Mark Daniels: Smoking Ban Fallacies

I've long been an advocate of moving on from the smoking ban. Unlike my esteemed blogging colleague, Pete Robinson, who advocates a return to the good old smoking days, I've worked hard at not banging my head against a wall fighting the ban but instead doing what I can to keep my business running post the removal of a core section of my customer base.

That said, I do find the announcement today that a report has found "the smoking ban has had no clear adverse impact on the hospitality industry" just a little bit rude.

Now, admittedly, the hospitality industry as a whole is much larger than one poky little village community pub, but this Government-commissioned review states that the impact on pubs, bars and restaurants has been positive.

Any survey can have its data skewed in a manner to achieve the result which is felt is needed, and I'm sure restaurants and hotels have probably not seen a negative response from 2007's ban, but who can ignore the dramatic rise in the closures of public houses and bingo halls after its introduction, and the drop in footfall for businesses such as nightclubs?

I've often chuckled to myself when people ask what sort of impact the smoking ban has had on my business. The honest answer is that I have only lost a handful of customers walking through the door, but they now use the pub differently, and for a much shorter amount of time in an evening than they ever did before.

The net result in the first year was a drop of 40% in my takings - and that hurt. Further damage was inflicted by the increase in supermarkets aggressively targeting the home-drinking market and manipulating the price of alcohol so that consumers believe pubs are very expensive and pricing themselves out of the market, and that a microwave curry for two and Dale Winton's In It To Win It Lotto show on a Saturday night is a better way of entertaining themselves than going to the pub.

I don't blame customers for taking the action they have in order to be able to keep smoking in the warm and dry, but the media perspective is one of doom and gloom for the pub trade, many are finding it difficult to continue trading, and the government are doing their damnedest to tell us all is rosy and the smoking ban has been good for us.

It's been a hard slog to keep my pub running, as it has been for many others in this sector, and lots of others have fallen by the wayside. The short-term costs referred to by Professor Linda Bauld's review are negligible, and there have been no noticeable reductions in my insurance, cleaning or maintenance costs because of it.

It would be easier to spend a day having my head run over by tractor than arguing for the ban to be revoked, but it's time for the Government to stop telling us that the ban is a good thing for the industry when it so obviously isn't.

Pub Location Location Location​

Did anybody see last week's episode of Location Location Location? I managed to watch it over a curry with my wife last night and it was a classic example of a couple who viewed owning a pub through rose-tinted glasses. Needless to say, by the end of the show, and despite having been shown some businesses that many of us would die to have the spare cash to buy outright as they did, they still hadn't bought one.