Northern Ireland Affairs Committee
2 September 2026
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Northern Ireland Affairs Committee House of Commons
00:03 - 00:32
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee. This is our session on taxation of the hospitality and tourism sectors in Northern Ireland. Welcome to Michael Cadden, Chair of Hospitality Ulster, Selina Horshi, member of Hospitality Ulster, and Adrian Cummins, the Chief Exec of Restaurants Association of Ireland. Anyway, welcome everybody. Michael and Selina, how would you assess the financial health of the hospitality sector in Northern Ireland?
00:32 - 00:59
Speaker 5
So, recently we have seen NISRA stats, and you'll see this in the evidence submitted by Hospitality Ulster, over 900 jobs have been lost in the hospitality industry, which is the largest fall since those records really started to be kept. It shows that what we have is an industry from the outside that can look busy, but the margins have been squeezed so much that it's now on very shaky foundations. So we're operating in increasingly challenging times.
00:59 - 01:07
Speaker 1
But Selina, are hospitality businesses facing different pressures from elsewhere in the UK, and if so, what are they?
01:07 - 02:09
Speaker 4
So, the biggest challenge we have is quite simply our geography leads us to be a border region where we are competing against our sister hospitality organisations in the Republic of Ireland, and we're marketed alongside them. And yet a customer is looking at a price in my hotel, three and a half miles from the border, and a price in Donegal, and what they're seeing is that the price is lower in Donegal. And our costs are roughly equivalent, but our VAT, for example, is significantly different. So for every 100 pounds that I take into my business on accommodation, the equivalent hotel in the Republic taking 100 pounds would make, retain, sorry, 4 pounds and 78 pence more on the VAT alone. Per room that doesn't sound like a lot, but we are a high volume, low margin industry, and that quickly adds up to hundreds of thousands of pounds within a business each year that we simply don't have.
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