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Every country has its own bar culture. Britain’s pubs are so established in the national psyche that they’re often a tourist draw in their own right. In an effort to support local communities, the UK government is moving to stop pubs from being redeveloped to other, more lucrative, uses. Boozers would be better off though if the pub trade, and not its premises, got more support.
Housing secretary Angela Rayner has clamped down hard. Pubs can now only be redeveloped if they have been on the market for at least a year as a pub, and there is no reasonable prospect of running a viable watering hole. The rules will also take into account a bar’s historical popularity to prevent businesses being deliberately run down.
It is not hard to see why the government is wading in. The decline of the tavern trade has been a long-running theme in UK political life alongside worries over other local services from banking to local children’s playgroups. Net, a quarter of all pubs have called last orders in the past quarter century, leaving 45,000 hostelries still observing opening time. The UK population meanwhile has risen by a fifth.
Supporting local communities is a politically appealing goal, but the UK is going about this the wrong way. For one thing, curbing the redevelopment potential of pubs will lower property values for existing landlords and may, in future, discourage new money from being ploughed into the sector.
It will also do little to support pubs’ underlying business case. Not all are pack-’em-in city centre boozers, any more than most resemble the quaint oak-beamed hostelries sought out by tourists. Those that cannot attract enough customers will eventually close. Others have tried this before. In the 1980s, New York preserved space and lowered rents for clothes-making in Manhattan’s Garment District: three decades later, both the space used and employee numbers had fallen 90 per cent.
One question must be whether the government should step in at all. There is a difference between people being nostalgic for a service and prepared to spend money on it: pubgoers of a certain age may remember how those mourning the demise of discount store Woolworths’ pick’n’mix sweets had not shopped there in years. And to the extent that pubs are the victims of changes in drinking habits, other community pursuits may take their place.
The best the UK can do is to remove excessive drags on the hospitality businesses: recent jumps in business duties and employer taxes have hit labour-intensive pubs and restaurants hard. There’s about 2 per cent net profit in a pint, calculates the British Beer and Pub Association. Leaving landlords with a reasonable head would be a better way of avoiding unnecessary closures.
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