In the pandemic, the government gave many concessions to the hospitality industry – however other sectors never managed to obtain a similar VAT reduction or Eat Out to Help Out equivalent, with ours being one of them. That’s why myself and other salon owners set up SOS (Save Our Salons) to campaign for a levelling up in the VAT rate and the adoption of the Irish VAT model (where the threshold is reduced, and services enjoy a lower rate than any VAT due on retail sales). Although we have not yet been successful, we won’t stop campaigning for it!
Although many of our industry’s associations and organisations aligned to represent us to BEIS (the government department set up to look after Our industry has experienced challenges that no other sector has faced, and now we are at a tipping point which could alter the industry forever, writes Hellen Ward our newly named Personal Care sector) during the pandemic, I never felt that these bodies adequately represented us: the VAT paying, PAYE employing salons who are training and educating apprentices – in short, the salon owners who are at the coalface. So, myself, Toby Dicker, Stephen Nurse and Luke Hersheson set up SEA – the Salon Employers Association -and invited Edward Hemmings to join us with his vast knowledge of apprenticeships. The SEA remit became more general as we evolved and realised that, aside from VAT, there are other issues that needed to change.