Good morning. I'm Alison Brittain, and I'd like to welcome you to Whitbread's financial year 2022 half 1 interim results presentation. Today's presentation will take place by remote webcast, followed by a live question and answer session at 9:15 A.M., where Nicholas Cadbury and I will be delighted to answer your questions. Details of how to join us can be found on our website. Turning to our agenda this morning, I'll start by taking you through our Half 1 operating and business update, and then I'll hand over to Nicholas, who will talk you through our financial performance for the first half of the year. Premier Inn's performance in the first half of the year was very strong, with recovery and demand ahead of our expectations, and we outperformed the market in the U.K. by some distance.
Despite the fact that there is still uncertainty regarding the evolution of the pandemic during the winter period, we are very confident about our ability to fully recover and to grow and create value. With the momentum we've generated, there's now the potential to see a sustained recovery in RevPAR run rates to pre-COVID levels in 2022, which is earlier than we'd anticipated at the full year results last April. Our expansion continues in Germany, and we now have a platform of 30 open hotels and a committed pipeline of a further 43 hotels with positive trends in our open hotels in August and September. Our very high levels of demand have, however, contributed to what is currently a challenging operating environment, alongside well-publicized market-wide supply chain issues and a tightening of the labor supply in the hospitality sector.
We believe that we are better placed than most to deal with these challenges, and we'll take firm action to ensure that our competitive advantage is maintained, and I'll cover this in more detail later. Our strong balance sheet sets us clearly apart from our competitor set and provides us with the flexibility to invest in our proposition, our commercial initiatives, and in unit growth, all of which underpin our market share gains at a time when others are constrained and competitor supply is likely to contract. Our Force for Good program remains at the center of everything we do. We're extending our ambitious commitments to operate responsibly and sustainably. This slide shows how our recovery built through the first half of the year and the overall strength of that recovery.
In the U.K., only essential business days were permitted from the start of the first half up till the 17th of May. During that period, we saw resilient business demand from tradespeople with occupancy levels reaching 40% in April. Overnight leisure stays were permitted from the 17th of May, and subsequent leisure demand was very strong across the majority of this date. Occupancy levels grew to over 80%, and total accommodation sales were ahead of pre-COVID levels in August and September. In Germany, we saw a similar story with occupancy quickly building, albeit from a much lower base, as some government restrictions were lifted in May.
Unlike the U.K., capacity restrictions on business and leisure events and the need to demonstrate proof of vaccination or negative tests for social events and hotel stays remained in place throughout the first half, and they acted as a market-wide drag on demand. Despite these restrictions, our occupancy levels reached over 60% in August and September. This slide sets out the magnitude of our outperformance in the U.K. versus the mid-scale and economy market throughout the half, averaging at 12.3 percentage points outperformance and growing our share of the total U.K. hotel market by 4 percentage points to 11.3%. This outperformance is clear, and it's driven by our scale, strong brand, direct distribution, and leading customer proposition. Our outperformance has continued into quarter three, with total sales over 14 percentage points ahead of the market.
While we materially outperform the mid-scale and economy market, that market itself is materially outperforming the rest of the hotel market. While we expect that gap to lessen as more upscale hotels reopen, this has given us a significant head start in our recovery. The map on the left-hand side of this slide visually shows the strength of demand across the estate in the summer. As you can see, occupancy levels in July and August were very high across the majority of our estate. Our flexible commercial model enabled us to successfully deploy different pricing strategies across the estate. In an area of very high demand, for instance, in Cornwall, Devon, and the Channel Islands, we priced high and outperformed the market on average room rate.
In areas of lower initial demand, such as metropolitan areas, including the example we use here of Glasgow, we implemented an occupancy-led pricing strategy. We priced low initially, helping build demand before increasing prices as booked occupancy built, leading to far higher occupancy levels and RevPAR than the market. This pricing flexibility allows us to adjust to varying levels of demand, remain competitive, and win market share. At our full year results presentation in April, we set out what we think are the key drivers of our sales recovery to pre-COVID levels. We revisit that analysis here with the benefit of another six months trading. As I've already stated, leisure demand returned very strongly, well ahead of expectations.
With the removal of restrictions on leisure events, there are reasons to feel very optimistic about the sustained recovery of leisure demand. Tradespeople business demand, which is around 25% of our revenues, has been resilient throughout the crisis, and that remained the case through the first half. We've seen office worker business demand, which is also around 25% of our revenues, begin to return as we move through September and October as people begin to come back to their places of work. International inbound travel, which represents around 10% of our revenues, has shown some signs of recovery but still remains at very low levels and demand is not expected to return in earnest until next year. We expect the German market to lag the U.K. market recovery by several months, reflecting the slower release from all COVID restrictions.
A key aspect of business demand recovery will be the return of trade shows. Overall, as we look ahead, our range of possible sales recovery scenarios is narrowing with a much greater skew to the upside than at our full year results presentation six months ago. At the time, we stated that a recovery to pre-COVID like for like RevPAR run rates in the U.K. was expected in calendar year 2022-2023. Of course, there may be some level of COVID restrictions during the winter, such as increased working from home. However, we believe that given the level of market recovery and Premier Inn's outperformance in the first half of this year, there's now the very real potential for the recovery in RevPAR run rates to happen at some point in 2022. While the top-line performance is very encouraging, the current operating environment in the hospitality sector remains challenging.
While we're not immune to these challenges, we believe that we are in a much stronger position than others to navigate our way through. While this does present us with cost headwinds, the impact on others will be far more profound, adding to sector pressures and increasing the likelihood of contraction in supply. We have operated throughout the summer at very high occupancy levels and with an increased number of guests per room, making our hotels extremely busy and creating extra demands on our operations. Labor shortages in the hospitality sector have been well documented, and while our previous actions mean we're better placed than most, we're still operating with around 2,000 vacancies. Supply chain issues also persist, the most prominent example of which is around linen supplies, which have resulted in check-in times moving later across the hotel sector.
Inflationary pressures also exist across a number of supply lines. Our teams have shown remarkable operational resilience as we traded through the summer, helping to minimize the impact on our guests. For that, I'm extremely grateful and proud, and I thank them all for their hard work and support. Our response to these challenges has been threefold. We've invested in our teams, ensuring that we maintain our high productivity levels and levels of service, and recently rewarded our hotel and restaurant staff with pay rises equating to a 5% increase in minimum pay rates. This takes our minimum pay to GBP 9.40, well ahead of the current national living wage. We've also rewarded the majority of our hotel and restaurant staff with a one-off retention bonus as a thank you for their hard work through the summer.
It's currently unclear how much of the current supply chain disruption and inflationary pressures are transitory as economies return to full operation following COVID disruptions, and how much may well be more structural. Our scale and our procurement processes have helped ensure we are well contracted in the short term, mitigating much of the inflationary pressure this year. We also announced a new cost efficiency program in April this year, which will deliver GBP 100 million of savings by full year 2024. Overall, we'll be in a better position to assess these pressures and the cost outlook for full year 2023 as we move into next year. We have the opportunity to further extend our competitive advantage while others are constrained and struggle with these headwinds.
Our agile commercial model also means that we can respond quickly to any change in the operating environment, and we're investing in marketing and refurbishment. This will drive increased sales and enable us to continue to take market share. Despite these headwinds, we remain confident in the U.K. business returning to pre-COVID profit before tax margins. The timescale for recovery remains uncertain. However, the opportunities to improve our operating leverage are many, and these include our ability to take market share through the competitive opportunities that exist and which have been enhanced by COVID, our ability to grow at pace, adding around 3,000 rooms a year, and the improved operating leverage of these new hotels, estate optimization, our pricing power in an inflationary cycle, the average room rate uplift from our refurbishment program, our investment in Premier Plus rooms, and our long-standing cost reduction efficiency program.
All of these elements combine to give us a strong margin recovery opportunity. I'll now take you through several slides that highlight the compelling long-term growth opportunity for Premier Inn in the U.K. We hold a uniquely advantaged position, as by some margin, the largest hotel operator in the U.K. Our scale delivers efficiency and customer choice, and our incredibly strong brand drives repeat bookings and market-leading levels of direct distribution. Our best-in-class operations and ownership model means we access every aspect of the hotel value chain and retain all of the profits which provides us with a competitive advantage. The U.K. market is characterized by compelling structural growth opportunities with an independent sector already in long-term decline and weakened further by the impact of the COVID crisis.
We are well-placed to capitalize on the expected reduction in competitor supply and take market share with a long runway of growth and the opportunity to deliver good returns. We passed the milestone of 80,000 open rooms in this half, and we still have a long way to go before we hit our target of 110,000 rooms. We're the largest operator in the U.K., and multi-year growth can make our estate over a third larger than it is today. We can leverage our restaurant brand portfolio to deliver a flexible customer proposition depending on the locations of our hotels, and we're continually evolving our food and drinks offer to capture demand as it returns. Our new hotels are in prime locations. They're larger, more efficient, and therefore deliver improved operational leverage.
The opportunity to grow will be even greater as market supply contracts post the pandemic. We see clear signs of distress throughout the independent market, particularly as government support in the U.K. has now largely stopped and the current operating environment is challenging. We expect the independent and budget branded supply to contract over the next 12-36 months, similar to the pattern evidenced post the financial crisis. We have the opportunity to optimize our estate with 8% of our rooms in the U.K. being in hotels with less than 60 rooms. That represents about 19% of our U.K. hotels. This creates an opportunity for us to either extend, refurbish, or churn these hotels. Churning the estate enables us to operate with fewer larger hotels in a catchment, drive greater efficiencies, and in turn deliver higher RevPAR and improve returns.
Exiting smaller older hotels also helps improve the overall customer proposition. While we're yet to commence a large-scale optimization program as we await to see the supply shakeout post-COVID, we've not stood still, and in the last 18 months we've exited 14 smaller properties and will continue to do so as and when the opportunities arise. We have a strategy of investing to win to grow market share and enhance our market leading position. Our flexible balance sheet enables us to invest in our estate, ensuring our leading customer proposition remains a competitive advantage as we drive market share. As you can see from this slide, we'll spend almost GBP 60 million on refurbishment CapEx this year, ensuring the estate is well invested, including an incremental GBP 10 million of P&L spend this year to continue to drive our outperformance.
We will have over 2,000 Premier Plus rooms by the end of this year, and we're seeing very good returns as you can see on this slide with higher price and higher occupancy levels as the superior offering has proved popular with both leisure and business guests. We're also investing to win in our teams. Our teams are at the center of everything we do and are the most important aspect of our customer service proposition. I've talked about the operational challenges faced throughout the summer, and our teams have responded to this challenge magnificently. We were thrilled to be recognized as a top employer in the U.K. for the 11th year running, and we believe this is testament to the hard work we do to make sure our teams feel valued, supported, and engaged.
We provide industry-leading training and development programs and have been improving our inclusivity and diversity agenda, including launching eight clear diversity targets. We've also continued to keep mental health and well-being front of mind, ensuring we support the mental and physical well-being of all of our team members through a number of initiatives. Creating an environment where everyone feels valued is important, and as I mentioned earlier, we recently announced a pay rise for all our U.K. hourly paid staff, equating to a 5% increase in minimum pay rates, and also rewarded the vast majority of our hotel and restaurant staff with a summer retention bonus as a thank you for their hard work and dedication through the summer. We'll continue to invest in our teams, seeking to recruit and retain talent and to ensure we maintain high levels of service across our business.
We've been investing to win in marketing and in April we launched our Rest Easy above the line multi-channel campaign, which saw the return of Lenny Henry to promote our brand. Our campaign was launched across all channels including TV, radio, and social and has been a big success, delivering considerably higher customer consideration scores and increased search and website visits. This is evidenced on the right-hand side of the slide with our post-campaign search levels and website traffic uplifts well ahead of the market. Given the returns we're seeing, we're investing a further GBP 10 million in this campaign this year, helping accelerate our market share gains into the second half and into next year. At the full year results in April, we presented how we are enhancing our business offer. Offering improved credit management on our business account broadens the availability for smaller companies.
While our enhanced business booker portal is driving higher conversion rates. We've seen a 48% increase in new business account signups and a 67% increase in new business booker accounts compared to the pre-COVID period. We've also materially increased the number of travel management companies through which we sell our rooms. Importantly, this gives us access to new customers who previously wouldn't have been permitted by their employers to book outside of their designated TMC. As both trade and office-based business demand begins to recover, this will significantly enhance our reach to this customer segment. Let's now turn to Germany and our value creation opportunity in this market. We've continued to accelerate growth with 24 new hotels added to the estate since February 2022, taking the open and committed pipeline to 73 hotels.
Our significantly enlarged estate now provides us with a very strong platform from which to grow our brand presence. As the estate grows, we can turn our focus to brand building with nationwide marketing campaigns and new corporate relationships supplementing our effective local brand campaigns. By utilizing the same ownership and direct distribution model as the U.K. and leveraging our U.K. capabilities, we're able to deliver a winning customer proposition in a very attractive market. We have a clear runway for growth in Germany. We'll continue to grow our pipeline and believe we have line of sight to at least 60,000 rooms achieved through organic and inorganic investment. This would equate to around 6% market share, which is still only around half of that achieved by Premier Inn in the U.K.
The long-term decline of the independent sector will accelerate as a result of COVID, with an expected contraction in competitor supply. We remain well-placed to capitalize on the enhanced structural opportunities and to win market share. We believe that the opportunity to create value in Germany is significant, and our commitment to the market will be substantial, delivering good long-term returns. This slide is a reminder of why the market is so appealing and also the strength of our customer proposition, which sets us apart from our competitors. The German market is highly attractive, larger than the U.K., with high levels of domestic business and leisure travelers and with a fragmented competitor set dominated by a declining independent sector. Budget branded RevPAR has been growing at a faster rate than the U.K. pre-COVID, and there are considerable opportunities to acquire assets with attractive long-term returns.
Our customer proposition in Germany is compelling, and it appeals to both leisure and business guests, offering a place to stay in prime locations with great quality and at great value. We're excited by the opportunities in this market, and we're confident in our ability to replicate our U.K. success in Germany, particularly as the business grows in scale. During the first half, we launched our first digital marketing campaign aimed at establishing the Premier Inn brand in Germany. The response was good, and while naturally as a new brand, our recognition scores are behind our more established competitors, it represents a good start to our nationwide brand build. As you can see on the right-hand side, we continue to see improvements in our already high customer scores, again, reflecting the quality of our proposition in Germany.
We've made a significant commitment to the German market, and we're now up and running with 30 open hotels. We know our proposition works, and we look forward to a hopefully undisturbed period of trading that will demonstrate the returns our mature hotels can deliver. The platform that we've built in Germany is already a valuable asset and one on which we can build. We've already invested and committed to over GBP 900 million of capital expenditure. We are very confident in our growth opportunities, both organic and through acquisition, which will drive an annual spend of around GBP 250 million on a lease adjusted basis and deliver around 2,000-3,000 rooms every year. We aim to deliver mature return on capital of 10%-14%, equating to a material value creation opportunity.
Our sustainability program, Force for Good, is embedded across all our business functions, ensuring that being a responsible business is integrated across our operations. It's an ambitious program, integrated business-wide with the overarching objective to enable everyone to live and work well. Following an incredibly difficult year last year and a challenging start to this year, keeping our Force for Good commitments and ambitions central to our response and how we rebuild after the pandemic has been very important to us. We've already had some great achievements this year. Following on from an ambitious move to bring our net zero carbon target forward by a decade from 2050 to 2040, we've now aligned our targets to a 1.5-degree increase and also signed up to the government's Race to Zero campaign.
Other highlights include the launch of the largest U.K. rollout in the hospitality sector of electric vehicle charging points. We launched eight commitments to drive greater diversity and to champion inclusivity. We also continued to fundraise for Great Ormond Street Hospital despite site closures. We've come close to raising a total of GBP 19 million since the start of our partnership. We've bolstered our focus on responsible sourcing in our supply chain, and this year we were award winners for our work on mitigating modern slavery in the construction sector. Whitbread has a clear long-term strategy to create value. We are already the number one hotel chain in the U.K. market. We'll continue to grow and innovate in the U.K., and see a clear path to grow by at least a third again, as well as optimizing the network and rolling out Premier Plus.
We're committed to the German market. We have a proposition that is attractive in the market and gets great guest scores. We've built an already valuable platform of 30 trading hotels and already have a committed pipeline to take us to 73 hotels. We'll continue to invest, both organically and through acquisition, to deliver further growth. Overall, we are well set for long-term value creation, and throughout, we'll continue to enhance our capabilities to support long-term growth and deliver for our shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, and communities. I'll now hand over to Nicholas to talk you through our financial performance.
Thank you, Alison, and good morning, everyone. This page shows a summary of our overall financial performance for the first half of the year, which was ahead of expectations. Statutory revenue was 39% lower than two years ago, impacted by COVID restrictions, particularly in the first quarter, but with our hotels trading significantly ahead of the market in the U.K. as these restrictions were lifted. The other income line on this page of GBP 93 million principally relates to government support schemes. This includes GBP 60 million from the U.K. Job Retention Scheme and GBP 28 million from German government grants. Operating costs of GBP 577 million were 12% lower than the first half of FY 2020, driven by the reduction in revenue-related cost of sales and the benefit of the U.K. business rates holiday of GBP 48 million.
As a result, the adjusted loss before tax for the half was GBP 56.6 million. We benefited from non-adjusting credits of GBP 37 million, taking our statutory loss before tax to just GBP 19 million. These credits came from a GBP 29 million profit on the sale and leasebacks of a hotel and five property disposals as part of our hotel optimization program. The business retains a strong balance sheet with net cash of GBP 60 million, with a strong liquidity position and an undrawn revolving credit facility of GBP 950 million. This financial position enables us to return to more normal levels of capital spend while navigating our way back to investment-grade metrics. I won't spend too long on this next slide, as we have already covered this in the presentation so far. This slide shows separate P&Ls for our U.K. and our German business.
As I reiterated in a previous slide, our performance in the U.K. was ahead of expectations. We still have some way to go, but we recovered to a loss before tax of GBP 17.8 million, compared to a loss of GBP 313 million in the same period last year. In Germany, trends were largely similar to the U.K., with high levels of domestic leisure demand. Total sales were three times the level of sales two years ago, reflecting the larger hotel network we now have despite the tight COVID restrictions through the half. Losses before tax in Germany were reduced to GBP 4.3 million, benefiting from the GBP 28 million of government support mentioned earlier. This slide shows our cash flow over the last 18 months since the start of the COVID crisis back in March 2020.
On the left of this waterfall, you can see that over the course of last year, we had an operating cash outflow of GBP 384 million in the first half and GBP 105 million outflow in the second half. Due to the strong trading since May this year, we have turned a corner, and for the first half of this year, we have had a cash inflow of GBP 160 million. Cumulatively, since the start of the pandemic, we have had operating cash outflow of around GBP 330 million. This, together with the GBP 340 million of capital investments we have made, has led to a total cash outflow of nearly GBP 600 million over the last 18 months.
This did include around GBP 400 million of P&L benefit from the U.K. and German government support schemes, so it would've been closer to GBP 1 billion outflow without this benefit. Thanks to the rights issue and the bonds we raised in February, we were able to continue to make these investments with confidence and have been able to replace GBP 300 million of debt facilities with long-term uncovenanted facilities. We also finished the half with net cash of GBP 60 million and a very healthy liquidity position with GBP 1.1 billion of cash, netting off against GBP 1.1 billion of bonds and our short-term revolving credit facility undrawn.
This position really helps us to invest with confidence and has supported our investment-grade credit ratings even when we were closed and ensures we navigate back to a structure of investment-grade metrics while we're still loss-making and uncertainties still exist. This structure has served us incredibly well over the last decade. We continue to maintain our disciplined approach to allocation of capital. As we look forward, our main categories of cash allocation will be around GBP 350 million of capital this year, with the ability to continue to take new hotel sites in the U.K. and Germany when our competitors cannot, and brings refurbishment spend back to pre-COVID levels, ensuring the estate is well maintained. We project capital spend to be around GBP 350 million-GBP 450 million next year.
With government grants that propped up so many businesses now ending, we believe there will be more growth opportunities available to us over the coming year. In the U.K., we aim to grow our estate by around 3,000 rooms per year, building new larger hotels that improve our operational leverage. In Germany, we are pursuing an aggressive growth strategy, both organically and through M&A, as we look to rapidly grow our footprint, and we are very confident of the opportunity to acquire assets at prices that will drive good returns. In September, we repaid GBP 25 million of U.S. private placements with another GBP 60 million to be repaid on or before their maturity in January 2022.
Although dividend payments and shareholder returns are not permitted under our lender covenant waiver conditions until the earlier of March 2023 or until the original covenant tests are met, we intend to return to paying a dividend at the first available point that we are permitted to do so. Turning to our balance sheet and our property, we have strong asset backing. We last valued our property portfolio at the end of 2018, which was presented at our Capital Markets Day in 2019. As a reminder, this valued the property at a range of GBP 4.9 billion-GBP 5.8 billion, and this was based on the value we could achieve from a careful sale and leasebacks transactions over a period of time with the strength of the Premier Inn brand and our strong balance sheet covenant.
It's been incredibly hard to value property portfolios in the hotel market over the last year just due to the lack of transactions. However, in the last 18 months, and particularly more lately, there have been around about 20 Premier Inn leasehold properties traded in the market. On this slide you can see the range of yields that have been achieved on the bottom left. It is often hard to get all the details of the transactions such as concessions, but on the face of it you can see that the yields, as demonstrated on this page, have held up well compared to our 2018 assumptions. We believe this supports the strength of our brand, our market position, and the discipline we have around our balance sheet. Our freehold properties give us both tremendous operational and financial flexibility, including providing a strong covenant to all of our stakeholders.
Whitbread has a long-standing track record of material cost savings, helping offset inflationary pressures, and this has become even greater in importance in the current climate. In April this year, we announced the next phase of our efficiency program, with this phase expected to deliver around about GBP 100 million of cost efficiencies by the end of our calendar year, FY 2024. We are making good progress and this target will be achieved through a wide range of measures. We're utilizing our international sourcing capabilities, investing in technology platforms to enable both marketing and labor scheduling effectiveness, and optimizing the U.K. estate. Savings are expected to be at least GBP 25 million this year and growing to accumulative GBP 100 million by the end of February 2024. Our investing to win strategy is driving our top-line outperformance.
Over the next two years, we have the opportunity to extend our advantage. On this slide, we've laid out some adjustments to this year's guidance that mostly net out. First of all, there is no change to the sales to profit flow-through sensitivity we gave in April this year. To drive our market outperformance, we have invested an incremental GBP 10 million in both marketing and refurbishing our hotels. The wage inflation in our sector is well publicized. To remain competitive, we've invested around about GBP 12 million-GBP 13 million in our pay rates this year. We put in place a one-off staff retention scheme over the summer for our site teams to thank them in the challenging environment they were operating in, which cost around GBP 10 million.
We will of course continue to monitor the labor market very, very closely to ensure our pay rates remain compelling. Lastly, just to note, we have all seen the increase in gas and electricity prices, but we are well hedged for this year, so there will be minimal impact. Offsetting the vast majority of these costs, we are receiving one-off COVID support credits from the German government of GBP 28 million in the first half and potentially around about GBP 5 million in the second half of this year. Other changes that don't materially impact the P&L this year are firstly, new rooms in the U.K. will be around about 3,500, up from 2,000-3,000 in the previous guidance.
FY 2022 is also a 53-week year with the extra week at the end of February expected to be profit neutral. Lastly, a net neutral impact of GBP 20 million increase in the U.K. Furlough claim as additional claims were made against the site team salary costs that we were able to retain during the period of closure. As Alison has laid out, we are confident on returning to pre-pandemic margins. We will, however, have to wait to give further future guidance on the speed of the margin recovery once we have greater visibility on how much of the current supply chain disruption and inflationary pressures are transitory versus structural. In terms of the current trading, we've seen the strong leisure demand continuing. Trades business demand remains resilient, and office-based business demand is improving. International inbound travel has shown some signs of recovery, albeit from a low base.
This, together with our outperformance and despite the uncertainties in the marketplace, means we do have the potential to reach a full recovery in U.K. like-for-like RevPAR run rate at some point in 2020. This is earlier than we'd expected, but is now looking more likely. In September and October so far, we have seen our total accommodation sales up 7.9% on the same months in 2019, i.e., pre the pandemic, and have continued to outperform the market by over 14%. We are about to enter the quieter, lower demand months of the year. The level of bookings into the fourth quarter are always low at this time of year, so it's hard to speculate on expected revenue growth in this quarter. However, we are starting to see demand momentum moving in the right direction, especially in the U.K. regions.
In Germany, we have seen similar trends, but with a few months' delay. Occupancy over the last seven weeks has been above 60%. I'll finish by putting up the first slide that we started on, just highlighting our significant outperformance in the U.K. ahead of expectations, the momentum behind the platform we're building in Germany to replicate the U.K., and the challenging operational and inflationary environment in our sector that although painful, will give us a better long-term relative position. Lastly, the strong balance sheet that allows us to invest and continue to pull ahead of the competition. Thank you all for your time today. Alison and I will now host a question-and-answer session starting at 9:15 A.M. U.K. time, and you'll be able to find the details on our website. Thank you very much.