‘It’s not fair’: cafe owners frustrated over exclusion from business rates cut

Ferdinand Geus is proud of the positive, global impact his small specialty coffee business is having.

“Around 3,000 small, family-owned farms in Yemen rely on us – we’ve persuaded many to stop growing khat, the drug, and start growing coffee instead,” said the business manager of Sheba Coffee, which supplies Yemeni coffee beans to independent cafes across the world, including the UK.

“We sell their coffee to cafes across five continents, fuelling employment for an entire chain of people that spans the seas and reaches into local high streets and neighbourhoods around the UK.”

Despite Geus’s enthusiasm, Sheba has been struggling under the weight of increased energy bills and a soaring cost of living. “Coffee is a luxury and people are cutting back,” he said. “To survive at this point in our business journey, we need to expand – to employ more people – but we can’t do that.”

They might have been able, however, had Andy Burnham’s 20% cut to business rates bills embraced cafes and restaurants. But to Geus’s frustration, the targeted package, worth roughly £100m a year, will only support specific high street sectors: pubs, social clubs and live music venues across England.

Taking effect from next April, it will save a typical pub an estimated £1,100 next year, a figure that would have helped Geus’s business “grow and survive”, he said.

“Burnham says he wants to support high streets but independent cafes are more than retail businesses; they are workplaces, meeting places and important parts of their local communities,” he added. “Supporting pubs while excluding cafes risks creating an artificial distinction between businesses facing many of the same commercial pressures.”

Hakan Elbir, founder of the deaf-run Dialogue Cafe, an inclusive social enterprise based at the University of East London that supports deaf and hard of hearing baristas, is also frustrated.

“We’ve been trying to hold down our prices – despite the rise in the cost of coffee beans, which came on top of all the other price hikes we’ve had to absorb – because any increase will push footfall down even further,” he said.

“But this incentive to our competitors is definitely going to affect us in a bad way,” he said. “Our customers will now prefer to go to the pub for their hot drinks because they’ll be able to undercut our prices. It’s not fair.”

Elbir said he is particularly disappointed because, listening to Burnham’s speeches since he became prime minister, he had been anticipating receiving help.

“I feel that he has missed an important point,” he said. “We are helping the government employ disabled people. We’re saving them money but instead of rewarding us, they put more barriers in our way.”

Elbir also argues that Burnham’s exclusive focus on venues that sell alcohol is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of where people want their community hubs to be.

“Our cafe actually does have an alcohol licence but predominantly and increasingly, people prefer to buy coffee or tea,” he said. “If Burnham wants to help communities, he needs to look at what communities really want, rather than what he thinks they want, and focus his support there.”