19 June 2026
Restaurants, cafés, pubs, bars and hotels in Southampton are asking residents to get behind a campaign to help save the hospitality industry.
Led locally by Spencer Bowman of Mettricks cafés and backed by the Hospitality Together Southampton Group and GO! Southampton, business across the city will be rallying support for Hospitality Together and the VAT’s The Problem campaigns, which aims to lower VAT from the current 20% to 10% in line with the rest of Europe.
Starting from this week, Hospitality Together posters will appear in venues across the city with GO! Southampton helping to distribute materials to cafes, bars and restaurants, encouraging them to display campaign posters, add their business to the campaign and share resources designed to raise awareness of the challenges facing the sector.
At the same time, businesses, residents and visitors are being urged to support the VAT’s The Problem campaign by signing a national petition calling for VAT on hospitality to be reduced from 20% to 10%, bringing the UK more in line with many European countries. The petition, led by celebrity chef Tom Kerridge and UK Hospitality, has already gathered more than 220,000 signatures with an aim to get to 1million.
The campaign follows a letter written by Spencer Bowman and signed by over 250 local businesses earlier this year calling for Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, to take urgent action to ease mounting pressures on the industry.
Alongside Spencer, representatives from GO! Southampton and the city’s hospitality businesses, visited to the House of Commons, to seek fairness and relief from what many believe is a disproportionate tax burden on the sector.
Spencer Bowman said: “The Government is not treating the hospitality industry fairly. We run successful businesses and footfall is high, but our profit margins are simply not reflecting that success. We are not asking for subsidies, as they tend to offer short term solutions or a “one-off” fund that is just not suitable. Instead, we simply request that VAT is lowered to 10% in line with the rest of and that will help us to keep our businesses open, protect jobs and drive economic growth.”
GO! Southampton, the city’s Business Improvement District (BID) has backed the campaign from the beginning as part of its wider ongoing support for the city’s hospitality sector as businesses continue to navigate challenging economic conditions.
Gemma Pratt, Deputy Executive Director of GO! Southampton said: “Independent restaurants, cafes and bars are the lifeblood of our cities, yet the hospitality industry is paying some of the highest VAT rates in Europe.
“This simply isn’t sustainable. These businesses are successful but are barely turning a profit. At what point do we get to where we lose these great venues because it doesn’t make financial sense to keep them open? Not only do we then lose those venues, we lose jobs and shrink the local economy.”
Spencer Bowman added: “The fact that the petition has already gathered more than 220,000 signatures shows how passionately people feel about this. We would really encourage Southampton’s visitors and residents to do the same, sign the petition and help keep their local high street businesses open.”
More information about the Hospitality Together campaign can be found here: https://hospitality-together.org/
A link to the VAT’s the Problem petition is here: https://www.vatstheproblem.co.uk/
