Cost of boiling water is no joke for cafés that face going under

THERE’S a video doing the rounds that shows Britain’s ex-PM Boris Johnson – to be entirely confused with the UK’s new PM, Doris Johnson – addressing the energy crisis just as efficiently as he addressed every other crisis during his tenure. If you have an old kettle that takes ages to boil, he says, it might cost you £20 replace it, but you’d save £10 a year on your electricity bills. Problem solved.

As with all of Boris’s attempts at empathy with the poor suckers he governed, you get the sense that this line was delivered with an eye to the hilarity it would provoke in his posh, privileged circle – as if Boris, who wouldn’t settle for less than €900-a-roll wallpaper when

re-decorating his Downing Street apartment, knew or even cared the first thing about the price of kettles, or the hardship of a crippling electricity bill.

But the cost of boiling a kettle is far from a laughing matter to the hospitality sector, which is likely to be decimated by the energy price hikes that keep on coming – we’ve had 29 such increases so far this year. The energy companies are determined that their shareholders shouldn’t suffer just because the price of their raw materials has increased, and so households and businesses have already contributed to a 74% rise in Bord Gáis’s profits for the first six months of this year: the war in Ukraine has proved a golden opportunity for greedy providers to fleece the public with absolute impunity.

Cutbacks

Across Europe, angry householders are burning their gas and electricity bills in the streets, and, on social media, people are being urged to cancel their direct-debit payments to their energy providers for fear that they could find their accounts literally emptied by up to 500% increases in fuel costs this winter. For households, the coming months will mean unprecedented privations, swingeing cutbacks, biting economies that will impact on every aspect of daily life. For many small businesses, though, especially the likes of local cafés, pubs and restaurants, the harsh months to come will almost certainly mean closure.

Already, there are reports online of café owners facing tenfold increases in their energy costs, and the outlook is equally bleak for businesses such as nursing homes that have high energy bills even in the best of times. Germany has introduced a windfall tax on energy companies but here, the Independent Energy Suppliers of Ireland has warned that any such tax will have to be passed on to households ‘just to rebalance the business’. And the Government is said to be reluctant to interfere with the market’s ability to set prices, even though that didn’t stop them introducing minimum alcohol pricing – which has, so far, only served to put further pressure on consumers without any appreciable impact on alcohol consumption. The crisis facing the country today is not dissimilar to the one that suddenly confronted us in the spring of 2020, when businesses were forced to close and jobs were lost as another war began, the battle to contain and defeat Covid-19. Through no fault of their own, publicans, restaurateurs, café owners faced economic catastrophe, and so the Government stepped in to ensure they survived.

A price freeze, as well as measures to prevent the energy companies maintaining their eyewatering profit levels by passing any windfall tax on to the consumer have to be part of the solution but the reality is that the price of energy is already too great for many small businesses to absorb. So further steps will have to be taken to help small cafés and pubs weather the tough times ahead.

Hostelry

Harry Potter author JK Rowling famously wrote her phenomenal best-seller in an Edinburgh café because, as a single mother, she couldn’t afford to heat her flat. And if this winter proves to be as bad as it threatens, then there will be lots of hard-pressed people, including the elderly, hoping to pass a few warm hours over a coffee or a pint in a buzzing hostelry, in preference to spending a lonely afternoon shivering in a cold house.

A legacy of Covid has been our embracing of al fresco dining, and being able to add extra tables outdoors must have given café owners a much-needed post-Covid boost.

Outdoor dining has brought colour and vitality to towns and villages – who knew we were Italians at heart? – and it’d be a crying shame if those lively places, and their intrepid owners who survived and flourished after the pandemic, were to be sacrificed to the greed of the energy companies shamelessly profiting from a crisis.