For the better part of a century, the fish and chip shop has been the most reliable barometer of British high-street health. When the chippies are thriving, the parade is alive. When they are boarded up, it is rarely a sector-specific problem. Right now, according to one of the trade’s most experienced operators, the chippies are battening down the hatches at precisely the moment Westminster should be helping them grow.
That is the verdict of Danny Hennesy, a three-decade veteran of the trade and owner of Mandens, the UK’s leading broker for buying and selling fish and chip shops. His warning is blunt: ministers are quietly squandering an opportunity to back one of Britain’s most resilient SME sectors at the very moment buyer appetite is at its highest in years.
“There has never been more interest in the sector, but it’s getting harder to run these businesses,” Hennesy told Business Matters.
That interest is visible in the listings. There are currently 338 fish and chip shops on the market across the UK via BusinessesForSale.com, pointing both to a maturing generation of owner-operators preparing to step back and a sizeable cohort of would-be entrepreneurs eyeing the trade as their escape route from corporate life. Whether those deals translate into thriving, reinvested businesses depends almost entirely on the trading conditions the next owners inherit.
The arithmetic of the fish and chip trade has always been unforgiving, but the past 18 months have stretched even the most well-run shops. The industry generates an estimated £1.2 billion a year and serves hundreds of millions of portions annually through a network represented by the National Federation of Fish Friers. Yet operators are being hit from every direction at once.
April’s increase in employer National Insurance Contributions, rising from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent and biting from a far lower secondary threshold, has hammered margins in a sector where staffing is the second-largest line cost after raw materials. Business Matters has previously reported that employers’ NIC bills have overshot Treasury forecasts by £28 billion, with hospitality among the hardest-hit sectors.
Energy bills remain stubbornly high. And the price of the white fish that defines the menu, cod and haddock, is being pushed up again by tensions in the Middle East. Reuters and others have documented how fishing fleet diesel costs have doubled on some routes, with the conflict feeding directly into the price of a Friday-night supper.
“Fish and chips is one of the most resilient food sectors in the UK,” Hennesy said. “It’s part of our DNA, when times are tough, people still come back to it because it’s familiar, affordable and reliable. But costs are rising from every angle, energy, raw materials, staffing, and global events are now feeding directly into the price of running a shop. That’s stopping owners from investing and growing.”
The behavioural shift Hennesy describes is the issue ministers should care most about. Operators who would normally be refurbishing, taking on second sites or upgrading energy-hungry fryers are instead conserving cash. That caution echoes wider sector data: Business Matters has reported that the hospitality tax raid is now forcing some pubs and restaurants to shut one day a week simply to protect margins.
“We should be seeing growth, instead, people are just trying to hold on,” Hennesy said. “Without support, more shops will close, and that would be a real loss to the high street.”
The loss would not just be sentimental. Fish and chip shops are anchor tenants in thousands of secondary parades that no national chain will ever colonise. When a chippie shuts, the footfall it generates for the newsagent two doors down goes with it, a dynamic that helps explain why high street closures are projected to accelerate sharply as the business-rates relief regime tightens.
For all the pressure, the underlying economics remain attractive, which is precisely why buyer demand has not collapsed. Well-run shops can deliver margins of around 28 per cent. Many turn over £8,000 to £10,000 a week. Top-performing sites push past £15,000, and a handful of marquee chippies clear more than £1 million a year.
Andrew Markou, chief executive and co-founder of BusinessesForSale.com, says that profile is exactly what is keeping mid-career career-changers in the market.
“In uncertain times, people look for businesses that offer stability and steady demand, and fish and chip shops are a classic example,” he said. “The demand is there. The question is whether the wider environment allows the sector to grow, or simply forces it to stand still.”
Hennesy’s frustration is not that the sector lacks resilience. It is that resilience is being mistaken for a reason to do nothing. He wants ministers to recognise that targeted relief, on energy, on the NIC threshold for hospitality SMEs, on business rates for independents, would unlock investment that is currently being deferred.
“This industry has survived everything, recessions, rising costs, changing habits. It will survive this too,” he said. “But with the right backing, it could do far more than just survive, it could lead growth in the fast food sector.”
For now, the chippies remain open, the queues remain steady and the national dish remains, as it always has, a low-cost ritual that outlasts almost everything thrown at it. The question for the Treasury is whether it is content to let one of Britain’s most reliable SME success stories merely endure — or whether, with a few well-aimed measures, it is willing to let it grow.