Rachel Reeves’ Budget will kill off more great British pubs

Not a grand cathedral or a glistening tower or a parliament stuffed with people pretending they’re listening.

A pub. A proper one. The kind with worn floorboards, lopsided pictures, locals who know each other’s stories, a landlord who remembers your last conversation and a bar that has quietly soaked up more history and heartbreak than any museum ever could.

So when the Chancellor stands up and announces a rise in alcohol duty, framing it as sober, responsible economics, it is impossible not to feel something crack.

Because this isn’t about a line on a spreadsheet. It’s about the places where Britain actually lives.

And before we even reached the substance of the Budget, everyone was worked up about it being “leaked” 25 minutes early. As if the nation had paused at their desks and tuned in with bated breath.

Whenever I’ve asked people whether they watched it live, the answer is a universal no. It was the middle of a working day in the middle of a working week.

The top searches beforehand were “when is the budget 2025” and “what is the budget”. That is the level of interest. The whole thing is political theatre with very few seats filled.

But the people who do care are the landlords and brewers fighting to keep their doors open. They didn’t get the pantomime “penny off a pint” line this year, but even when that trick is rolled out, it’s meaningless. Dan, the landlord at my local, had to put his prices up by 20p last year just to cover rising costs.

A single penny off might win a cheer in the Commons, but what use is it when I’m still handing over seven hundred and fifty pennies for a pint.

And truthfully, I haven’t held a single penny since the days when cash machines still spat out paper fivers.

What frustrates me most, though, is that pubs are always treated as though they’re indulgences rather than infrastructure. As though they’re optional extras instead of the glue that holds communities together.

They are where birthdays are toasted, breakups dissected, friendships forged, grief softened, matches celebrated or mourned, neighbours introduced, lonely people made less lonely.

They are the places where conversations happen that would never survive a Zoom call. Pubs are our unofficial community centres, our social safety nets, our antidotes to isolation.

And now we have the data to back up what anyone who’s spent time in a pub already knew. New research from PubAid reveals that pubs across the UK raise around £40 million every year for grassroots sport. That support creates £160 million of social value. Sixty-two per cent back local teams. They host 6.7 million community sport sessions annually, reaching around 1.7 million people.

They kit out players, host tournaments, give free space to clubs and champion groups who would otherwise be squeezed out, from women’s teams to older adults to people with disabilities or mental health conditions.

Each pub delivers, on average, 240 hours of community sport activity a year. They do this even though 68 per cent say rising costs limit what they can offer. And still, two-thirds now do more for local sport than they did five years ago. This is what pubs are. Engines of belonging. Champions of the overlooked. Hubs of activity in towns where almost everything else has been hollowed out.

Because while the sector is fighting to keep communities alive, policy is pushing them under. February’s tax hikes, the new glass packaging levy, business rates, VAT, energy bills, wage increases and now a 4.5 per cent rise in duty. It’s relentless. And it’s shrinking the world in which landlords operate, pint by pint.

Which is why LBC’s Tom Swarbrick launching a national pub day feels so necessary and so bittersweet. A day to celebrate the heartbeat of Britain. A proper national toast. But at the rate we’re going, it’s hard not to ask the bleak question: how many pubs will still be open by the time the date is announced.

Health groups are pleased with the duty rise. That’s their lane. But warm words about “responsibility” don’t change the fact that pubs are being financially punished for existing.

You cannot claim to care about community cohesion while making it harder for the places that deliver it to survive.

If ministers want thriving towns, reduced loneliness, grassroots sport, public wellbeing, local pride and genuine recovery, the answer isn’t another tax rise disguised as virtue. It’s support. It’s breathing room. It’s recognising that a pub is not a luxury, it’s a lifeline.

We’re not just losing good beer. We’re losing the places that make Britain feel like Britain. And once the final orders are called in too many towns, no Budget line will bring them back.

That is why this matters. Because a country without its pubs isn’t just poorer. It’s lonelier. It’s dimmer. It’s less itself.

___________________

LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.

To contact us email opinion@lbc.co.uk