Covid-19 Economic Support Package

Mike Wood Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

Hospitality is one of Britain’s biggest employers. Some 3.2 million people across the country rely on hospitality for their jobs, including 4,300 of my constituents in Dudley South. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor has always been a real and true friend of the beer and pubs sectors, in particular. He knows how much they have been affected by this pandemic, and he has delivered a comprehensive and unprecedented economic support package. Without such a support package, many thousands of pubs and breweries would simply not have survived the spring. They would not have got through the first phase of this outbreak.

I do not know whether the Chancellor has seen his rather fetching likeness on posters in pubs up and down the country, recognising the contribution that many of those support measures have made to making our pubs and other hospitality viable over the past six months but, as we are now firmly in a new phase of the pandemic, new measures are vital for those businesses that are not necessarily legally compelled to close. For those that are required to close their doors, the grant he has announced, although it may not cover the whole rent and all the fixed costs, will make a substantial contribution to the costs those businesses incur even before they pull a single pint or serve a single meal. However, there are also enormous challenges facing venues that are not legally compelled to close, those in tiers 1 and 2, where the legal restrictions that have been introduced make it impossible for them to operate. We know that one in 10 pubs has never reopened since March’s lockdown, and about two thirds of those that did reopen were already trading at a loss last month. That was before the introduction of 10 o’clock closing, mandatory table service, and of course the new restrictions that have come into effect today.

[Alex Cunningham]

Simon Longbottom of Stonegate, one of the largest pub groups in the country, has written to me about this, and he could have been making the speech that the hon. Gentleman is making now. He is very concerned that in tiers 1 and 2, he gets no help with his business costs whatsoever. Can the hon. Gentleman give the Chancellor some direct advice on what he needs to do about that?

[Mike Wood]

I would not presume to attempt to direct my right hon. Friend the Chancellor, beyond saying that pubs and hospitality cannot, of course, continue to operate with almost no income and without additional support that is proportionate to the legal restrictions they face. Those restrictions may not be in their immediate area. I have heard today from Titanic Brewery, a brewery in Stoke. The majority of its customers are in Liverpool and Merseyside, which are tier 3 areas, but that brewery will not receive support even though that is where its customers are based. These pubs need urgent additional support; otherwise, many of them are going to close their doors for good and never reopen, which would be a huge loss to not only our economy, but our communities.