Scots hotel firm facing £280k national insurance increase due to 'jobs tax'

Coast and Country Pubs - which runs 10 hotels including the Kings Arms Hotel in Melrose - is paying £280,000 more because the UK government increased employers’ national insurance contributions.

The issue was raised by Conservative MP for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk John Lamont at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday.

Coast and Country Pubs owns 10 pubs and hotels in the Borders, Glasgow, Inverness, Fraserburgh, Thurso and John o’ Groats.

Employer National Insurance contributions (NICs) increased to 15 per cent from 13.8 per cent and the threshold for paying them dropped to £5,000 annually from £9,100 in April last year.

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Mr Lamont told MPs in the House of Commons: “Last week I met my constituents Rob and Lizzie at the Kings Arms Hotel in Melrose which they run as part of a family business of 10 hotels across Scotland.

“They employ over 250 people but their national insurance bill is going up by £280,000 because of Labour’s tax on jobs.

“We need to get Britain working again but this government’s policies are doing the opposite.

“Does the Prime Minister understand the damage that he is doing to our economy?

“And how does he expect businesses like this to survive?”

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Sir Keir did not address the issues facing business and instead used the question as an opportunity to attack the previous Conservative government.

He replied: “The steps we’ve taken have been to repair the damage that was done by the previous government?

“We took those steps and the Spring Statement showed the results of those steps: inflation coming down, interest rates coming down and the economy stabilised.

“I know they don’t understand that because they blew up the economy in the first place.”

Rob Reeley, owner of Coast and Country Pubs, said he had to close one site permanently, while others were shut over winter and less staff have been taken on this year.

He said: “We closed three of our sites for six weeks over over the winter period where we normally wouldn't.

“We've started to restrict food service times. We used to serve food in all of our sites from breakfast all the way through till nine o'clock at night.

“There’s three or four sites which are now not open at all during the day or we’ve restricted food between two and five o'clock.

“Even if we're only saving two or three hours of labour cost in the kitchen, it all adds up. It makes a big difference to us at the end of the day.”

He added: “We've got to be very cautious about price increases, because we understand that things are tough for everyone.

“So there's about there's a fine balance to be had between increasing prices and cutting staff, or cutting staff hours and opening times.

“This time of year last year, we had 35 more employees than we have right now.”