INTERVIEW
UKHOSPITALITY
New leadership for British hoteliers
With Kate Nicholls now head of the newly formed trade association UKHospitality , LEWIS CATCHPOLE sat down with her to find out how the new look body will affect UK hoteliers
Can you start by talking me through your hospitality career and your work at ALMR ? I started at the House of Commons doing a lot around food safety , food hygiene and food labelling back in the early 1990s and some of the things I was writing were reports about the legislation in food colourings and additives in food and I had a lot of food companies and hospitality companies and brewers coming over to lobby me . I was approached by Whitbread to join them and out of politics I moved into hospitality in the strategic affairs department in Whitbread , advising the board on a range of European legislation and UK government relations . So I combined my two passions of hospitality and politics and have been doing that ever since . For the last 20 years I have worked in that sector advising companies and trade associations on how to get the message across to government from hospitality companies of all sizes and shapes , and having been at whitbread I then moved into public affairs agency and some of my clients were licensed retail pubs and hotels - one of them was the ALMR , and I started working with them 16 years ago .
What have been some of your main accomplishments while at ALMR ? While working at the ALMR we have had success in getting the government to think again on business rates and make some changes to how transitional relief they were providing to hospitality business . We had more success in Scotland than in England
KATE NICHOLLS
and Wales . Over the last two budgets in 2017 we managed to get much better transitional relief for supporting businesses and hospitality-specific relief , and we got the government to think again about the taxation of online businesses and how they are picked up in the business rates review . We also secured a commitment to root-and-branch reform which is critical for hospitality business going forward . The other one I would pick out is around the National Living Wage where we have made sure that the government has kept that as being a economically driven decision rather than a political one . We have stopped the rate becoming a political football . The final one I would mention is Brexit - over the last 18 months since the referendum vote we have been meeting on a monthly basis with the government to make them aware of the impact on the sector and that has been reflected in the decisions taken around migration and specifically now around food and regulatory alignment .
So , the merger - can you tell us how it came about and what it means ? It came about following two campaigns that we were working on collaboratively with the BHA - one around the National Living Wage and another around Brexit - so probably about a year ago where the boards of the two organisations that they would work jointly to influence government thinking in those areas . The success in the joint thinking took us so much further forward . The boards then decided that this is something that should be continued and we should look at a way of formalising the collaboration and do it more widely . Then 6-9 months ago the two chairman met and the two boards met and we realised that the best way achieving that was the merger between the two organisations .
We have strong recommendations from the working group making sure that it is a true merger of equals and a balanced representation going forward , and brings together the best of both organisations to have an even more effective voice in the future .
How quickly will this happen ? I think we would like to move very quickly , I think we have strong momentum behind the merger itself and also behind the campaign work we are doing , so we are keen to crack
24 www . hotelowner . co . uk March 2018