Why we're backing #VATsTheProblem — and why you should sign

Order a meal out in the UK and 20% of what you pay is VAT. Do the same in France, Spain or Italy and it's 10%. In Germany it's 7%. Same plate of food, less than half the tax. That gap isn't a detail — for a lot of independent venues it's the difference between a viable year and a closed door.

That's the case behind #VATsTheProblem, the campaign asking the Government to cut hospitality VAT from 20% to 10%, in line with most of Europe.

What the campaign is

It's led by Tom Kerridge — chef and publican, of the two-Michelin-starred Hand and Flowers in Marlow — and it has a single, simple ask: 10% VAT for hospitality. It's backed by the sector's main trade bodies — UKHospitality, the British Beer and Pub Association, the British Institute of Innkeeping and CODE Hospitality — and it's aiming for a million signatures, with a push to the public from the start of July. In its first few days the petition passed a hundred thousand.

Deliberately, it isn't pitched as a party-political point. It's framed as the one cost line that touches every part of hospitality — the chain restaurant, the village pub, the independent café, and the people who work in all of them.

Why it matters to the independent in particular

VAT is a flat hit. It doesn't care how well you run the place. You can have a brilliant chef, a full book and a tight kitchen and still hand a fifth of every bill to the Exchequer before you've paid a single supplier. When margins are already thin and costs — wages, energy, business rates — keep climbing, that 20% is often exactly the slice that would have kept the doors open. The campaign points to roughly three hospitality venues closing every day in the UK. A VAT cut won't fix everything, but it's the lever with the most direct effect on whether an independent survives.

Why we're saying so

Grace is built for independent UK hospitality. That's not a market we picked off a slide — it's who we're for. Whether our customers make it isn't only about software; it's about the conditions they trade in, and VAT is one of the biggest. So we're not going to be quiet about it. We think 10% is fair, we think the case is strong, and we'd rather say so than pretend a software company has no stake in whether its customers are still open next year.

How to help

Sign the petition at vatstheproblem.co.uk. It takes a minute. Then do the thing that actually makes it count: ask your team to sign, and your suppliers, and — from July, when the campaign turns to the public — your guests. The campaign site has a "Why VAT?" explainer and a toolkit if you want the numbers and the assets to share.

One signature is a rounding error. A sector's worth of them is harder to ignore.