I’ve talked about the budget before, but I don’t think I’ve made it clear enough how furious I am about it. Independent businesses like mine are being completely screwed by this government, and the anger is so intense it’s hard to even put into words.
Here’s what I worked out recently, around Business Rate changes….. our rateable value at our hotel in Wrexham currently sits at £87,000, from April 2026 it jumps to £171,000. Basically Double!
In 2025/26 the rates bill was £87,000 x the rateable value multiplier of .568 totalling £49,416 – however we have had a 40% reduction due to the Retail, Leisure & Hospitality (RLH) Rates Relief (2025-26), meaning we have to pay (have been paying) this year £29,649.60. If I based this calculation on our 37 rooms at 80% occupancy, it is £2.74 of every room bill goes to repayment of business rates.
In 2026/27, the rates bill has been revalued to £171,000 however the fabulous government boasts that the Welsh rateable value has dropped to .515 – that now totals a bill of £88,065. They also forgot to mention that there is no Retail, Leisure & Hospitality (RLH) Rates Relief scheme happening in 2026-27 – as everything is back to ‘normal’. Meaning based on our 37 bedrooms at 80% occupancy, the cost will be £8.15 of every room bill goes to the business rates repayment.
So lets think this through – £80 per night – take away 20% VAT, 20% Commission to Booking.com, 10% for Business Rates – we are at less than £40 before we cover the further increased Utilities Bill, averaging circa 10% now, of course our wages – that don’t just cover the cleaner of the bedroom, – it’s the maintenance man, the night porter there for your health and safety, the receptionist to check you in, the management to keep the hotel top notch – that’s before we have anyone on standby to possibly offer you breakfast like a chef and a waitress. Of course other items such as linen, toilet roll / toiletries, tea & coffee making facilities, any form of contribution to wear & tear/replacement of the goods in the room over time, perhaps a uniform and night out for the team, etc, etc – I can assure you if there was a £1 left at the end of all of this, don’t worry they will come and take a further 25p for corporation tax at the very end for good measure.
These new rateable values kick in from 1st April 2026, based on a rental snapshot from April 2024. That alone is laughable. It pretends the world stands still and that a made-up rent reflects your ability to pay. It ignores reality, cashflow, payroll, debt, and the fact that hospitality is one of the most people-heavy, service-heavy, margin-tight industries out there.
It feels like a number has been pulled out of nowhere just to take more money and us entrepreneurs are paying for the privilege. And then someone, somewhere in government, will tell you it’s “fair”, or “everybody has to play their part”. Since Labour walked in, we have only had to pay more and more. You’re sat there with a calculator trying to work out which part of your actual, real life you’re supposed to sacrifice to keep this thing going.
Because those numbers don’t just live on a letter. They land in your bank account. They turn into a bill that has to be paid on top of wages, suppliers, energy, repairs, debt, tax, everything else. It’s not theoretical. It’s: do we hire that extra person? Do we fix that thing that’s breaking? Do we invest in making this business better, or do we feed the black hole that is business rates? And somehow, every time there’s a “change”, that black hole gets bigger, never smaller.
What makes it worse is the way it’s so wrongly hidden. You get the speeches about “supporting the high street”, “backing entrepreneurs”, “helping hospitality”. You see the photos, ministers and Labour MPs pulling pints, wandering around kitchens, talking about how important small business is. Then you open your actual bill, look at your new rateable value, and realise the same people smiling for the cameras have just made it harder for you to survive another year.
This whole thing is built on a fantasy world where demand is stable, costs are flat and we’re all sitting on massive margins we can just “absorb” things with. In reality, everything has gone up. Food, drink, wages, energy, insurance, interest, the lot. Every single part of running a hospitality business is more expensive, more fragile and more stressful than it was a few years ago. But sure, let’s double the base you tax us on and call it “fair” and “progressive”.
And Labour haven’t walked into this and fixed it; they’ve walked into it and pressed the accelerator. They talk about “stability” and “responsibility” while quietly making decisions that just squeeze anything that isn’t a giant corporation with endless pockets. Stability for who? Responsibility to who? Because it’s certainly not to the people actually creating jobs and places and communities.
For places like Hotel Wrexham, this isn’t some little adjustment. It’s the difference between running with enough staff to do the job to a certain standard, or scraping by on a skeleton crew and hoping nothing breaks. It’s the difference between investing in the building, the rooms, the offer, or patching things up with duct tape and hoping guests don’t notice.
It’s the difference between paying yourself a wage that vaguely reflects the risk and the hours or being the only person in the business working for free while everyone else gets to go home at the end of their shift and switch off. And this is what labour is forcing on us.
Businesses are not getting a break. And it will only result in this:
Slower service. Tired staff. Less investment. More closures that get written off as “market forces” or “bad management” instead of what they actually are: a direct result of government decisions made by people who will never have to stand in front of a team and explain that a line on a rates bill means someone’s hours are gone.
So yeah, I’ve “talked about the budget” before. Probably too politely. The truth is, this is obscene. It’s not “everyone doing their bit”. It’s a deliberate choice to squeeze people who already carry more risk than most, and then gaslight them into thinking this is just the cost of being in business. Under this lot, it has gone from bad to worse.
If you take anything from this blog, let it be this: don’t let anyone tell you this is normal, or that it’s just you not managing properly or not being “resilient” enough. The game is being rigged in real time, and people like us are the ones paying for it. Know that everyone is struggling and know that it is not your fault but we are being given a bad hand right now and everyone is undergoing a very hard time.
And if enough of us go under, it won’t just be a few failed businesses, it’ll be empty streets, dead towns and a government wondering where all that business rate money went when there’s nobody left to bleed… taking a real hard look at the spending and decisions made by the public sector is where to fix this problem (something they can’t seem to do) not robbing from those people who actually do sacrifice their own pay for their teams, suppliers and bills.
