UK
Some good, some not so good news from the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement last week – and some that didn’t even hit the bell for any sort of news criterion. LCN asked the Textile Services Association (TSA) CEO David Stevens for his thoughts. “I don’t think there were too many surprises in the Autumn Statement. The big one for our sector is the rise in the living wage and the knock-on effect it then has within laundries’ wage structure,” he said.
“Wages are a massive proportion of our costs, but I think paying it to our staff is a lot better than paying the massive increase in energy costs we have been paying for the past two years with no upside. It is unlikely this type of increase can be absorbed into what is already wafer-thin margins, so it is bound to have an impact on prices,” he said.
“The TSA will be publishing its next Laundry Cost Index in January, but the Autumn Statement changes will show in the index that will be published in April next year. We expect the wage increase to have around a 4% impact on the index. For more information, please visit our website: https://tsa-uk.org/laundry-cost-index/.”
The threat of rising energy costs never goes away. With this in mind the February UK edition of LCN will feature a special Materials Solutions article by Richard Neale of LTC Worldwide dedicated to finding ways of keeping those costs as low as possible.
