Britain’s rural economy is buckling. Hauliers, hoteliers and farmers up and down the country are warning that the cost shock unleashed by the Iran war has tipped thousands of small businesses into what one Somerset operator describes as “total survival mode”, and that, without urgent intervention from the Treasury, the pain will inevitably be passed on at the till.
Even as diplomats in Washington and Tehran inch towards what officials describe as a “largely negotiated” peace deal, the damage on the ground is already done. Hauliers report fuel bills running tens of thousands of pounds a week higher than at the start of the year. Farmers say the economics have become so distorted that some are quietly selling stockpiled fertiliser rather than planting crops with it. And in Britain’s off-grid hotels, the cost of a litre of heating oil has very nearly doubled inside a fortnight.
It is, by almost any measure, a textbook cost-of-doing-business crisis, and one falling disproportionately on the small operators who keep rural Britain ticking.
A 76 per cent jump in heating oil, overnight
Shaun Whitehouse, co-owner of Lanes Hotel, a 35-strong boutique spa in Somerset, has worked in hospitality for almost half a century. He has never, he says, seen anything quite like this.
“We’re struggling to keep our heads above water,” he told Business Matters. The price of heating oil at the hotel, which sits off the national gas grid, has rocketed from 81p to 143p a litre in a fortnight — a rise of more than 76 per cent at exactly the moment his payroll has been inflated by the national living wage uplift and his business rates bill has risen again.
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