Beer and Pub Taxation

Steve Double Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this important debate. I have the great honour of representing a constituency with St Austell Brewery at its heart. St Austell Brewery should be of particular interest to us, because it brewed the beer for the Long Live the Local campaign. I had the great honour of sampling one of the very first pints that were produced. I pay tribute to James Staughton, who has for many years been the chief executive of St Austell Brewery, and recently retired and stood down from that position. He was rightly recognised in the honours list with an OBE. He has been the driving force that has led the brewery’s success over the past 20 years or so, so that it now produces the finest beer in the country, Tribute.

There are 85 pubs in my constituency. I do not claim to have visited every one of them, although I suspect that over the past 40-odd years I have probably visited the vast majority of them. Every one of them is important to the community that it is a part of. As we have heard from many hon. Members, pubs are about much more than drinking beer. They are the heart of our communities—important for bringing people together to celebrate, commemorate and even, at times, mourn together. They are great for social cohesion and good for mental health. I believe it is possible that one reason we see mental health deteriorating is that people are not gathering to socialise, support one another and build friendships around a pint. We should therefore recognise the important role that pubs play. They are also important for raising money for charities. Many community pubs raise thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds every year to support local charities.

I am all for taxing things that do harm. I am all for tax on cigarettes. I think it should be higher. My question, however, to the Minister is why, if we recognise that pubs are so good for and important to our communities, we tax them so highly. According to the statistics that I have, pubs in my communities contribute about £105 million a year to our local economy, but they pay £30 million a year in taxation. That is too high. I call on the Minister: let us do all we can in the coming Budget and in the years to come to reduce tax on pubs. Yes, we can do it by cutting beer duty. We should do it as quickly as possible by reviewing business rates for pubs; but I ask him also to look carefully at how we can have a differential duty rate for beer sold in pubs—particularly on draft beer. If we can find a way to lower the duty on beer sold in pubs it would be an important step towards protecting pubs and making sure that they succeed for the future.