KAFFEINE / Arts & Culture, Public Relations, Retail & Property , Travel & Tourism

Kallaway Spearheads Call on Government to Support High Street Businesses.

5 August 2020

Kallaway helped Britain’s retail, hospitality and leisure industries galvanise public, industry and cross political party support, to lobby parliament to provide greater assistance to these important sectors at a critical time.   

Called #RaiseTheBar, the campaign called on government to increase the business rates threshold for the Retail, Hospitality and Leisure Grant from £51,000 to £150,000 to allow almost 55,000 more businesses access to the grant and a better chance of survival. 

Matthew Sims, CEO, Croydon BID and Andrew Taylor, Managing Director of the Cocktail Pub Company co-founded #RaisetheBar, and started to recruit high profile organisations including the UK Hospitality and the Greater London Authority to back their initiative. They then asked Kallaway to turn the collective support into a campaign and drive it forward towards a positive outcome.  

We acted quickly to put in place the campaign strategy, messaging and a clear ask to government.  We secured features across the national press, engaged MPs and guided local businesses on how to lobby their local MPs.   

Our communications campaign helped attract 10,000 people to sign the petition to government and saw 

•        The Mayor of London write to the Chancellor,
•        86 Tory MPs (almost a third of those elected) write to the Chancellor 
•        Dominic Raab raise the issue with the Treasury 
•        Anneliese Dodds, Shadow Chancellor pushed the Chancellor to respond
•        Ed Miliband, Shadow Business Secretary asking Alok Sharma, the Business Secretary, to act. 

Having galvanised the national industry #RaiseTheBar is now working alongside the SOS London campaign to apply joint pressure on Government. We continue to support #RaiseTheBar and are also contributing to SOS London.

Mathew Sims, co-founder of the #RaiseTheBar campaign, said: “In bringing Kallaway on board to direct the campaign we were able to professionally structure our message and allow the #RaiseTheBar campaign to reach millions of people from across the UK at a crucial time. In gaining traction with thousands of businesses, Kallaway supported our need to harness the power of our community in calling for urgent change. As a result and through the direct support of Kallaway, the Government is listening.