Brains chief: Pub industry facing an ‘impossible’ future
THE chief executive of Brains – Wales’ biggest brewery – has warned that the upcoming lockdown could create an ‘impossible’ situation for the pub industry.
The hospitality industry has arguably been hit the hardest by the 10pm curfew on alcohol sales which was introduced by the Welsh Government last month.
As well as this blanket restriction, pubs in local lockdown areas have only been able to accept groups from one household – measures CEO Alistair Darby says has had a serious affect on trade.
The CEO has criticised the Welsh Government’s plan to go into a fire-break lockdown from Friday.
And he says they have not provided evidence to prove that the hospitality industry has contributed to a rise in coronavirus cases.
“We in the hospitality sector have made it very clear that we are not scientists, we are not medics, we appreciate that the government has to make some very difficult decisions,” he said.
“It is not our place to fall out with the government.
We as a sector want to play an active part in the kind of battle against coronavirus and we have done so. We were closed for the longest of any sector. We have opened up and poured a huge amount of money and effort into making our pubs and restaurants and bars safe.
“However, the key thing is that we don’t understand why, we don’t really understand how this lockdown is going to help because we don’t think that pubs and restaurants are the source of the problem. The data does not prove that.
“We’re going to have to go with a firebreak because
we are being legally obliged. Having done it, what we want to be able to do more than anything is to be allowed to reopen with fundamentally less restrictions than currently exist so that we can recover and prepare successfully for Christmas.”
Brains pubs began a phased re-opening in July after initial lockdown restrictions were lifted. However, after just four months of trading the CEO says this firebreak lockdown and current restrictions has made the industry “impossible”.
“When we reopened in August, we reopened our pubs in a phased way in order to ensure that we opened safely and properly, and that we had all of the measures in place that was expected of us by the authorities,” he said.
“We were determined to make sure that we played our part in having really clean premises with good social distancing. It was clear customers were clearly delighted to be back in pubs and they were very, very pleased with the safety measures we’ve got in place.”
However, he says that the Brewery – which owns and runs over 200 pubs – noticed a “very rapid and dramatic drop in sales” when local lockdowns were introduced.
“We were down in September from the previous year but the extent to which we were down once local restrictions went into place doubled. So it got twice as bad.
“The curfew of stopping selling alcohol at ten o’clock sent out a certain message, then the households were not allowed to mix and really in no time at all, all of the many reasons why people come to pubs made it impossible.
“All of those things made the situation impossible or very difficult to impossible.”
Despite the dramatic rise in confirmed cases across the country, the Brains boss claims there have been just six incidences of track and trace contacts for possible Covid-19 cases recorded in the pubs among 600,000 visits by customers.
“Since we reopened in all this we have welcomed 600,000 customers – we know that because every single customer has to track and trace and book in and all the rest, so we know how many customers we have,” said Alistair.
“Of our 1,500 members of staff employed, we had only six test positive for coronavirus. So if pubs were a hotbed of transmission, surely many more of our staff would have been ill and tested for coronavirus, and they have not.”
The owners of the Brewery are now calling on the Welsh Government to loosen the restrictions around the industry when it is allowed to re-open saying current measures are ‘impossible’ to maintain.
Alistair says that only by removing the 10pm curfew, travel restrictions and single household rules would the industry have any chance of clawing back lost income.
He is also calling on the Welsh Government to follow England in implementing a 1m plus rule on social distancing with mitigating factors, over the current 2m advice.
In March, Brains announced it was selling off 40 of its pubs. At the time it described the move as part of “a three-year plan to significantly grow the profitability of our business and to futureproof it for the benefit of generations to come”.
“I think the key thing is it comes all the way back to the sector, what we need is real clarity.”