises don’t hurt either.

So it’s possible that this will pass with a little finessing and that the hospitality sector will be able to continue with its worrying about where on earth to find the staff in fortress Britain now Priti Patel and her dysfunctional Home Office have hauled up the drawbridge and are getting busy with flaming arrows and boiling oil.