As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on beer and brewing, I welcome the measures that the Chancellor announced to support sectors that have been particularly hard hit throughout the pandemic and by many of the measures that were necessary to fight coronavirus. In the previous financial year, around £17 billion in lost trade was wiped off the value of the pub and beer sector. Trade in the wider hospitality sector was down 64% year on year; beer sales through pubs fell by 70%; and at least 1,000 pubs that closed during the restrictions have still not opened their doors since the end of those restrictions.
Beer and pubs are worth fighting for and are intrinsically linked. Pubs and brewing support around 930,000 jobs throughout the United Kingdom, roughly equally split between men and women, and around half the people employed in the sectors are aged under 25. Pubs and brewing support more than 1,000 jobs in my constituency of Dudley South. They contribute around £26 billion to the UK economy and, as the Chancellor will be aware, around £15 billion to the Exchequer in tax revenues.
If pubs are a force for good economically, they are also a force for good socially and culturally. As Professor Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford wrote in his report “Friends on Tap”, people who have a local that they use regularly are more likely to have more friends and to be more
“satisfied with their lives and feel more embedded in their local communities”.
They are likely to be healthier and happier.
Isolation is one of the big social challenges that face so many of our communities. Pubs really were the original social network. They are at the heart of our communities. So often, when a pub in a town or village closes, it is the last facility to go. As pubs have closed throughout the pandemic, it is not just one service that has gone with them. As we have seen through so much of the work by the wonderful charity Pub is The Hub, there are, in effect, community centres operating out of pubs. There are parent and child groups, jobs clubs and almost every facility and service. The APPG even visited one pub with a barber and hairdresser operating out of the bar. I only hope that the people cutting the hair had less to drink than some of those who might have been on the receiving end of the haircut. Pubs also raise more than £100 million a year for charities and they support grassroots community sport to the value of £40 million annually, working in every one of our constituencies.
Over the past two years, pubs have never been in greater need of support, so pubs, brewers and beer drinkers were looking to the Chancellor today to see whether he would step up to that challenge. I was pleased to hear that he did with a package of measures that went beyond what I think the industry had even dared to hope for. A key measure will be around business rates. The 50% support on business rates will make a massive difference to the viability of many pubs and to the jobs and livelihoods that depend on them.
One of my first questions in this place after I was elected six and a half years ago was to ask the now Health Secretary about business rate reform. As has been alluded to during this debate, it has been promised a few times. For this finally to go ahead, we need to make sure that it recognises the realities of a 21st century economy where
the value of property is not necessarily the driving force of economic activity, as it might have been 50 or 60 years ago.
Pubs pay around 2.5% of business rate revenues and that is despite having only about 0.5% of the rateable values. They are paying far more than the proportionate amount and that needs to be addressed during the reforms that were mentioned earlier.
As a sector, beer and pubs were absolutely clear that the one thing they could not afford as they started to rebuild after the pandemic was an increase in alcohol duties.