Westminster City Council's treatment of a London pub shows that silly season is not over
In an effort to reduce the number of after-work drinkers occupying pavement space outside a London pub, Westminster City Council has demanded that the pub must slow down its customer service. It has also insisted that it should stop serving food in its restaurant and redesignate the space for ‘vertical drinking’.
The idea — branded “bizarre” by industry commentators — originated as a sarcastic suggestion by the bar manager, but was leapt upon by the council as a sensible measure.
Westminster City Council is renowned as a strange, humourless and anti-business local authority with little recourse to common sense. Already this year it has been forced to perform a humiliating U-turn on its plans to introduce evening and weekend parking charges that would have damaged pub and bar trade.
And it is still pressing ahead with controversial plans to charge licensees fees rising to more than £1,000 for advice on licence applications.
Who are these so called ‘public servants’ who seem to love playing bad politics with our industry? All of their recent ideas — including this latest nonsensical “go-slow” instruction — appear to be terrible knee-jerk (with emphasis on the jerk) solutions desperately looking
for problems.
If this is the level of quality of decision-making we can expect from local authorities, we can look forward to a year-long silly season that perplexes, frustrates and damages the pub industry in three equal measures.
MA250 docks in Liverpool
From the ridiculous to the sublime. Our MA250 business club for independent licensed multiple operators met last week in Liverpool for an excellent day and evening of networking — working and playing hard.
We heard about a wet-led revival in the north-west by two companies — Amber Taverns and Bravo Inns — both achieving 20% returns for their investors.
We enjoyed the roller-coaster story of our recent Great British Pub Awards overall winner, the Lass O’Gowrie (see next week’s issue for our Big Interview). And we learnt about opportunities for pubs from licensing or franchising comedy nights from Jongleurs.
Then we hit the streets of Liverpool for a retail tour that showcased some interesting venues, including Intertain’s newly-refurbished Walkabout — with its double cubicles in the ladies’ toilets! — and Pax Leisure’s Alma de Cuba, an amazing Latin American bar and restaurant inside a converted Catholic church.
If you missed it you missed out. So if you are an operator with two or more pubs or bars, make sure you join the MA250. It’s free, it’s inspiring and it’s a lorra lorra laughs, as they say on Merseyside.
