This month sees the fifth anniversary of the reduction of the drink-driving limit in Scotland in December 2014. At the time, the immediate impact on the licensed trade was such that it caused a noticeable downward blip in Scotland’s national GDP figure. Now, five years later a study by academics at Stirling University has examined the longer-term effect on the trade and, perhaps predictably, concluded that it hasn’t really made a great deal of difference, saying that “Most participants reported no long‐term financial impact on their business.”
However, when you look at it more closely, the foundations for the study look distinctly flimsy. The authors interviewed a mere sixteen businesses, of which just four were classified as being in rural areas. Plus all of those four are described as “Hotel, pub and restaurant”, which by definition is going to be less affected than a normal pub that just maybe does a few bar meals. And it has been suggested on Twitter by licensing lawyer Stephen McGowan that at least some of the sixteen had been selected because they had received awards for taking steps to diversify their business. They seem to have deliberately chosen their subjects to support their desired conclusion.
Of course the impact of the change wasn’t going to be felt evenly across the whole of the licensed trade. Many pubs in the centres of large towns and cities would notice little or no difference. But, on the other hand, many pubgoers outside those areas would be placed in the position where their previously lawful behaviour had been declared illegal overnight. Few would want to risk the potentially severe penalties of breaking the law, and so they would respond by one or more of drinking less, visiting less often or not at all, and transferring their business to somewhere more accessible.I note that some of the 16 were specifically chosen in advance on the basis that they had demonstrated ways of innovating in response to the impact on trade, through an awards scheme. Full study here https://t.co/HBubN48SKm— Stephen McGowan (@LicensingLaws) December 10, 2019
None of those would do anything other than to reduce the business of the establishments they used to frequent, and two out of the three would also impact the trade as a whole. It was possible to argue that the smoking ban had the potential to bring new business into pubs from anti-smokers, although we know in practice any increase was greatly outweighed by the loss of trade from smokers and their tolerant friends. However, there is no upside whatsoever for the trade in cutting the drink-drive limit.
The authors do acknowledge some the issues that may have been caused with real-world pub visitors, for example:
Especially people do not tend to come out at tea time as much whereas they used to come out at tea time and just have a couple of pints and still drive. Whereas now you do not see that’...However, these are dismissed as insignificant in the wider context. They also state that they did not interview any owners of closed businesses, which seems a strange omission. It’s unlikely that cutting the limit in itself would have been the sole cause of any closure, but it may well have been a significant contributory factor which tipped them over the edge. But, of course, dead men tell no tales....So Sunday to Thursday you might get somebody coming in and having two, three, four pints up until midnight but maybe driving the next day; they would not be driving straight after leaving the pub but they'd be driving after they got up in the morning… …so they would go home earlier or reduce the amount, or just not come out at all.
Many people who pontificate about pubs seem to exist within a urban bubble and give the impression of having no conception whatsoever of how pubs actually operate outside it. There must be a large overlap with the useful idiots who still fail to recognise how much damage the smoking ban has wrought. And it’s important to remember that the vast majority of drinking drivers who visit pubs have no intention of breaking the law and indeed believe they are doing their best to stay within it.
Of course there is a road safety case for cutting the limit, although I would contend it’s a pretty flimsy one, and figures so far have suggested no reduction in the number of casualties. But nobody should delude themselves that it won’t have an adverse impact on the pub trade, and on many pubgoers themselves.
It’s rather amusing that, at the end of the study, the authors state that none of them have any conflicts of interest to declare. Shouldn’t that include being funded by the public health lobby?
Of course it’s going to be declared “a success” with no, or only negligible, effects on the pub trade. To admit otherwise is to admit the unthinkable, i.e. that the glib assumptions that were made prior to imposing the policy were, simply, wrong. And, as we know from the smoking ban, that’s the one thing that these wretched people will never do – admit that their judgement was in any way faulty. They do it with every darned policy they inflict on us, and not just in respect of pubs, either. To be honest, every pub in the whole country could go bust and shut up shop, and yet we’d still have the policy-makers pumping out meaningless, misleading “reviews” like these saying how much pubs have been “transformed” by their policies! I travel quite a lot around the UK, as indeed you do, Mudge, and I have to say that finding a real pub, i.e. not a born-again restaurant or some sterile town-centre bar, where one can just enjoy a few pints and a chat with some regular locals is next to impossible. Not absolutely impossible, of course, but certainly much, much more difficult than it was at the beginning of the 2000s when, to be frank, one was pretty much spoilt for choice, and exploring the good, the bad and the ugly was all part of the fun of discovering the character of a new area.
ReplyDeleteAnother point that has emerged from discussion on Twitter is that this legislation has led to such a climate of fear that people have become reluctant to have as little as three pints in the evening if they are going to be driving the following morning, because they are so concerned about being stopped. Rationally, there's no reason for them to do that, as all the alcohol would undoubtedly be metabolised, but you can't really blame them for over-caution.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I noticed on a recent trip to Inverness was that some of the pubs had some form of breathalyzer machine, not something I've seen in England.
ReplyDeleteAs I've previously stated elsewhere, just looking at the GBG entries for Scotland shows a virtual monopoly on outlets which have decent public transport links. It's significantly impacted sales of cask enough to make carrying it unsustainable in many rural outlets, with a lot of handpumps removed because it can't be sold quickly enough.
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