The Campaign for Pubs has written to chancellor Rishi Sunak to challenge wholly unrealistic figures for pub rents he quoted on national television.
Appearing on the Andrew Marr Show, on BBC1 on Sunday, he said the average rent payable by a typical pub was in the region of £14,000 to £20,000 a year.
He quoted the figure within the context of a conversation about the level of support the government has provided to pubs, which led to concern among publicans that that support has been based on erroneous information.
‘Wildly innaccurate’
The Campaign for Pubs has called urgently for the chancellor to reveal the source of his figures, which they describe as wildly inaccurate.
Research conducted by the campaign, direct from a large number of UK publicans, found the lowest rent reported was £21,000 with the average appearing to be around £39,000. This would certainly be in-keeping with the 2017 RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) benchmarking figures which placed the national average at £37,691.
However, there are many publicans whose rents are far higher still, with many reporting some above £80,000 and indeed some well over £100,000, especially in London and other busy city settings.
Such high rents are accompanied by high rateable values, meaning that many such tenants (many of whom are individuals or very small businesses) missed out entirely on covid grant funding in the first lockdown, due to the government’s decision to exclude businesses with rateable values over £51,000 from any grant support.
The situation for many pub tenants has been made worse by continued demands for excessive rents during enforced closure by pub-owning companies and commercial landlords, a scandal that has already caused some pubs and restaurants to closed their doors. Some publicans have received no rent reduction at all in cases where their commercial landlords have openly ignored the government’s voluntary code of practice.
The levels of government support for pubs has in reality not even covered ongoing fixed costs, including rent and other bills, so most pub tenants have been getting further in debt.
‘Deeply worrying’
Campaign chair, Paul Crossman, a publican in York, said: “We can only hope the chancellor’s forthcoming measures will be based on the reality faced by small business operators, some of whom, for example, have continued to face demands for full rent during closure at levels at least four or five times higher than those the chancellor quoted.
“If this crucial Budget does not reflect the actual reality for pubs on the ground then huge numbers will not make it through to the summer, with dreadful consequences for publicans, their families, and their communities, not to mention the wider economy.”
Vice-chair, Dawn Hopkins, a licensee in Norwich, added: “It’s deeply worrying that the chancellor is so out of touch with the reality of rents on the nation’s pubs. Publicans up and down the country spat out their tea when they heard him giving such a low figure, and if Treasury support has been based on this, that explains why it is so far short of what is needed to get pubs through this crisis.”
