Alan Roper: 'wage and tax policy has stripped 12.6m out of our profits'

""I'm not against the minimum wage," he insists, in the office above one of his flagship centres. "But you have to recognise that prior to Labour, it was the Conservatives who increased it by ten per cent for two years in succession. Then Labour came in with another 6.7 per cent, plus the 3.5 per cent employers' NI rise. That is a major hit. I don't know anyone who has not seen a pub go under recently because of these costs. Sometimes I wonder if politicians realise the level of impact this has.""

""It is not just the people on the minimum wage. The colleagues who were earning a pound or one-fifty above it, as a good employer, I chose to maintain that gap. When their pay moved up, the department managers' salaries moved up. That is where the 12.6 million comes from. I wish it had happened over eight years; instead, it happened in three.""

""The £12.6m figure, he is at pains to stress, is not back-of-an-envelope. Blue Diamond benchmarks profit per employee across the group and Roper can trace the number precisely.""

""The consequence has been a quietly ruthless review of full-time equivalent hours, first across the garden retail estate and now in the restaurants. 'We benchmarked the most efficient centres against the rest and got everybody working on the same page in terms of hours recru'""

Alan Roper, managing director of Blue Diamond, links recent minimum wage rises and higher employers’ national insurance costs to a £12.6m reduction in group profits. He says the figure is calculated using profit-per-employee benchmarks and reflects employer decisions to preserve pay gaps above the minimum wage. Roper argues that maintaining higher pay differentials caused additional salary increases for managers when lower-paid workers’ wages rose. He describes the impact as significant for businesses, including closures he associates with these costs. The response includes a review of full-time equivalent hours across garden centres and restaurants, aligning staffing hours with the most efficient centres.

Read at Business Matters