Caroline Nodder: No industry is so heavily burdened by tax as the pub industry
Tax is one of those words that immediately gets your back up. It reeks of unfairness, is synonymous with the state penalising the little guy, and is viewed, I would say almost universally, as a bad thing.
Right from our earliest years we are taught to think of tax in the negative - King Herod forces a heavily pregnant Mary to take to the road on a donkey to pay her taxes for goodness sake! - and in more recent times some of our biggest public protests have been over taxes (the Poll Tax riots being the most infamous).
And against all this I can think of no industry that is so heavily burdened by tax as the pub industry.
We are positively crippled by taxes. We pay them on the beer we serve, for the people we employ, on the goods we sell and for the premises we sell them from. There is no aspect of a publican's life that is not heavily taxed to the hilt. Herod would be proud.
But despite this, when our customers come into our pubs and see prices have gone up to cover yet another hike in taxes who do they blame?
The government? The Chancellor? The tax office?
Nope. It's you. They blame you, the poor publican standing in front of them.
So this week I have a challenge for all of you out there in pubs across the country.
I think pub-goers need to be told how much of what they spend over your bars is going straight into the government's coffers. I know from various trips abroad that in many countries when you buy a drink in a bar you are given a receipt that highlights how much the drink cost, and in addition how much tax you are paying. It's there in black and white.
And while you may not read every receipt, certainly as a consumer you have an immediate impression that part of the price of the drink is going to the government.
Could we not introduce something similar in the UK? If we did I am convinced that consumers would be a lot less likely to criticise our industry for price increases and a lot more likely to turn their critical eye on the politicians.
It would also be much harder for the government to consistently increase duty, for example, above the rate of inflation when consumers would be able to transparently see how much extra tax they were paying.
The thing about tax is that it has this element of stealth about it. It is often hard to isolate how much you're paying, and my view is that we need to remove the stealthiness and be open about it.
Pub-goers are a mighty force to be reckoned with and no government can afford to ignore such a large group of voters, so they could become the trade's secret weapon. Talk to a few in your pub, ask your Epos system administrator if it's possible to include a tax total on receipts, put up some posters even. It's time the truth was out.
