The anti-pub charter
Once again there was no room in what budget reshuffle there was to make employing people a more attractive thing to do, either financially or emotionally.
There is still a huge ‘employers liability’ payment in national insurance and employers liability when the employee has so many rights that it makes you think very hard about taking on that extra member of staff or apprentice. Indeed, it makes you wonder how to employ less people, not more.
This applies not just to pubs but to all the many small businesses with relatively few employees who are finding that the rights employees have combined with the costs of employment make it a very unattractive proposition. It is good that personal allowances are going up for the lower paid as that includes many if not most licensees as well as their employees.
However, the galling thing for me about the budget is that it was an opportunity lost to improve the employment prospects of young people.
Following on from the Budget we had the announcement of the Government’s new Alcohol Strategy. You can find all the admirable details for yourselves but in summary the Government thinks that cheap alcohol is bad, expensive alcohol is good.
The duty escalator hits alcohol at source and minimum unit pricing will help move towards an expensive alcohol situation everywhere, which the Government thinks is the answer. (Well we can answer for that, it is certainly a factor stopping people coming to the pub.)
Education will help people move towards a personal entitlement to not drink, total sobriety being the aim. So there we have it, a muppets charter in which David Cameron, in his introduction, says:
‘… will not hurt pubs. A pint is around two units. If the minimum price is 40p a unit, it won’t affect the price of a pint in a pub. In fact, pubs may benefit by making the cheap alternatives in supermarkets more expensive’
Well thanks Dave. You may not have noticed but you couldn’t hurt pubs much more without rescinding all on licences with immediate effect. All in all, last week was not a good week for pubs. Dave’s government could have signalled that employing people is a good thing by lowering employers national insurance with a view to removing it altogether.
His government could have showed that supervised drinking is a good thing by giving pubs benefits such as a reduction of the duty on draft products or a business rates reduction. There was nothing for our industry and we have to learn that our trading environment is very hostile from the point of view of tax and regulation.
Our customers are also more and more demanding with regard to standards and value. Be prepared to work in that framework or get out. It really is that simple.
