Why the Rise in 18-21 Minimum Wage is Misguided

by Alastair Scott | Jan 2, 2026 | Thought Leadership

I have spent a bit of time looking at minimum wage rates across different countries of the world and trying to get a deeper understanding of the purpose and effect of them. It is fascinating.

If we look at the core minimum wage for those aged 21 and over, the government has always aimed for it to be two-thirds of the median wage in the country. According to some research (although not all), this target has already been achieved, which is why the government is now trying to grow the core minimum wage in line with national wage growth.

At least this means the core minimum wage should now grow only in line with wage inflation. The target of two-thirds of median wages is among the highest in the world – only Mexico sets a higher benchmark.

Economic research has long suggested that the effect of minimum wage on unemployment is low, but increasingly, studies show while this holds true in the short term, it doesn’t in the long term. No surprise there – in the short term, we have to carry on as we are, but in the long term, we will find better ways to run our businesses and shed staff.

Another proven effect of the minimum wage is that it drives inflation – and that inflation hits the very people it is intended to help the hardest of all consumer groups, because it affects the goods they buy more than anyone else. As a result, the increases in the minimum wage produce no economic benefit for those people. The government could, and should, lower the target two-thirds of median wages to 60% and let the rate drift upwards more slowly – it would help everyone.

The government, now that it has hit the target for over-21s, is aggressively pursuing growth in the 18-21 rate so that this cohort have the same wage rates and standards of living as their elders. While this is admirable, it is somewhat academic. It only works if you have a job. If you don’t have a job, then the rate is irrelevant.

Surely the government’s most important objective should be getting more young people into work. With almost one million 16 to 24-year-olds not in employment, education or training (NEETs), we face an even bigger and more worrying challenge. Our NEET rate has risen by 6% year-on-year and is now higher than both the US and Europe.

That must be the priority. If young people don’t learn to work at that age, they may never learn – and there is a serious risk that these million young people go through life without ever working. The UK cannot afford that, and it’s not good for those individuals who suffer as a result.

Hospitality is one of the key industries helping young people take their first steps into the workplace. By my calculations, we employ around 5% of the country’s 16 to 24-year-olds. When the government damages our industry, it also damages the prospects of countless young people trying to get that crucial first foothold on the working ladder. And as supermarkets move to cashless tills and the high street continues to contract, where else will young people learn their essential life skills?

In truth, the only reason the minimum wage is so politically acceptable is that it shifts the cost of supporting people on to employers rather than the government. If the government had to pay the difference, I’m sure it would be far less enthusiastic. The average age for leaving home in the UK is now 25, with more than half of 21-year-olds still living with their parents – so the economic need is not as pressing as some suggest.

So come on, government. Stop driving inflation by continually raising the minimum wage and give young people a real chance to get a job and start climbing the employment ladder. Make youth employment a primary objective and recognise that increasing the minimum wage isn’t helping – nor is making the hospitality industry suffer even more.

Alastair Scott is chief executive of S4labour and owner of Malvern Inns

Admin and Prep

by Alastair Scott | Dec 15, 2025 | Thought Leadership

What do we call all the tasks that we have to do as a business that are outside of service? Non-service tasks? Fixed tasks? At S4labour, we call them admin (management tasks) and prep (getting ready, either front of house or back of house). But what are these tasks, when should we do them and how much time do they take? Let’s take each in turn.

There are a few examples I can use here to highlight the challenge of even defining the tasks. Do we treat cutlery polishing as prep (for the next day), or is it a task to be done during service? What about stacking glass or the dishwasher? Some days, you are better to run short and do these tasks after service, but on other days, they might need to be in-service tasks – either because you need the teapots or because there isn’t the space to stack the dirties.

So, we will all have different versions of what we might call prep tasks, some of which will be service tasks and included within the deployment graphs, and some of which aren’t.

I think kitchen prep will have a more uniform definition – that is anything that needs to be done to be ready for service. But even then, the devil is in the detail. Let’s take our traditional Sunday roast. Most of the work – cooking the potatoes or making the gravy – is a prep task, but we might classify it as a service task. Once the potatoes are in the tray, the workload for service is low as they just need to go in the oven and get shaken occasionally to brown evenly all over. The skill is in putting the potatoes in the oven at the right time to come out and get used fast enough not to go soft. And the gravy is hopefully just bubbling on the hob, low enough so it doesn’t catch on the bottom, but ready to be ladled onto the plate or into the jug.

So much of a Sunday lunch moves from substantially service to substantially prep – I don’t know anyone who doesn’t do their Yorkshires ahead of service. Even most of a burger might be prep – with the tomato, lettuce, cheese and gherkin all ready to go, and with only assembly and grilling required during service.

Once the tasks are defined, when should we do them? We have developed a successful methodology of slack tasks and fixed tasks, trying to split each into a task that can be done when we are quiet, rather than someone being given specific hours to cover it. Once we understand how team capability is measured, we also understand that there is in-built slack.

I asked one of our consultants what proportion of tasks should be slack, and his answer was all of them! I like the intent, but I still think line cleaning, pre-opening and a few others are fixed tasks, even if we can move some of them to the middle of the day or the middle of service.

Once you have decided what the tasks are, and whether they are fixed or slack, you need to decide how long they take. If you sell 1,000 burgers a day, it is probably worth measuring how long it takes to get the tomato from the packet to the service line. I once did some work for an airport where laying the bacon on the trays to get cooked was a four-hour job every day. And, if we go back to front of house, how long it takes to do recruitment every week is a difficult call but still needs an estimate.

But the most important and difficult decision is deciding when to do them. Are they a slack task, to be done when there is a quiet time during service, or a fixed task, as a designated activity with a time set against it? It is easier for the team to create fixed tasks (please come in early to look at all the emails), than create a slack task (please go on the bar in the afternoon and do your emails at the same time).

And this is the challenge that we can’t ignore; fixed tasks are damaging our industry. We are at the point now where because the cost of labour is so high that we can’t ignore all these small, difficult but important changes that together make a massive difference to our businesses. So, take the first step.

Alastair Scott is chief executive of S4labour and owner of Malvern Inns

Creating Amazing Management Performance

by Alastair Scott | Nov 14, 2025 | Thought Leadership

Sometimes we pin business performance all on the manager. Of course, the manager is the leader of their business unit – they set the tone, hire the people, and drive the business forward. They decide on all the activities of the business and make the difference. True? Not completely, in my view. 

The problem with this argument is that if a manager works five days a week, they might only run five shifts. But in most businesses, there are 14 shifts across the week, so a manager could only be running a third of them. The other two-thirds are run by assistant managers and team leaders – people who are just as critical to the day-to-day running of the operation and in the service levels, the team engagement, and the efficiency of the business. 

The more admin-heavy a business is, the more the proportion of the business a manager sees reduces. The more the business uses fixed tasks rather than slack tasks, the more this reduces. So increasingly, the face of the business, and the shift leadership, is down to team leaders and assistants – the management team, rather than the manager. These are the people who interact with guests, make decisions in real time, and shape the experience on the ground. 

Of course, the manager appoints these people and drives them to perform just as well when they’re not there. But therein lies the challenge. It’s one thing to lead when you’re present – it’s another to lead through others when you’re not. 

I was in my own business last Sunday when the manager was about to leave at the end of a busy day for him. His challenge, as he left, was to motivate and energise a tired team to keep up service levels through the Sunday evening, get all the slack tasks done, get the team out efficiently at the end of the night, and leave the business set for success the next day. That’s a tall order, especially when energy is low and the finish line is in sight. 

We all know how often this fails to happen. Sunday has traditionally been the graveyard shift of the industry. If we did trade visits, we should really do them on a Sunday night – that would tell us what our businesses are really like. It’s easy to look polished on a Friday night when everyone’s switched on. Sunday night is where the cracks show. 

My point is that every shift leader is a vital part of the guest experience. We should think less about the manager and more about the management team – including every person in the business who leads a shift and is the leader in their business at that time. In our sites, that’s about eight different people: several who open the business, several who close, and the key team of senior managers in the middle who run the bulk of the busy shifts. Each of them plays a distinct role in shaping the guest experience and the operational success of the business. 

But to create great performance as a business, each of those people must care as much about the customer as the next manager. They must know how to do slack tasks while delivering to the guest. They must be really efficient and have great restaurant eyes. I think that’s a pretty hard task to do. 

When did you last train your team to do this? When did you last observe the “walking and chewing gum” challenge of opening and serving or, even harder, closing and serving?  

I’ve recently been frustrated with how our teams leave the business, and I’ve asked a manager to do the close with the team to make sure we do this really well. The underlying message being that we both agree it hasn’t been done as well as we’d hoped. Some people are brilliant when they’re being managed, but less good when they’re trying to motivate themselves. I think too often we let these people open and close. Of course, some are brilliant in those circumstances. But do we think about this as we decide who should open or close? 

My thesis here is that we should talk less about manager performance and more about management performance – bringing up the weakest area of the business and making it better. 

And maybe I need to go and see my own sites more on a Sunday evening, just as I’m winding down. Are you going to be comfortable or correct, as a previous boss of mine used to say. 

Deployment

by Alastair Scott | Nov 14, 2025 | Thought Leadership

Deployment is a word that has been bandied around the hospitality industry for a long time. At S4, we invented it. But what does it really mean, what are we trying to achieve, and how do we become great at it? 

In essence, all we are ever trying to do in hospitality is match supply and demand. Too many staff standing around is wasted cost and wasted money. Too few staff, and you deliver a poor guest experience – leading to comped meals, lost sales, and, at worst, unhappy guests who tell others and never return. There are only so many jobs the team can do to fill the time if you aren’t busy. 

That’s why we, and others, pull sales data, forecast sales, and then create a sales profile to write a rota against. In many businesses, you see two daily peaks – lunch and evening – when people want to eat or drink. Our job is to have enough staff when it’s busy, and not too many when it’s quiet. Of course, there are barriers: shift lengths, minimum hours, staff availability, and skill levels. And it’s not just about matching supply and demand within a day – it’s also about matching the total number of staff we have at different times of year. It’s easy to produce the perfect rota for Christmas week, but where are the staff? 

But deployment is way more than just having the right number of people, it is then about using them in the right way. Over the weekend, I visited a farm shop that had clearly done a brilliant job attracting customers. But as we finally got our coffee after the excruciatingly cold pumpkin making, it was fascinating to watch. There were queues out of the door but loads of empty tables. When you watched the staff, they had plenty of people, but too many of the people were neither trained nor managed. The coffee and cake line was riddled with bottlenecks. Half the floor staff were wandering around doing their best to look busy, but actually, were doing nothing. The managers were working very hard but ignoring the people wandering around. Perhaps they didn’t have time to train them, perhaps they didn’t want to, or perhaps they thought it quicker to do the job themselves. 

Deployment is about having the right number of trained team, with the right roles and the right objectives for that role. A well-motivated, energised team member is infinitely more valuable than a poorly energised team member. Without this, as I witnessed on Saturday, chaos ensues. 

So, the hierarchy of deployment is simple: 

• The right number of people at the right time 

• The right skills for the shift 

• The right brief of responsibilities 

• The right management on the shift 

If any one of these is missing, the shift won’t perform as it should. And we all know the circularity of the difference a good manager, a well-trained person, and a well-structured shift makes. As the cost of staff goes up, the effort and energy we all need to put into training, shift management, shift briefing and the right number based on all the above factors can make a significant difference to the shift. I used to say that running at 25% slack was a good job. The truth is that if you invest in all the above skills, you get the number down to nearer 15%, and that makes a massive difference to the P&L.  

And the reality is, we have no choice. With financial pressures mounting, deployment is no longer optional. It’s a commercial necessity. 

Clarkson’s Farm

by Alastair Scott | Oct 31, 2025 | Thought Leadership

I have recently, and somewhat belatedly, finished watching Clarkson’s Farm 4, where Jeremy buys his pub. It was an interesting experience for me. Where I have previously found all of his farming shenanigans funny, I was a bit more frustrated at the poor decision-making opening a pub. Perhaps I now understand how the farmers feel. I hope the advice was for TV appeal rather than thinking it might work!

One item really struck me though, which was a little piece Jeremy did on what happens to a village if it loses its pub, and what is left of the village when that happens. His argument was that the village is little more than a dormitory, with no heart and soul, once the pub disappears. It didn’t escape me that while he was making that argument, he was also opening what looked very much like a roadside pub, one that would inevitably draw trade away from the local villages. Sure, the village might still retain some sense of community. It could have a shop (though I’m not entirely convinced that counts, if I’m honest).

But a club, a community centre – somewhere people can actually come together, that really does matter. In our two villages where we operate, one village has a cricket club and a shop. The pub competes with the cricket club as a community hub, and it is great that the two co-exist together.

In the other village, we are the only things left. No shop and no community centre. And the neighbouring two villages have nothing at all. We are their community, and as a result, the three villages now see themselves as a group of villages rather than separate ones.

The village Christmas and Summer parties all happen in the pub, and typically we have a good 100+ attending the events, which have slowly grown over the years. If we believe in community, then we need village pubs to survive. It would be relatively easy to give them support. Exemption from business rates if you are the only pub in the village would make easy sense. A grant if you are the only pub in the village would go further.

But just as important is planning and usage. As we move gently away from alcohol more and more, we are embracing the coffee occasion. Pubs need to become coffee shops so that those who want to meet have a place and a space that works for them.

One of my most depressing drives is across the A66, which joins the A1 to the M6 (you southerners probably won’t have heard of it). I am consistently upset by how busy the farm and coffee shops are, and how quiet the pubs are. The pubs along the strip need to figure out how to make themselves attractive to this market and deliver an offer that works.

How we do this is not easy. When we took on one of our pubs, we built a large extension at the back which not only added loads of covers but joined up a disused barn. We made the mistake of not branding it as a separate coffee venue.

As it happens, since Covid we have repurposed it as a wedding venue and are now building a decent wedding business. We’ve renamed it the Orangery and are now trying to work through how to brand it effectively as both a wedding venue and a coffee shop. Lots of fun.

I once went into a pub in the South that had a small coffee shop next door, run and owned together. I was fascinated watching customers come into the coffee shop who would never have gone into a pub, look around for the best seat, and then wander through to the pub because they preferred the seating. A great lesson in kerb appeal for me.

But of course, if you have a coffee shop and a bar then the danger is that you need two staff to open, and if you are not careful you have immediately lost any profitability you added. So how to work the model, and leave one half or your business unmanned, is a real skill, but an important one to learn.

So, while Jeremy Clarkson might only be seen in the pub drinking a pint, I think the market for coffee is an important one which we need to find a solution for in a fair proportion of our non-city-centre industry. As well, of course, as the government doing what they can for the community as well.

Alastair Scott is CEO of S4labour and owner of Malvern Inns.