Mr. Colin Neill:

I thank the Chair, and again I will try and keep it brief. I am in an office where one has to move to turn on the lights. We are very energy conscious here. It stops one sleeping as well.

Starting with energy, while we are not the biggest energy users per seas individual businesses, as a cost of doing business we are actually the second most impacted. We were open 18 to 24 hours a day, and whether one has one customer or a 100, one is burning light and heat, and there are cooking costs and all of that. Energy is cited as one of the biggest challenges our sector has faced. Hospitality and tourism suffered heavily during the Covid-19 pandemic, and then the cost-of-living and cost-of-doing-business crises have impacted, so we have had three years where one has had to work hard just to break even.

On the point of labour, there are huge labour challenges in Northern Ireland. Yes, we have a substantial number of people economically inactive, and despite repeated government initiatives, that dial has not shifted. Whether that is down to the initiatives not being right, or whatever, I will leave that to someone wiser but we have got to find a way to engage the economically inactive. That said, to grow at a rate we need, we need exterior labour as well. There just are not enough people in Northern Ireland. We hear talk about benefiting from the Windsor Framework. One could not build a big new plant or premises here without the labour to actually run the thing, so it is a huge challenge.

The salary cap was mentioned. The new immigration salary cap is £38,700, which is going to come into effect in the spring and will be imposed by the UK Home Office. The median wage in Great Britain is £35,000 per year, and the median in Northern Ireland is about £32,000, so there is a huge challenge there again. It cuts off another labour source, and that was really important for a lot of our chef and managerial posts. They are important because tourism is much more developed around the world, and bringing in people of other nationalities from other locations and countries brings that experience and expertise that we do not have. We need to infect our own people with that enthusiasm for the industry as well.

Finally, on the all-island economy, correct me if I am wrong but I think Tourism Ireland is one of the few all-Ireland trade bodies that has got really well established on the back of the Good Friday Agreement. I would always be biased and say that with Tourism Ireland, if I was a company and I saw one of my areas had huge potential to double, that is where I would put my money. However, I know it is not as simple a thing as that. Historically, there have been challenges with the UK funding into Tourism Ireland being adequate, and that needs to be corrected. Then we need to make sure that every opportunity, whether that is growth areas in the North or growth areas in the South, is really targeted under that institution. Again, I reiterate what Mr. Roberts said about one huge challenge in Northern Ireland. We have progressively seen that the non-domestic or business rates have continuously been the area from where the Northern Ireland Assembly has sought to get money. It only has one revenue-raising power, which is rates. However, it has gone to such an imbalance now.

I live just on the outside of Larne. Some members might know it; it is a port town on the north coast, or the actual Causeway Coast. If one looks, 62p in the pound is what one pays in business rates. If I compare that to the City of London, it is 52p in the pound, and that is with the extra security and policing levy in London. There is just not the headroom to increase business rates any more. It is getting to the point where nobody can make enough money to pay them.