Rachel Reeves and the hospitality jobs bloodbath

The raw numbers tell only part of the story — but they are worrying enough. What the statistics show is the struggling hospitality sector — one of London’s biggest employers — shedding huge numbers of jobs . And the crisis is deepening,

When the Office for National Statistics revealed this month that the national headline rate of unemployment is once again back at five per cent, a deeper dive into the data showed how restaurants , bars and hotels have borne the brunt.

By October the number of payrolled jobs in the sector was down 2.5 per cent in a year, having fallen for 19 consecutive months. Since the election in July last year, about 111,000 hospitality roles have gone — most paying relatively modest salaries. It is almost half the total of 247,000 jobs lost across the economy