Kate Nicholls on how UKHospitality and industry bodies' effective communications with the government have kept the worst of restrictions away - and what measures they would like to see to support businesses through the winter months
Note: This interview was conducted on Friday, 26th November 2021. Since then, the government has announced new measures to curb the spread of the virus in England, including the mandatory wearing of masks on public transport and in shops.
Yesterday, Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced that mandatory facemasks would not be extended to wider hospitality settings in England - at least for the next three weeks - despite the emergence of the Omnicom variant of the coronavirus.
This follows on the Scottish and Welsh governments' recent decision not to require the use of Covid passports in domestic hospitality settings, as the pressure on businesses would be too high.
We spoke to UKHospitality CEO Kate Nicholls - also the co-chair of the London Tourism Recovery Board and the hospitality sector's Disability Ambassador as appointed by the government - about the industry body's ongoing efforts to contain the effects of restrictions on hospitality.
The organisation hopes the government will be receptive to its campaign to keep Covid passports out of wider hospitality, or, should the science point to them becoming necessary to curb the spread of the virus, be willing to compensate businesses for the additional workforce required to enforce them.
Q - Is it not understandable that people want the safety and reassurance offered by vaccine passports? Would businesses not benefit from their implementation?
A - In England, the policy under plan A is for matters of Covid certification and vaccine passports to be the choice of the venue to be able to implement them if they want to, on a voluntary basis.
You have seen lots of large business events, conferences, theatres and cinemas who's adopted this policy on a voluntary basis.
If that's right for their business activity and for their customer base [...] it's available for people to do on a voluntary basis and that is the right approach, as part of an individual assessment by the venue, as part of its risk assessment.
That applies more widely - if businesses would like to adopt it and feel that is appropriate then the tools are available to them. It's a very different question to 'should it be mandated in those circumstances,' which is what the government's Plan B looks at doing if cases rise and if there are issues of concern around the management of Covid in the economy.
Q - Why, as an industry body, do you think that - as it stands - Covid passports are a bad idea within domestic hospitality settings, from a logistical and moral point of view?
When we're looking at mandatory Covid passports, that has really significant impacts for the business. As they operate, that is at point of entry not at point of sale, so there is a significant cost to businesses for enhanced staff at the door and security to be able to manage that, and we've seen from the mass events in Scotland and in Wales where vaccine passports apply, you are seeing a slowdown of the processing going through.
Because you've got 100 percent checks on customers coming through, you're having to double the number of staff you've got available on the door in order to cope with that, and the cost of doing business significantly increases because you've got to invest in that staffing to be able to man people at the door.
For the larger events in Scotland and Wales and for the nightclubs where that applies, that's a significant increase in costs. If that were to be applied in more domestic hospitality which Scotland and Wales were looking at for pubs bars and restaurants, that would be an even more significant cost, because they don't traditionally have door staff or security staff to be able to man the door and turn customers away.
You would be diverting staff resources there and the cost would significantly increase - we estimated that staffing costs would increase by about 20 percent.
The second aspect of cost to the business is that this doesn't just apply to the customers, this applies to staff, so you need to be doing regular checks on staff, both in terms of vaccine passports of those who are vaccinated.
But because our staff tend to be a younger age group, you're also going to be relying on lateral flow tests because a large proportion of them won't be fully vaccinated - particularly if this means your third jab, you've got differentials that you're looking at there in terms of the age of your employee base.
In England the proposal is that those lateral flow tests would have to be supervised and would have to be done in the venue before you work on a shift or there would have to be a video supervision to make sure that the person doing
