Since then, she has seen the business landscape dramatically change • In 2019 Julia’s business had record sales for her business at the beginning of 2020 she visited family in Cambridge. Lockdown was announced and Julia made the choice to move and adapt her business from Fort Augustus down to Cambridge to stay with her parents who were classed as vulnerable. • 3 years on the revenue from Our House of Spice hasn’t recovered, mostly down to a change in Julia’s priorities – the pandemic made Julia re-evaluate her life and decided to scale down her business to look into what she was passionate about. • Julia decided to spend more of her time championing British Asian women • People Like Us – non profit which addresses inequalities amongst black, Asian and ethnic minorities o Ethnic minority professionals more likely to borrow money, move in with family and skip meals due to the cost of living crisis o 41% of ethnic minority pros worried about being made redundant due to rising costs compared to 27% of their white colleagues • The _ Trust – a race equality think tank o August 2022 Katherine Zakret wrote: the impact of the cost of living crisis for ethnic minorities is disproportionate as they are the same people who have already been unequally affected by the pandemic – higher death rates, unemployment and poverty • May 2022 The New Economics foundation reported that black, Asian and other ethnic minorities will experience the average increase in the cost of living 1.6x higher than white people • Whilst we are fighting for gender equality, ethnic minorities are fighting to survive Gillian thanks Julia and passes to Erica Moore Erica Presents: • Erica introduces her business Eteaket which was started in 2008 • Erica has a tearoom in Edinburgh and supplies tea products to other hospitality businesses across the UK and is expanding into offering wellbeing tea courses • Erica states that the hospitality sector is in crisis at the moment • Pre-pandemic, the sector employed some 285,000 people and added £6bn per year to the Scottish economy – Erica suggests the growth of this would be very stagnated at the moment • Almost a third (32%) of hospitality businesses are at risk of failure in the next year. • Even when businesses have managed to increase their turnover the costs of everything are going up by large sums of 20% etc not just 5% • More than 10% (13,037) of the UK's hospitality businesses have permanently closed since the start of the pandemic in March 2020 • The struggles that hospitality businesses are facing include o Cost of resources, supplies going up significantly o Increase in energy prices o Staff costs and staff absences with the rising cost of wages is crippling o For businesses in city centres a lot has changed – majority of people work from home more often than pre-pandemic meaning less traffic and footfall so causes a big drop in trade • Calls to action from Erica o Intervention in energy market o VAT rate cut o Improve recruitment in hospitality o Combat health and wellbeing issues caused by the past few years • We are going to lose lots of small independent businesses if nothing is done – it is shortsighted if we don’t help these businesses Gillian thanks Erica and comments that another aspect that is affecting businesses is that customers are potentially having to cut back on a lot of things for the same reasons.