THE UK Government has 24 hours to save a million jobs across the country, a hospitality trade group has warned.
UK Hospitality has called for an “immediate package of employment support for businesses” in order to save jobs in pubs, restaurants, bars and hotels as businesses face the prospect of having to make mass redundancies in order to survive.
Chief executive Kate Nicholls said: “Our analysis suggests in excess of one million jobs are now on the line. Job cuts are extraordinarily deep and they are happening now – today and tomorrow, and are snowballing.
“Companies are having to make the very difficult decisions now and with many hospitality and leisure businesses now having to choose to close or massively reduce their operations, there is little chance of saving many jobs without far-reaching help. What the sector urgently needs is a package of support and funding to keep people in employment. This needs to happen now – within 24 hours.”
The trade group said the industry has already shorn between 200,000 and 250,000 jobs in the past two weeks, with the majority of those happening in the past few days.
Nicholls said support from government would help “individual people to preserve their employment status and to avoid swamping the already-strained welfare system”.
“It will also allow companies to keep their teams and be ready to aid the economic recovery when stability returns,” she said.
