Hairdressers call for tax reform in ‘save our salons' Westminster protest
Hairdressers gathered in Westminster for a protest calling for tax reform in the Spring Statement to 'save our salons'.
Protesters wore black cutting gowns and uniforms, with many sitting in fold-up chairs while receiving hair and beauty treatments on Monday in Parliament Square.
The British Hair Consortium (BHC) has urged Chancellor Rachel Reeves to address 'structural flaws' in the tax system having a 'disproportionate impact' on the hair and beauty sector.
The group wants VAT on labour costs to be cut from 20% to 10% in the Spring Statement.
The BHC said the industry faces a 93% employment decline by 2030 without reform, with no new apprenticeships by 2027, 'pushing the industry to the brink of collapse'.
It added that a study by CBI Economics found that without intervention, independent salons 'will continue to close, jobs will be lost, and an entire generation of skilled professionals could disappear'.
The BHC said the study showed that the sector is far more labour intensive than most other high street businesses, with limited chances to reclaim VAT cost.
Signs held by protesters on Monday included 'Give Tax the Chop' and 'Cut the VAT to save jobs'.
Discussing the protest, Toby Dicker, co-founder of the BHC, told the PA news agency: 'It was an amazing turnout, 400-plus hairdressers, hair salon owners coming together for the first time to protest about our industry.
'What's next for us is that we're going to continue to forge bringing different business owners together and to create a really positive platform to share what's going on in our industry.
'All we want the Government to understand is that if they don't sit down and talk to us now and understand what's going to happen in the future, then they're going to lose 90,000 employees across our sector and a whole future generation of apprentices.'
Mr Dicker added: 'Our industry has been ignored for years and we're calling on the Government to correct decades of mismanagement.
'Most owners haven't had a pay rise in many years and simply can't consider expanding their business, let alone take on an apprentice.'
Laura Geary, director at Headmasters, one of the UK's biggest salon groups, said: 'The changes from the last Budget have made it very hard for salons to continue to offer the benefits of employment and we will certainly not be able to take on as many apprentices going forward.
'This will kill the future of our industry.'
Denise Thomas, owner of Denise Thomas Hair Salons in Liverpool, said one of the 'biggest challenges' she had faced over the years had been VAT.
Ms Thomas, who has been a salon owner for 25 years, added: 'A growing number of salons now operate with chair renters who don't have to pay VAT, which allows them to keep their prices low and creates an uneven playing field.
'If salons like mine continue to be squeezed, they'll become less and less viable, making it even harder for employers like me to secure a stable future.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Bausch Health (BHC) Jumps 8.5% as Exec Hikes Stake; Subsidiaries Raise Over $3-Billion Fresh Funds
We recently published a list of . In this article, we are going to take a look at where Bausch Health Companies Inc. (NYSE:BHC) stands against other best-performing stocks of Friday. Bausch Health extended its winning streak to a sixth consecutive day on Friday, ending 8.53 percent higher at $5.98 apiece after one of its directors acquired $15 million worth of shares in the company. In a regulatory filing on Thursday, Bausch Health Companies Inc. (NYSE:BHC) said that its director, John Paulson, acquired nearly 2.79 million new shares through his company, Paulson Capital Inc., at a price of $5.05 to $5.47 apiece. A series of pharmaceutical and medical products in a warehouse, displaying the range of products available. No reason was divulged regarding the transaction, but investors may have taken the acquisition as a cue to bargain-hunt on its shares. Paulson's acquisition followed the listed firm's regulatory filing earlier this week that one of its direct subsidiaries and two indirect subsidiaries are planning to raise more than $3 billion in fresh funds through the issuance of a loan facility and revolving credit facility. On Tuesday, the listed firm's direct arm, Bausch + Lomb Corporation, launched a 600-million euro ($693 million) senior notes offering on Tuesday. This was on top of another $3 billion being raised by two indirect subsidiaries through a term B loan facility amounting to $2.2 billion and a revolving credit facility worth $800 million. Bausch Health Companies Inc. (NYSE:BHC) said funds from the fundraising program will be used for the repayment of its direct subsidiary's existing revolving credit facility, refinancing of term loans due 2027, and paying other fees and expenses, as well as general corporate purposes. While we acknowledge the potential of BHC as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an extremely cheap AI stock that is also a major beneficiary of Trump tariffs and onshoring, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock. READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and 30 Best Stocks to Buy Now According to Billionaires. Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Bloomberg
2 hours ago
- Bloomberg
Portugal Aims to Meet Defense Spending Goal of 2% of GDP in 2025
Portugal said it aims to reach a target for investment in defense to represent 2% of gross domestic product in 2025, reaffirming a plan to accelerate spending in the sector. A fifth of the investment will be on goods, infrastructure and equipment, in line with Portugal's commitments as a NATO member, according to the government program handed in to parliament on Saturday. The ruling center-right coalition won an early election on May 18, and Prime Minister Luis Montenegro is now serving a second term.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Labour's insane economic policies are taking us back to the dark 1970s
We have been here before. The crisis that the country faces may be catastrophic but it is not unprecedented. Anyone old enough to remember life in 1970s Britain will recall an almost universal sense of utter hopelessness and resignation. Most people (but not all, as it turned out) seemed to be beyond any thought of constructive rebellion against apparently invincible forces. Decline was not just an alarming possibility: it was inevitable and crushing in its finality. The everyday business of life was not simply encumbered by incompetence and infuriatingly poor services as it is now. It was made virtually impossible: the lights were going out on a regular basis along with facilities like heating and cooking, which relied on electricity; the train service on which commuters depended (no working from home back then) was repeatedly withdrawn sometimes without warning; and essential supplies were obstructed, which caused desperate shortages of goods. It was often observed, with characteristic British irony, that it was like living through the war – only this time the enemy wasn't foreign. You know what happened next. The Thatcher Government broke the death grip of trade union power which had crippled the British economy, not just by new legislation that directly limited the unions' coercive practices but by dismantling the nationalised industries over which they had a monopolistic hold. Along with union hegemony, the suffocating grip of Left-wing councils was also brought down. I recall this particularly vividly because my family's life in the London Borough of Haringey had been turned into a class war nightmare by a vindictive Labour council whose rising star Jeremy Corbyn obligingly closed down the schools in solidarity with the striking caretakers. But the miraculous revolution did not happen overnight. The first attempt to beat the coal miners who were critical to this struggle failed because the deprivation that their prolonged strike caused was too great for the population to bear. It took the Government a year of stockpiling coal in a carefully planned strategy to survive another winter of strikes before the breakthrough came. There was no instant revelation on the political front either. The presentation of what soon became known as Thatcherism, with its transformational view of how wealth was created and distributed ('growing the pie' as opposed to simply dividing up the existing one into more equal pieces), was a major philosophical undertaking. This was no mere electoral strategy. It was a historic shift of paradigmatic social thinking: a systematic argument with the Marxist analysis that had dominated political discourse in its harder or softer forms for a century. It took philosophical thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Nobel Prize-winning economic theorists like Milton Friedman, translated into practical action by an inspirational political adviser like Sir Keith Joseph, to create solutions that no one could have foreseen a generation before. Yes children, that was how it happened all those years ago that Britain emerged from what looked like an inevitable descent into domestic failure and global insignificance. But how can this be relevant now? After all, we have learnt the essential lessons about how to create economic growth and encourage the spread of it through society – haven't we? We know that private enterprise must be allowed to flourish if actual wealth is to increase, and that the state can only spend real money that markets produce if it is not to bankrupt the nation with debt. And, what is more, if the state inhibits or depresses the ability of private entrepreneurialism to flourish, there will be no possibility of it improving living conditions for anyone. Surely we know all this – don't we? The awareness of it must be embedded in the consciousness of every serious politician who aspires to power. (The unserious ones who are so ideologically purblind that they will not accept it are, I genuinely believe, unlikely ever to be more than a disruptive nuisance.) Blairite Labour had to demonstrate that it had been converted to the new truth before it could hope to be re-elected. It staged a ceremonial renunciation of the old dogma with the removal of its commitment to state ownership of the means of production and declared itself enthusiastically committed to capitalist free markets – so long as they were accompanied by 'social fairness' (which was, unfortunately, redistribution by another name). After all that, here we are. A new Old Labour Government is now restoring the suffocating employment rights which make the dynamism and flexibility of entrepreneurial business impossibly difficult. It promises enormous amounts of money that don't exist and cannot be produced, because of the restrictions it has put on private enterprise, to public services like the NHS designed on the old monopolistic model. It caves in, without a struggle, to the demands of every public sector union for all the world as if the 1980s had never happened. What is at the heart of this? To understand such retrograde thinking, you must listen to the rhetoric in which it is expressed. The Prime Minister and his hapless Chancellor speak of 'working people' as a homogeneous class whose communities are as conformist and predictable in their attitudes and loyalties as they were 50 years or more ago. Their lives are seen as inextricably bound up (and limited by) a single local industry which must be renewed or replaced by another industry or by a technological revolution into which the population can be inducted. There appears to be no understanding that what used to be a solid, passive working class which wanted nothing more than safe jobs for itself and its progeny was awakened by the 1980s to the possibility of social mobility. The working people to whom Labour is offering its expensive beneficence may now quite possibly be inclined to start up their own ventures and move on. Pouring government money into regional capital projects will mean taxing their new enterprises into the grave. The revelation of the Blair years was that there were lots of working (class) people who did not welcome the traditional, patronising Labour message. They may still be a minority, these brave individualists, but they are the future and they will not be ignored. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
