Decisions on pubs’ futures are based on some ill-informed preconceptions
IT HAS been suggested that as lockdown eases, the Government may allow pubs and bars to reopen without the 10pm curfew and with no requirement to have a substantial meal, writes Neville Grundy.
This all sounds quite hopeful – until you hear that one proposal they have been reportedly considering is a temporary ban on any alcohol sales.
The chief medical officer Chris Whitty and others are said to be concerned that drinking alcohol will destroy any attempts to maintain social distancing. This is not a scientific judgement: it is simply an opinion, and it’s not one that is borne out by my own experiences last summer.
Every pub I went into observed all the rules and required their customers to do the same. Occasionally I forgot and more than once I was ordered by bar staff: “Oi, Neville! Go back and sanitise your hands!”
If pubs can’t serve alcohol, there is a greater danger of the virus spreading in unsupervised conditions such as when groups of friends gather in one house, not for a party as such, but just to have a few drinks from supermarkets. Such behaviour will continue if reopened pubs can sell only nonalcohol drinks: very few regular pubgoers will return just for tea, coffee and soft drinks.
Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality, tweeted: “Reopening in name only inflicts irreparable damage on hospitality as we saw October to December with restrictions with little meaningful impact on health or harm, pushing revenues as low as 20% to 30%. Unsustainable for restaurants and pubs.”
She explained how pub and bar operators had taken meticulous measures to reopen safely last summer, and how few cases of Covid-19 infections had been caused by the industry. She emphasised that, operating under such extreme limitations, the pubs and hospitality industry did not break even.
While there is always the occasional idiot on either side of the bar who will selfishly break any rule that gets in the way, when pubs reopened last year I saw no chaotic scenes of drunken abandonment, and neither did anyone else I know.
This industry’s problem during the pandemic is that decisions are being made about its future by politicians who know nothing about it because they never go into pubs themselves, except for photo-opportunities at election time. Decisions about a significant industry should not be based on uninformed preconceptions.
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