Ever since Annabel Beeforth, Jessie Westwood and I co-founded the What About Weddings campaign earlier this year, we’ve been engaging with politicians of all parties to sing the praises of the UK wedding industry and to ask for their help and support.
One big supporter is Lucy Powell MP, Shadow Minister for Small Business and Lucy has spoken up for the sector many times, in the House of Commons and in the Media. We’ve also been speaking to Ed Miliband’s team for some time as Ed, as Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, is a man who is very interested in the plight of the wedding sector and the 400,000 workers to contribute to this £14.7bn industry here in the UK
Today, we coordinated a meeting with Ed and Lucy and were thrilled to invite a number of voices from within the wedding industry to share their experiences and thoughts with the Labour frontbench team. Mark Dawson from Brookfield Barn, photographers Bhavna Barratt and Osman Marfo-Gyasi from Wolf & Co joined us as did venue owner Nusrat Khan and Siobhan Craven-Robins from NAWP.
It was a fantastic meeting with plenty of discussion and points raised. Ed and Lucy both absolutely grasp the situation that the sector is in and the potentially catastrophic impact of any future restrictions. We discussed the diversity of business type and location in the wedding industry, financial support, insurance, and the knock-on impacts for the many women in the sector amongst many other things. Ed and Lucy have promised to write to their Conservative counterparts and continue to support us as best they can. Thank you to Ed and Lucy for their time and to their teams for setting up the meeting.
We can also confirm that there was no chaos whatsoever with Ed Miliband!