The Government’s entrepreneurship adviser says we don’t need more restaurants. She’s wrong and here’s why

When the Government’s entrepreneurship adviser, Alex Depledge, declared that Britain does not “need any more restaurants”, I’ll confess my first reaction was disbelief. My second was to reach for the data. And my third, after reading it, was a conclusion both simple and troubling: she has misidentified where entrepreneurship in this country actually lives and in doing so, is making it harder for it to survive.

Let me start with the basics. Hospitality employs 2.6 million people in the UK, 7.1% of the entire workforce. It generates £69.5 billion in gross value added. It contributes £54 billion in gross tax receipts annually. It is, by any reasonable measure, not a peripheral cottage industry but a cornerstone of the British economy. But here is the figure that should stop the Government’s entrepreneurship adviser in her tracks, one drawn from the House of Commons Library research briefing on hospitality, published in January 2026, which she may not yet have had the opportunity to read: 99.6% of hospitality businesses are SMEs, and 97.7% are small businesses. An adviser appointed to clear the path for more small enterprises might reasonably be expected to know that one of the most entrepreneurially dense sectors in the entire UK economy is the one she has just publicly dismissed.

But the argument I want to make goes beyond the statistics, important as they are. It goes to something more fundamental, something that Depledge, for all her intelligence and commercial experience, appears to have overlooked entirely.

Every business deal that gets done in this country, every investment secured, every partnership formed, every client relationship built, happens somewhere and through human contact. It happens over a coffee, over lunch, over dinner, at a networking event, at a conference, at a drinks reception. The hospitality sector is not separate from the high-growth economy that the Government’s adviser wants to build. It is the connective tissue of it. You cannot scale a clean tech company, close a venture capital round, or sign a manufacturing partnership without, at some point, sitting across a table from someone in a room that a hospitality business has made possible.

I want to give a concrete example of what smart support for hospitality entrepreneurship actually looks like, because it is already happening, just not by government. On our own university campus, we work with Aramark to provide catering for students, staff and events. Given the natural variation in demand across term time, Aramark does something rather clever: it brings in small, independent food truck operators on a rotating basis, giving them seven or eight hours a day of guaranteed footfall, exposure to a large and diverse customer base, and the kind of commercial experience that no business incubator programme can replicate. The result is a richer, more varied food offering for our community, and a genuine launchpad for small hospitality enterprises.