The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Winner of Masterchef facing £73k power bill rise fears for restaurant
Award-winning Fife chef Jamie Scott has branded a £73,000 hike in his electricity bill “a farce”. Jamie, who won Masterchef: The Professionals in 2014, owns The Newport Restaurant in Newport-on-tay.
In Dundee he also operates Wrecking Ball Doughnuts and Hard Grind Coffee, which also has an Arbroath cafe.
He revealed yesterday he is facing a £90,000 annual bill for electricity at The Newport, up from £17,000.
“I feel like we’re quite an energy-efficient company and we always try to be as sustainable as possible. We used to make stocks overnight, but now we do things differently.
“We are very careful as to what’s left on overnight – all we leave on are the fridges and freezers.”
He said the news, delivered over the phone on Tuesday afternoon, was a shock and added that he had prepared for his electricity bills to double, but was astonished to be told they would increase by more than £70,000.
“We were prepared for it to go up by double.
“The standing charge has gone up from 22p to £4.47 and that’s the thing that kills us. It did feel like a bit of a kick. It’s just been allowed to happen.
“If you came to my restaurant, people know it’s £70 for 10 courses – we don’t then present a bill for £500.”
He said the lack of a cap for businesses would be an issue going forward for firms and is working out ways of recouping energy costs. He said the £90,000 he was quoted is just an estimate.
“We feel we’ve been fair with our prices,” he said.
“We’ve not gone up too much. We’re also paying the team the national living wage, but these things all come at a cost.
“Obviously we put some increases in for the utilities, but it’s a tricky one.
“It was the shock of it more than anything.”
Jamie is now looking at an electricity bill across all his businesses running into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
He said: “It’s terrifying. My wife keeps saying if Covid didn’t kill the business, the energy crisis will. We felt like we thrived through Covid and learned to grow.
“The community gave us their support, but now we feel we’ve nobody to turn to. It does feel like we’re getting kicked.
“We already know people aren’t able to eat out as often.
“We know they might not be able to come to the restaurant six times a year and might only come three times. There’s already that pressure, and now this.”
Jamie is also looking at investing in solar panels.
“We were looking at solar panels before Covid, but we were just getting back on our feet.
“I’ve been sent some contacts so we’re liaising with them at the moment to see if they can help.”
It would almost be laughable if it was not so serious. At a stroke, restaurant entrepreneur Jamie Scott is facing a hike of £73,000 to his annual electricity bill for his renowned Newport eatery.
That figure is incredible, but it is not a mistake.
Jamie now has to find the equivalent of three average full-time wages in Scotland for his business to stand still.
Where is that money expected to come from? There is no magic money tree, so can Jamie reasonably pass that cost on to his customers and pay the bills that way?
Or does he look at how he can pare back his operation in some unpalatable way to ensure there is enough flex in the budget to cover the uplift?
There are hard, potentially lifechanging, decisions that will have to be made.
Jamie is far from alone. Other businesses are also feeling the squeeze, just as hard-pressed households up and down the land are scrabbling to find the money to pay to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.
The cost-of-living crisis is most cruel to those already most in need.
It is squeezing people to the point they have nothing left to give up or cut back on.
Now the wheels of business are slowly grinding to a halt as cost headwinds mount up and disposable income ebbs away.
This is not something that individuals or small businesses such as The Newport can sort out alone.
This is a structural problem that requires out-of-the-box thinking and fleet-footedness.
It requires major government intervention to protect people and the companies that will help drive the economy forward in better times.
Sadly, those things seem to be in short supply right now.
Entrepreneurs like Jamie have an incredible knack of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and he and others will, we hope, find a way not only to survive but to thrive.
But help is needed.
That call – both from the public and private sectors – is being made loud and clear and those in positions of power must listen to it and take action.
Sir, – Now that the dust is beginning to settle after the latest round of council elections, it is increasingly puzzling that the Labour Party is opposing forming formal coalitions with the Conservatives or SNP, despite such arrangements existing during the last term.
The election resulted in a total of 27 out of 32 councils with no overall control, with the SNP and Labour each securing a majority in one and independents forming a majority in three.
This nonsensical “no coalition” pledge is most recently being played out in Edinburgh, where it is clear that Labour’s leader on the council wants to continue its partnership with the SNP, but Labour HQ has overruled this.
Labour accuses the SNP of not valuing councils and undermining local democracy, yet in the same breath they clearly do not trust council colleagues to decide what is best for their own areas.
The Labour Party should also have been clearer to voters in its own campaign material that in the vast majority of cases it had no chance of being in administration given the PR electoral system.
Despite making moderate advances at the election the irony is that Labour, which aspires to form the Scottish Government, will inevitably be in administration in considerably fewer councils than previously.