Soaring UK Inflation May Prompt ‘Permanent Closure’ of London Nightclubs

On Wednesday, the UK’s Office for National Statistics said that the country’s annual inflation in July had accelerated to 10.1% from 9.4% a month earlier, reaching a high unseen since 1982.

London nightclubs may shut down due to soaring inflation and energy bills, which have “pushed consumer confidence to a record low and convinced many people to cut out their non-essential spending”, according to Bloomberg.

The news outlet cited the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) as claiming that it were the nightclubs in the UK capital that helped make Britain a destination for more tourists and pumped £46 billion ($55.4 billion) a year into the national economy ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hans Hess, owner of the Egg London nightclub near the King’s Cross district in London, told Bloomberg that “it’s been tough times” when they closed temporarily during COVID lockdowns in 2020, along with most other London clubs.

“We re-opened a year ago, and now we’re faced with new problems such as inflation,” he pointed out.

Hess said that they are “offering drinks deals, reduced ticket prices and doing competitions, giving tables and free entries away,” adding that at the moment, they “need to hit” their “weekly targets and that’s the only way to do it.”

The Egg London owner was partly echoed by NTIA chief executive Michael Kill, who insisted that the government “cannot continue to understate the escalating crisis.” He warned that “without intervention, businesses who have survived the pandemic, supported by public funding, will face further uncertainty, and in many cases, permanent closure.”

This followed the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reporting earlier this week that UK inflation had risen to 10.1% amid a 40-year high, amid spiraling food and energy prices. Grant Fitzner, chief economist at the ONS, said a “wide range of price rises drove inflation up again this month”. He referred to prices for bread, dairy products, meat and vegetables, which Fitzner said contributed the most to the increase in inflation.

In June, the Bank of England (BoE) predicted that inflation in Britain would hit 13.3% in autumn. In its forecast, the BoE claimed that "the increase in October reflects higher projected household energy prices following a prospective additional large increase in the Ofgem [the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets] price cap."

The Bank blamed the surging inflation on rising global energy prices as well as domestic factors, including “the tight labor market and the pricing strategies of firms”.

In this vein, a recent survey conducted by the University of York revealed that at least 45 million Brits might be in the grip of fuel poverty by January 2022 due to the looming energy price cap increase. Fuel poverty is a term used to describe those households which have to spend more than 10% of their disposable income on home energy in order to maintain an adequate standard of warmth.

The survey was preceded by the consultancy Cornwall Insight suggesting that annual energy bills for Brits might hit £4,200 in January, a considerable increase compared to the group’s previous forecast of £3,615.

Labour’s Shadow Climate Change and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband described the figures as “shocking”, and claimed that they “show the full scale of the national emergency that could unfold unless the Conservative government acts to freeze energy bills”.