Battered by the storm

It has been only too obvious that the pub trade has been hit extremely hard by the Covid lockdowns and restrictions of the past couple of years, but there has been something of a lack of hard figures to quantify this. Now this has been rectified by the British Beer and Pub Association, who have updated their Beer Barometer statistics to bring them up to the end of 2021.

Unfortunately, they haven’t updated the detailed downloadable spreadsheet to back this up, but the headline numbers are all too clear. In 2020, as shown by the graph above, beer sales in pubs were no less than 55% down on 2019, while in 2021, where pubs in England were able to open without restrictions for the final five and a bit months, the drop had been cut back to 38%, which is still pretty devastating.

In this environment, it is hardly surprising that most pubs have found it a financial struggle, and obviously there is a knock-on effect on the brewing industry which was only partially offset by increased off-trade sales. Beer is proportionately consumed more in the on-trade than other forms of alcoholic drinks, and so a switch to home drinking was inevitably accompanied by a movement to wines and spirits, where duty receipts rose by 8% and 13% respectively.

The removal of the remaining Covid restrictions in England from 27 January gave a positive psychological signal, and hopefully the road is now clear for the pub trade to make a sustained recovery during 2022. But they are certainly not out of the woods yet. Kate Nicholls of UK Hospitality reported yesterday that, even now, 23% of pubs and bars are still trading at a loss, and only 30% are doing any more than break even, so there is still a long way to go.

An important factor in underpinning the recovery will be maintaining the lower VAT rate of 12.5%, which is due to end in April, until at least October. While this does not directly affect beer, it does give a boost to any establishments that serve food.

It’s always hard to generalise from one’s own personal experiences, but I have got the impression that the business in pubs has noticeably picked up over the past three weeks, and in fact my local Wetherspoon’s was pretty rammed on two different occasions. In contrast, last autumn there was always, with few exceptions, the feeling of a slight shadow hanging over proceedings, which was only made worse by the overhyped Omicron scare in December. So there are grounds for optimism, and hopefully we can look forward to a good summer, especially given that a lot more people will be taking holidays in this country.