Back on Monday morning, I started this unexpectedly busy week by covering an email sent out by the Night Time Industries Association on a Sunday night requesting replies to a snap survey by noon on Monday. And it hasn’t taken long for them to put the results out.
The survey, which covered a little over 500 venues, found that a fifth of nightlife businesses are worried they’re going to have to make mass swathes of their workforces redundant – whilst a third fear going out of business in the next month entirely unless the government steps in quickly.
It remains to be seen whether they will – the feedback I’m hearing and seeing about £1billion made available by UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak yesterday is mostly negative. But is the situation really as bad as the Night Time Industries Association claims? To find out, I reached out to the insider.
Regular readers might remember him – he recently told this blog about concerns about the mental health of DJs and disclosed one recently tried to take his own life amidst the pressure he was under. He was more than happy to offer his take on current events.
His take is grim. He says “The poll by the NTIA is a bit small, but it’s a lot closer to the truth than you’d think. I said a while ago that we were f***ed – well, we’re now doubly f***ed. There’s a lot more clubs on the brink of bankruptcy than you’ll ever read about. If there’s another lockdown, I think several will collapse. Things can’t be stretched any further.”.
And the stories of nightclubs being half empty? His reply was “These stories are true, but they’re not the full story. After nightclubs opened up in the summer again, the first six weeks in clubland was mad. I’ve never seen anything like it. But it dropped off big time after that, and it’s got a lot worse in the past two weeks. Mixed messages and people not really understanding the vaccine passport stuff is mostly to blame.”.
He even pinpointed me in the direction of this tweet by Sacha Lord – whom my insider has had a few choice words about in the past. Namely this one…
6k will not even touch the sides for businesses.
— Sacha Lord (@Sacha_Lord) December 21, 2021
Unless the Chancellor comes back with a serious package, it’s the final nail for many small businesses.
It feels very much to me, like the Gov’t are only interested in saving the big corporates.
Completely the wrong approach. pic.twitter.com/iOhP2KMky2
Yep, things are bad…
