Ahead of a vote on new tier restrictions in Parliament today, the hospitality sector is urging MPs to back urgent extra support for the sector.
Jonathan Neame (left) and Tom Kerridge
UKHospitality chief executive, Kate Nicholls, said: “Hospitality is being asked to bear a disproportionate burden in order to let other sectors of the economy reopen and festive bubbles to happen.
“Our businesses deserve a plan that allows as much trade as possible, adequately supports those unable to open and a clear fiscal strategy for recovery in 2021. We urge MPs of all parties to press the government to provide further essential support to hospitality.”
Newspapers this morning are suggesting that wet-led pubs, which have been worse affected by the the tier system, will be in line for extra financial help. “The move is designed to curb Tory anger over the impact of covid curbs on a hospitality sector that has already weathered two national lockdowns,” says the Daily Mail.
On Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Joanthan Neame, chief executive of Shepherd Neame, and chef and publican Tom Kerridge, outlined the big issues facing the pub sector ahead of this evening’s vote.
Neame was asked what his staff were saying about the new restrictions. He replied: “I think they’re bewildered. They think that it’s completely unfair. I think the judgement is arbitrary, and I think the impact is completely disproportionate.
“These are real people with real lives who are worried about putting food on their table and worried about their jobs for the future. And they can’t understand why, having done so much to follow all the rules so assiduously through the summer when they were open, they’re now being, in their view, singled out and targeted for unfair treatment. It’s not a happy place in our sector at the moment.
‘We need a long-term plan to re-establish and re-base this sector’
“If we lose our pubs, we lose so much. We lose the soul of our country, we lose social cohesia. I cannot understand why, if there’s an outbreak of infection in part of the county, you have to close a village pub nearly 100 miles away elsewhere in the county. And nor can any of the community around that pub understand it, and nor can the licensees, who are some of the finest people in this country.”
Kerridge, who has been hosting a BBC2 programme on saving pubs, said: “[Pubs] are very much centres of community, they are very much hubs of society. The problem we have here is that the powers that be, the government, are looking at the product the pub sells as just being alcohol related, and the scientific effect it has on the body, rather than the richer fabic of what pubs provide. They’re lving rooms of local communities, they’re spaces where people connect. They get rid of lonliness. They connect — they’re so, so important, particularly at times like this.
“There’s many landlords up and down the country who can really not understand the difference between people being able to now go to a theatre or a cinema and be able to have a drink there, and being able to sit with their friends in a socially-distanced covid-secure environment where so much money has been spent throughout the hospitality industry to put PPE together, to be able to make places covid secure, that now they’re at a point where they face closure.”
Martha Kearney asked Jonathan Neame if he thought some of his pubs would end up having to close. “Yes, I sadly do. It all depends on how long this particular tier system is in place. We hope it’s thrown out of Parliament today, but if it’s not thrown out we just hope that the British Parliament take the same approach to the hospitality industry here as the French government do. All the language there is of solidarity, is of ‘we’re in this together, we’re asking you to step aside and make a sacrifice’, and the compensation for doing so is materially greater than in the UK.
“Rishi Sunak was the toast of the sector in lockdown one, but in lockdown two every business has taken on more debt progressively through the summer. In France at the moment there’s 20% compensation and 100% furlough. What we can’t have is stop-start changes of policy. There have been five in six weeks in this industry. We need a long-term plan to re-establish and re-base this sector, right through into 2022. Then we can recover and do everything to serve our communities that we want to.”
