https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tax- ... y-industry Looks like people in the traditional Tory voting areas are either considered more honest, have already been targetted or, more likely, HMRC do not have the avaiable officers in the SE? Interesting that some of our poorest regions are going to be made to pay up, just like the disabled have been most affected by cuts (even though the "most vulnerable" are supposedly to be protected). Maybe it's a plan to destroy the last vestiges of enterprise in these areas so that, when combined with benefits cuts, the areas become truly desolate and thereby ideal for fracking, whether or not their may be be oil there?

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tax- ... y-industry Looks like people in the traditional Tory voting areas are either considered more honest, have already been targetted or, more likely, HMRC do not have the avaiable officers in the SE? Interesting that some of our poorest regions are going to be made to pay up, just like the disabled have been most affected by cuts (even though the "most vulnerable" are supposedly to be protected). Maybe it's a plan to destroy the last vestiges of enterprise in these areas so that, when combined with benefits cuts, the areas become truly desolate and thereby ideal for fracking, whether or not their may be be oil there?

Same old Tories, if you don't vote for them they couldn't give a stuff.

As is normal they pick a few selected regions in trades where they think there is opportunity for undeclaring of taxes, business like restaurants and boarding houses who handle lots of cash payments often without receipts (if not requested by the customer) are clearly going to be targets and so the selected areas are not surprising - if they manage to reach their collection target then no doubt it will be spread to other areas - pure coincidence that its in the north and possibly more to do with available resources.

This also explains to me why a certain hotel local to here has recently ordered its staff to refuse tips from customers with no corresponding uplift in wage rate to compensate, if the customer absolutely insists its to go to a nominated charity, if the employee accepts and doesn't declare it then its a disciplinary matter - the hotel can now declare to HMRC that it has no liability for estimated income tax payments on employee tips.

For me, it would be far better to pay waiting staff a higher wage, put the extra on the menu and state that staff are paid a proper wage, so no gratuities please.
Simpler all round and HMRC can concentrate on the multi-billions that large corporations are avoiding, never mind the piddling millions that hospitality is failing to pay.

Doctors, lawyers and tradesmen have already been hit. It comes as no surprise that they are looking at other professions and industries.

I wonder how many people rent out property but fail to declare the income? If HMRC forced letting agents to disclose details of all their landlords I reckon around 50% of those would not be declaring their rental income.

I'm quite shocked that they don't have to.

Not all landlords have letting agents

I am aware of that, that wasn't what was being discussed though.

Not true. If a hotel worker is given a tip and the worker keeps it, then the hotel has to pay 0 tax. The company only has to ensure tax is paid if the tips go into a tronc and then are distributed by the hotel.

The local hotel took this decision because workers were complaining that tip money was being used to cover the cost of breakages.

We may be talking about a different hotel, although it is close to both our locations, the one I am referring to used to pool all of their tips (in theory) so that they were shared around the departments, and breakages were never part of the equation.

On the matter of tips – if you want to tip staff at a hotel, do it in cash directly and don't add it onto the room bill, even when you fill in the 'gratuity' section on the chit.

Hilton Liverpool doesn't hand those tips on, according to staff there, and I suspect it's not alone in that.

Unless I misunderstand it, the effect of pooling tips is that the staff providing the best service are subsidising the tips for those who are not the best.
Is that not the opposite of what tipping is supposed to be for?

Better by far to pay a proper wage and stop treating staff like servants.

Indeed. I got the impression – and this was from, in effect, three different staff at three different times – that the Hilton Liverpool staff see none of the tips added as a gratuity on forms for adding a bill to the room.

I have tweeted at the hotel about this, but they've not responded, so I assume that as an acknowledgement that this is what happens.



Quite agree.

Mind, apparently in some restaurants, staff can make a fortune in tips.

That would be the case in a perfect world, in reality the issue of whether a person tips or not comes down to whether that person is a "tipper" or not, the staff can give the best possible service but if the customer does not tip or it doesn't even cross their mind (we aren't like America), then they won't get one - and in the hotel that I have knowledge of the vast majority of clients DO NOT tip as a matter of course (no reflection on the hotel which has three AA stars and a 66% TripAdvisor rating - 66% being very good on that site for moaning tw*ts)

T'Other Half spotted a review there once for a cafe/restaurant that we regularly use in Paris (it's superb for people watching).

It was written by a man who had been to the upstairs restaurant with his wife and child. The child, he acknowledged in this 'review', had been standing on chairs etc, but having done nothing himself, he was appalled that one of the staff was quite "rude" about it.

Talk about a lack of self-awareness.

You do misunderstand, pooling tips ensures those who work just as hard back of house get a proportion of the tips.

... and, in others, not.
For example, in 2008, Carluccio's were still using tips to actually top up their staff wages to the minimum wage ... and it was legal !
Whether that has now changed, either at Carluccio's or in law, I don't know, but I seriously doubt it.

Service charges ... there is no universal use of where that money goes and in many (most?) cases it is just a boost to the bill and profits ... and, as you can't go fetch your meal from the kitchen yourself, it's just a shifty Ryanair-style trick in restaurants, if you will.

All tips are supposedly taxable but it must involve guesswork on the part of HMRC to decide just how much is taken in tax.

As long as tipping persists there will be employers who exploit it.
Again, to be fair, surely it's much better and simpler to pay a proper wage.

It was outlawed – [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7533863.stmbecame law in 2009[/url.

I once had a huge argument with a restaurant in Chester (and was asked to leave

) for refusing to pay the "service charge" element of the bill. The bill without the service charge was £220 and they had added 12% on (£26.40) which I told them I wasn't paying. We had been served by 2 young girls who had done a good job so I gave them each £20 in cash as a tip. The restaurant owner still insisted that I had to pay his service charge on top of that, which I told him was nonsense and there is no legal obligation to pay a service charge on any bill. Restaurants trick many customers by implying that the service charge is something they are obliged to pay when there is no legal basis for it.

Fair enough (and thanks for that, I hadn't realised) but it doesn't affect my point about how they should get a fair wage anyway.
If I buy a shirt at M&S the service I get is determined by a system and is not reflected by tipping, so why should it be like that in a restaurant?

My present potted theory is that, in 2013, they really don't actually care whether people vote for them or not, they must know with certainty that they have zero chance of being re-elected yet are doing nothing about it. Instead they seem to be hell-bent on offering protection, advantages and doing cosy deals with big business, carry on as usual with banks, line the pockets of the big insurers, crack on with more crazy PFI schems and "outsourcing", hell they even talk about privatising the courts and the borders etc. Maybe some of them will do rather well out of it with non-exec directorships etc in the near future. Maybe some already have.

Trip Advisor is the bain of every hotelier and restauranteur in the country and yet can make or break their business.

To use the hotel of my inside knowledge they now have pro-active management who reply to most guest comments and the most oft-used phrase is on the lines of "I wish you had mentioned this while you were staying with us", or a more polite version of that - time and again they ask every guest at check out if they have enjoyed their stay and most of them state how much they have enjoyed it, only to then moan like hell when they get home and sit in front of their computer.

This particular hotel has recently appointed a new chef and apparently he is superb and is getting the reviews to match, just looking at some of the comments they've received this week on TA there is one that has marked the hotel down two stars for the simple reason that they didn't have baked beans for breakfast, they then go on to say how they loved the rest of their stay but not having baked beans for breakfast was a two star deal breaker - f'kin idiots



The best I saw though was a couple who complained that the reception staff had been rude and insolent at check out when this couple had tried to make a complaint about their room, unfortunately for them the hotel manager happened to be observing his reception at the time as part of their training duties and his comment on TA to them is priceless, basically the couple were lying through their teeth, hadn't complained at all and had received perfectly courteous service at checkout - in all seriousness the hotels now recognise that there is an element of statutory complaint in order to get a reduction on bills and/or free or heavily discounted re-visits.

Why the fook would you accept a free stay at a hotel you've just slagged off

(but they do)

As I mentioned the other day, 206 of 'our' Parliamentarians have recent or current private financial interests in private healthcare. They got to vote on privatising the NHS.

And that's just one subject.

They probably aren't overly fond of bloggers either, but I do attempt to post from a properly critical perspective.