Call time on 2m rule or pubs face carnage
Boris Johnson has a decision to make in the next few days that will determine whether hundreds of thousands of shops, bars, theatres, cinemas and restaurants are doomed to close for ever.
The Prime Minister has reportedly been spooked by warnings that up to 3.5million jobs could be lost if the hospitality sector is not allowed to return to business this summer.
Those predictions may terrify him now, but i want to tell him bluntly, he hasn’t seen anything yet.
it is difficult to know where to begin in outlining the numerous problems facing the hospitality, travel, and retails sectors because of Covid-19, but let me start with one thing that is easily put right.
We are almost unique in Britain in adhering to an arbitrarily established two-metre rule of social distancing. A gap of one metre is sufficient in many countries – including France, Denmark, singapore and China – and most crucially it satisfies the World Health organisation.
Yet for reasons that no one can explain, we are sticking doggedly to two metres, and the Prime Minister, we understand, will stay with it until a mysterious scientific consensus emerges that will give him political cover to relax it.
i’m afraid it fits the pattern of contradictory and baffling policies that has become the hallmark of this government’s handling of the pandemic.
But the specific folly of the twometre rule is that it renders it effectively impossible for a pub, restaurant, theatre or airline to operate.
People talk wistfully of a new era of outdoor drinking and dining, but you cannot open a hospitality business without toilets, and how can you operate those facilities with a two-metre rule? in addition, the vast majority of restaurants and pubs, especially in cities, do not even have gardens.
According to our industry’s best estimates, if the two-metre rule remains in force, only about a third of hotels, pubs and restaurants would be viable. With the limit adopted by most other countries, this rises to about 70 per cent.
My specific knowledge is of the pub trade, which had its own structural problems long before the pandemic. sadly many of the 60,000 or so British pubs will close permanently, even if all restrictions were lifted today. But the carnage will be much, much worse if the rules stay as they are.
The trouble is that politicians tend to pull or drink a pint only during election campaigns. But i would like to take Mr Johnson to visit our shuttered pubs, which have been the heart of community life.
We gave away as much of our food stocks as we could; but in the basements of tens of thousands of pubs stand barrels of condemned beer, waiting to be poured down the drain when furloughed staff return.
roughly two-thirds of pubs in the UK are operated as individual businesses, and i can tell Mr Johnson bluntly that if the two-metre rule remains in force, many thousands of them will simply not reopen because they know they cannot make a living.
Ministers deserve credit for the job protection scheme and other relief measures to business. But this will all be in vain if whole industries fall off a financial cliff once the furlough scheme inevitably comes to an end.
THE Government’s scientific advisers urge caution about the two-metre rule, but that is what scientists do. Besides, two metres is both confusing and effectively unenforceable in any social situation, and certainly on public transport.
Leading us out of the lockdown requires weighing risk of the virus against the danger of economic paralysis, in turn leading to permanent social and mental health epidemics.
only Boris Johnson can make these huge calls that will determine nothing less than the future of the economy. He needs to be out front and in command, not stuck in Downing street agonising over conflicting scientific advice.
He must start by removing the twometre burden on our small businesses. The measure is scientifically unfounded, and regarded as unnecessary by governments that have done a better job than our own in fighting Covid-19.