Two decades ago, I was part of the group that helped shape the Licensing Act 2003. I was the chair of the very first working group, focused on people. It was a landmark piece of legislation for its time, recognising that licensed businesses and the services they provide are important culturally, socially and economically, and central to creating places people want to live, work and visit.

For two decades, it has been the bedrock of our industry. But bedrocks, if left untended, can become millstones. In short, 20 years on, we are back trying to redress the same problems the original Act was trying to fix around the spirit of freedom, deregulation and reform. Our objective now should be to improve good operating practice, promote partnership, showcase proportionate and fair regulation and demonstrate firm but targeted enforcement.

That is why I am immensely proud, and frankly thrilled, to say that this week represents a watershed moment for our sector. After a sustained, several-months-long ‘sprint’ (a new way of making policy and fast-tracking creative ideas to make a difference), whereby I have personally chaired two of three working groups, the government has not only listened to our calls for reform but has committed to actioning all ten of the proposals put forward by the industry-led Licensing Taskforce.

This is not a minor tweak or a cosmetic adjustment. This is a fundamental overhaul – a strategic victory that will unlock potential, drive investment and breathe new light and life into our high streets and town centres.

This success was not accidental. It is the direct result of a focused and relentless effort by UKHospitality, working collaboratively with our partners at Greene King, the British Beer & Pub Association and LIVE Music to demonstrate to government that the very laws designed to enable our sector were, in many cases, stifling its growth. We secured our seat at the table, chaired the working groups and articulated a clear, evidence-based vision for a modern licensing framework. We made the case not just for the good of hospitality, but for the good of the UK economy.

The result? The chancellor will have sight of these powerful, pro-growth recommendations before the autumn Budget. This is a testament to the influence our sector now wields in the corridors of power, and a clear signal of the vital role hospitality plays in the nation’s economic and social fabric. It showcases what we, as an organisation, can deliver for our members: real, tangible change that impacts your bottom line.

I am, personally, immensely proud of three key deliverables that we’ve been working on for some time. First and foremost, the introduction of a new National Licensing Policy Framework is a game-changer. For too long, businesses have been frustrated by the ‘postcode lottery’ of licensing decisions, where interpretations of the law vary wildly from one local authority to the next. This framework will provide clear, consistent direction, rebalancing the system and ensuring that decisions are made with a view to promoting growth and vibrancy, not simply managing risk.

Equally transformative is the commitment to a one-time licensing condition ‘amnesty’. We all know of venues shackled by archaic conditions imposed decades ago – no music on a Tuesday, no entry after 10:30pm, no moving of furniture etc. These relics of a bygone era act as a handbrake on innovation. The amnesty will provide a clean slate, allowing businesses to modernise their licences to reflect their current operating model, free from disproportionate and outdated restrictions.

Beyond these two pillars, the package of reforms addresses the practical, day-to-day frustrations that impede your ability to be agile. Increasing the allowance for temporary event notices (TENs) gives more flexibility to capitalise on national events and local celebrations. The commitment to removing regulatory barriers to using outdoor space – changing from a two-year maximum policy to a two-year minimum – will finally allow you to properly embrace and invest in al fresco hospitality, a proven driver of footfall. And finally, removing the costly and antiquated requirement to advertise in a local newspaper is a long-overdue step into the 21st century.

Collectively, these measures represent the most significant liberalisation of licensing law in a generation. They will cut red tape, reduce costs and empower businesses to innovate, invest and create jobs. Many lessons were learnt working in this accelerated fashion, and it will be interesting to see how the government implements further acts of policy fast-tracking to address issues of planning, high street regeneration and tackling red tape.

Of course, we are not naive. We understand that these reforms are an enabler, not a silver bullet for all the challenges our sector faces. The crushing burden of business rates, punitive employment costs and volatile energy prices remain at the very top of our agenda. This must be the start, not the end, of the government’s support.

But let us be clear: this victory provides a crucial foundation for our recovery. By removing the regulatory straitjacket, the government is handing us the tools to grow. Our job now, at UKHospitality, is to use the momentum from this win to redouble our efforts on those other critical cost pressures. We have demonstrated our ability to effect change, and we will not rest.

For me, this moment feels like coming full circle. To have been there at the birth of the Act, and to now be leading the charge for its renewal, is a profound privilege. It has been a long road, but this week, we have secured a licensing framework that is once again fit for purpose. This is a testament to the power of a unified industry speaking with one powerful voice. Let’s use this new-found freedom to do what we do best: innovate, invest and lead the revitalisation of our communities.

Despite the challenges that hospitality businesses continue to face, the future of the industry is bright, and together, we can ensure that we finally get the opportunity to thrive.

Have you ever succumbed to the “HiPPO” effect? Apparently, it happens in hospitality. A lot. Short for “highest paid person’s opinion”. It’s when decisions are made based on who shouts the loudest, earns the most, or simply feels most strongly about an idea. Sound familiar?

In hospitality, it’s a classic trap. The menu rewrite driven by the managing director’s personal taste. The new venue format launched because “it worked in my last place”. The loyalty scheme tweaked based on one angry tweet. Gut feel, seniority and internal echo chambers have a way of guiding decisions – but they don’t always lead to the right outcomes. Funny that. And when the stakes are high (as they often are in this industry), the cost of getting it wrong can be painful.

Take Butcombe Group, the 120-venue strong operator of pubs and inns across the UK and Channel Islands. Butcombe had every reason to feel confident: award-winning food, passionate teams, a loyal customer base and strong growth. But its chief operating officer, Jayson Perfect, admitted in a recent Hospitality Talks interview I did with him that it was a “a bit of a ‘Jason Perfect thinks it’s great, so it must be’ moment”. So, instead of continuing to plan in a vacuum, the team commissioned a mix of exit interviews and focus groups to better understand how customers experienced the brand, particularly on drinks-led visits.

The research was revealing. While customers loved Butcombe pubs and absolutely raved about the team (some of the strongest team feedback we’ve ever had at KAM), there were clear opportunities to evolve. According to Butcombe’s customers, the drinks offer lacked variety, especially in the no and low category. Some guests weren’t sure whether venues were food or drinks led. And the loyalty scheme wasn’t always top of mind.

The team at Butcombe listened and acted. The no and low offer grew from one to five products, including a new 3.4% West Coast IPA. Brunch and small plates were rolled out across the estate to improve flexibility and appeal at different day parts. Venue layouts and signage were adapted to improve clarity around the customer journey. 

All of this points to a simple truth: decisions based on data and insight are safer, faster and more effective than those made on instinct alone. That doesn’t mean gut feel has no place in hospitality. This is a creative, emotional, people-first industry after all. But gut feel shouldn’t be the only thing guiding growth, investment and innovation.

 

Just look at Wingstop UK, which recently launched a new hot honey glaze flavour (if you haven’t tried it yet, you most definitely should). Instead of relying on internal opinions, it put it to the test with real customers. Blind taste tests revealed the new glaze was a clear winner, giving the business confidence to roll it out across stores. A small, focused investment in insight that de-risked a big commercial decision.

 

For brands expanding into new areas, research and data becomes even more valuable. Professionals at Play discovered that what worked in Manchester didn’t always translate in Birmingham or Nottingham. By understanding local audiences and adapting its messaging, it was able to maintain brand consistency while staying relevant in each new city. It’s a common assumption that customers are the same everywhere, but research helped it build its brand positioning in key regions and avoid costly one-size-fits-all mistakes.

Behaviour, too, doesn’t stand still. After the pandemic, Borough Market suspected that people were using the space differently, but it didn’t guess – it asked. The research showed new patterns in how visitors moved through the space, how long they stayed and what they were looking for. It gave the team confidence to make changes to its long-term strategy and communications.

In every one of these cases, data and insight didn’t replace creativity or leadership. It simply grounded it. It protected businesses from costly missteps and opened up clearer, more customer-focused paths forward. So, next time you find yourself in a meeting, nodding along as a big idea takes shape – one driven by passion, not proof – pause for a second. There might be a HiPPO in the room. And the best way to keep it from leading you off-course? Listen. Ask. And trust what your customers are trying to tell you. Just maybe, they do actually know best.

Petersham Nurseries’ restaurant grew from within the Richmond-based nursery as a café for its green-fingered shoppers, and along with providing top-notch food, it has cultivated destination-venue status from diners enjoying being surrounded by flowers and plants.

 

It has been a similar story at Supawan Thai restaurant in London’s King’s Cross, whose dining room has extended out from a flower shop, which gave a fresh, colourful vibe to the fiery produce delivered onto the plates of its customers.

 

As well as providing a talking-point-worthy backdrop, plants are increasingly finding their way into dining rooms and kitchens for actual use in dishes as a result of the growing trend of using hydroponics and vertical farming. This involves cultivating plants without soil, often with automated systems controlling lighting (LEDs), temperature and humidity in a controlled environment including sealed cabinets.

 

Hydroponics used at great scale in vast vertical farms attracted lots of Silicon Valley money have all pretty much failed, but this has not meant the death of such efficient plant-growing because the technique is being adopted by a growing number of hospitality companies across the sector.

 

These include high-end kitchens such as The Ritz and The Goring Hotel and independent restaurants including Roe and Fallow in London and Elements in Glasgow, along with Kerb at Corner Corner in Canada Water and various foodservice companies such as Compass, BaxterStorey and the Sodexo-owned The Good Eating Company. The latter has introduced vertical farms into venues such as The Orangery Restaurant in the capital.

 

They all have the same underlying reasons for implementing such solutions. Gary Townsend, chef owner of Elements in Glasgow, uses a solution from Evogro and puts it best: “We have cut down our plant wastage by around 75%. We’re not binning half-used trays or guessing what we’ll need. If we’re growing it ourselves, we only grow what we’re going to use. That saves cost, reduces our footprint and keeps the kitchen lean. And of course, there’s the environmental side. Instead of shipping herbs across the country, they grow a few metres from the pass. That’s local sourcing taken to the next level.”

 

Each business must then make the individual decision on whether or not they involve the hydroponic growing as an integral part of their venue, with diners sitting in among the greenery. For Townsend, the fridge-sized cabinet from Evogro sits in his kitchen, whereas at Corner Corner, where the kit is supplied by Harvest London, it is fully visible to diners and visitors. It feeds a variety of herbs and green leafs into the two on-site kitchens that house four operators curated by Kerb – Café by Sireli, Masa Tacos, Chick N Sours and Jou Jou Bites.

 

The plan is to fully engage with visitors and the local community, and so packages are being devised that include cocktails, a tour of the ‘farm’ and dinner using the on-site ingredients. Such engagement is also a crucial aspect of The Orangery Restaurant, whose vertical farm comes from Square Mile Farms. On the ground-floor restaurant is a 15-metre wall of vertically-growing plants that are harvested for workers in the offices above, while in the basement alongside the kitchen sits an impressive farm of 20,000 plants supplying as much as 80kg of green leaves into the restaurant each week.

 

In amid this sea of greenery sits the private dining room that is definitely one up on the Petersham Nurseries experience. But the use of vertical farming should not be seen as one-upmanship among smarter venues because its use is filtering down into the mainstream market.

 

Consider Pizza Pilgrims, where Basil has been an extremely wasteful ingredient for its pizzas in the past. But since the chain began working with Harvest London to supply the fresh ingredient, its order has fallen from six tonnes with its former supplier to only four tonnes with Harvest because of the 30% reduction in waste it now enjoys.

 

With such gains being achieved, we will inevitably see a growing number of brands at all price points within the market dabbling with vertical farms and hydroponics within their supply chains in some way or other, because it will enable them to boost a whole of host of different key performance indicators that ultimately improve margins and deliver a better customer experience.

My two closest locals currently have on draught, respectively, Rothaus Alcohol Free Pils, imported from Germany, and Mash Gang’s 0.5% IPA Glug. The beer list notes that the latter is hopped with Citra and El Dorado to “create a tropical torrent”.

Nab-Labs, as we used to call them back in the 1980s, have certainly come on. Indeed, alongside Glug, the second pub offers about a dozen alcohol free beers in various styles in cans. Among its 20 taps, one is exclusively no and low. Mostly, that’s been Cloudwater’s 0.5% Fresh, which is now, surprisingly, the Manchester brewer’s best-selling brand.

Mash Gang, which makes only alcohol-free beers, brings an edginess as well as a craft ethos to the category that ensures that it sits comfortably with the full-strength range. Order it and you can still feel cool – and you can have a pint.

For a while now, draught has been seen as key to taking low and no beers to the next level. Crucially, it means those choosing to go low can stand among their friends with a pint and feel fully a part of things.

Flip that around, and from the pub or bar’s point of view, they have another way of attracting and holding onto groups of customers – one or more of whose number is increasingly likely to be not drinking or ‘zebra-striping’, switching between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, in the course of a session.

Yet choosing to dedicate a tap to alcohol-free remains a difficult decision for many operators. The British Beer & Pub Association estimates that only 8% of bars offer a no-low on draught.

The understandable fear is that, with a limited number of lines, it won’t sell as well as the beer it’s replacing, and overall volumes will take a hit. It’s an issue that Lucky Saint, an 0.5% lager that’s been making steady progress on draught, is well aware.

“Instinctively, we always felt that if you moved from, say, four full strength lager taps in a venue to three, that wouldn’t be a reason for a customer to walk out – they’d just choose another brand,” says the brewer’s category and insights director Lou Pollitt.

“But we’ve gone one better now and, using Vianet flowmeter data from Oxford Partnerships, looked at draught lager performance in 83 venues before and after listing our brand on tap. Comparing volumes, we found that nine out of ten pints of Lucky Saint are incremental to full strength draught volumes.”

This seems a telling piece of evidence that suggests putting an alcohol-free beer on tap can actually increase sales. It will probably cannibalise the packaged no-lows in the fridge, but it comes back to the importance of draught beer in the social environment of pubs and bars. There’s a sense that it brings people closer together, on top of which, it’s something you don’t generally drink indoors. So, you can see it as leveraging a hospitality unique selling point.

It's also sending out the right signals to a changing consumer. At the well-attended event in London to launch the 2025 Low+No Drinking Differently report from KAM and Lucky Saint a few weeks back, Ben Warren, commercial director of experiential leisure company Professionals at Play, told the audience that “putting alcohol-free beer on draught was a game-changer for us”.

He said: “Because it’s on display, it gives customers confidence, and it demonstrates that we take low and no alcohol seriously.”

That’s important. The Drinking Differently research heaps up a persuasive mountain of evidence to show that, although no and lows are still only a small part of the market, the way people socialise over a drink is changing significantly and permanently.

It’s not a simple matter of switching out of alcohol, and still less about abandoning the pub – people are moderating their consumption through making conscious decisions about what to drink and how much on each occasion. A dynamic, flexible approach, as the report puts it.

In that context, the alcohol-free offer can be key to the way people perceive a venue, and the extent to which it aligns with their evolving values – around what constitutes a healthy lifestyle, for example

Conveniently, the product has improved considerably in recent years – in quality, range and marketing. Older generations might still be swayed by their experience in the Nab-Lab era, when alcohol-free was a distress purchase rather than a positive choice, and those unfortunate enough to be the designated driver had to make do with an inferior drink.

But the latest alcohol-frees evident at my locals are vigorously freeing themselves from stigma and are perceived very differently by a generation that’s willing to taste them, rate them and see them as a credible option on the bar.