The Chancellor drains the final dregs from the Great British pub

No political campaign is complete without the obligatory pulling of the pint.

But the pre-election rhetoric is inevitably abandoned, and this time round, it feels worse than ever.

Hospitality is not being undermined by a single bad decision or a momentary lapse in judgment.

It’s being worn down by a steady accumulation of policies, layered one on top of another, each adding cost, complexity or risk to an industry that already operates on wafer-thin margins.

If proposed increases to business rates go ahead, Newcastle will face some of the steepest increases anywhere in the country.

One city centre pub, the Dog and Parrot, is staring down a 664% rise in its rates bill, from around £12,000 to £95,000. To cover that increase, at 12p net profit per pint, it would need to sell more than 690,000 additional pints – those are fairytale numbers.

Even if rumblings are true about the detail of the anticipated ‘U-turn’, and they increase the discount to 20p, the Dog and Parrot will still face a 396% increase to rates. Hardly a silver bullet.

And business rates are only the tip of the iceberg. Labour-intensive hospitality businesses have been hit repeatedly by rising minimum wages and higher employer national insurance contributions.

Energy costs remain structurally higher than ever, with little recognition of the fact that many venues trade late into the night, across weekends, and throughout the year.

Packaging taxes and recycling charges are all adding cost and bureaucracy to everyday trading without regard for operational reality.

Then there is the proposed tightening of drink-drive limits. For a city like Newcastle, this strikes at the heart of how the city’s leisure economy works.

Newcastle is a destination city. People travel here for party weekends, birthdays, reunions and celebrations, often staying overnight and heading home the following day. Our bricklayers, joiners, electricians, plumbers, and delivery drivers all rely on driving for work and the proposed limit is effectively a zero-tolerance limit.

If people believe that a day, or a night out in Newcastle could prevent them from driving the next morning, many will simply decide not to come. That loss of footfall doesn’t just affect pubs and bars, it ripples through hotels, restaurants, taxis, venues and the wider city centre economy. Behaviour changes quickly, and once lost, that trade is hard to recover.

The business rates U-turn, if it happens, will be welcome but it won’t undo years of cumulative damage caused by policies that consistently pull in the same direction, squeezing hospitality harder each time.

The leisure sector is not a cash cow.

Large national chains may be able to absorb some of these pressures, but it is the independent venues that define Newcastle’s character that will take the hit. And once they’re gone, they won’t be replaced.

If successive governments genuinely want vibrant, safe and thriving city centres – not just somewhere to a host a ‘grip-and-grin’ – they need to stop treating hospitality as an easy target and start recognising it as an economic driver in its own right.

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Stephen Patterson, Chief Executive at Newcastle’s Business Improvement District, NE1

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