Peckham Restaurateurs Say NI Rises Cut Take-Home Pay 25%

Take-home pay at Persepolis, a restaurant and shop in Peckham, south-east London, has fallen 25% since National Insurance rises announced in the 2024 budget took effect — and its owners say the damage is "even worse" than they expected.

Co-owners Jamshid Golshan Ebrahimi and Sally Butcher are pressing the chancellor, ahead of Wednesday's Budget, for three specific fixes: subsidies for apprentices, a cut in employer National Insurance contributions, and VAT relief. They want to hire. They can't afford to.

"I have a thick pile of CVs at the office, and I want to give them all a job, but we can't," Ebrahimi said. He described the measures introduced in the last Budget as a "silent killer" for the hospitality industry.

What does this change for a small operator?

The mechanism is simple input-cost stacking. NI contributions rose. The minimum wage rose. Food costs rose on top of both. Ebrahimi put a number on the last one: "Tomatoes used to cost £3.60 a punnet and now it's £9.50 — these are hidden costs." That's a 164% increase on a single line item, the kind of jump that quietly erodes already-thin restaurant margins.

He says the business survives only because he and his wife work "80 or 90 hours a week" — roughly double a standard full-time schedule, absorbed as unpaid labor that substitutes for hires they can't fund.

Butcher, 65, says they're not outliers. People in hospitality today are "working more than we used to," she said, and even if they wanted to cut back their hours, they can't afford to.

The apprenticeship ask

Ebrahimi framed the policy request in plain terms: "The government is supposed to be looking after us, so do something for us, bring in more apprentices, subsidise some of the wages, some of the VAT, reduce national insurance. There are so many things they can do if there is a will for it."

Head chef Rowlan Clark, 29, backs that from the kitchen. He dropped out of university and calls hospitality "the net that caught his fall." Five years into his role, he argues the sector's traditional role as an accessible entry point into work is shrinking for graduates and non-graduates alike.

"Those opportunities are diminishing," he said. Subsidised apprenticeships, in his view, would lower the effective cost of employing inexperienced staff and push operators to take a chance on young workers.

What business groups want from the Budget

BusinessLDN, which represents around 170 businesses in the capital, is calling for stability first — including a commitment to avoiding tax increases hitting UK firms — plus targeted measures to move young people not in education, employment or training into work by making them cheaper to employ.

CEO John Dickie said: "We need a sense that you can plan two, three, six months ahead." He added that it would benefit the economy to have "young, bright, keen people engaged, learning new skills, earning a wage and paying for themselves rather than relying on benefits."

He said rising NI costs and minimum wage increases have made it harder for businesses to hire younger, inexperienced workers — the exact cohort Persepolis wants to recruit. On AI, Dickie said London businesses could use it to improve training, and argued that investment in London's growing tech sector would create jobs across the capital.

What the Treasury says

An HM Treasury spokesperson said: "We are on the side of businesses," pointing to business rates cuts, a cap on corporation tax, £4.3bn of support to limit bill rises, and employer NICs relief when hiring under-21s and apprentices under 25.

The spokesperson added that "decisions on tax are a matter for the chancellor to set out at fiscal events, rather than routinely commenting on rumour, speculation or proposals."

Chancellor John Healey, in a speech last month, said: "My defining mission as chancellor is growth, good growth in every postcode." Labour's 2024 manifesto pledged not to increase income tax, NI or VAT — the three biggest revenue raisers — leaving Wednesday's statement as the test of whether operators like Persepolis get relief.