'We're the whipping boys of this government’ – top bar owners hit out at the 10pm curfew

The UK’s bars have once again been rocked by news of heightened restrictions, with the Government announcing yesterday (September 22) that all pubs, bars and restaurants in England must close at 10pm from Thursday.

Adding insult to injury, these new rules could last up to six months, according to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and venues caught breaking the curfew could be fined up to £10,000 or forced to close entirely.

For bar owners, this news is devastating. Industry experts had previously warned how months of forced closure had brought many venues to the brink of collapse. Reopening under social distancing posed further problems, with industry business models needing high occupancy to offset wafer thin margins. Now, their prime hours have also been taken away.

“Ever since furlough was announced, bars have been the whipping boys of this government,” said Edmund Weil, who co-owns a number of London’s most lauded bars: including Swift, Nightjar and Oriole.

This is a hard claim to refute. “First was the exclusion of service charge – taxable earnings – from the Job Retention Scheme, putting the majority of our staff on the breadline,” said Weil. “Then the five per cent VAT rate, which excluded alcoholic drinks, putting wet-led venues at a massive disadvantage in comparison to their dry-led competitors.”

Eat Out To Help Out offered little help, he pointed out, instead making Thursday the “new Monday” and “hollowing out our traditional peak trade hours”.

And now the 10pm curfew: “Announced with a scant 48 hours notice, this will decimate our businesses.”

“It is like shutting a restaurant for dinner service,” said Richard Wynne, the owner of Callooh Callay, another top London bar. “40 per cent of our trade comes after 10pm. This coupled with our venue capacity being halved means we are now trading at 30 per cent of what we were at pre-Covid.”

The perceived lack of trust fostered in consumers by the Government will be just as damaging as the loss of business hours, added Thomas Hay-Owens, general manager of The Old House in Sheffield: “The takeaway for a lot of individuals, due to the wording and framing of the announcement yesterday, will be that hospitality venues are unsafe and somehow to blame for recent spikes.”

"To ask the public to trust businesses once more, with incentives such as Eat Out To Help Out, and to then, within the space of two months, suggest to the public that visiting bars after a certain hour is inadvisable, doesn't only create a lack of public trust in our current government, but by proxy, a lack of public trust in the hospitality industry."

What’s more frustrating, is that this penalising of hospitality may be unwarranted. Many business owners feel their being painted by the government as at fault for Covid transmission is both “unfair” and “false”.

“The figures quite clearly don't back up the decision,” said Elliot Ball, one of the operators behind a number of UK cocktail bars, including London's Cocktail Trading Co, pointing to recent statistics from Public Health England that put restaurants and bars far behind other sectors in rate of transmission.

Workplace and educational settings have been responsible, individually, for double the number of Covid cases in the past week compared to ‘restaurant settings’. In total, only 4.6 per cent of new cases of Covid can be traced back to hospitality – meanwhile, 43 per cent of new cases have come from care homes alone.

Armed with these stats, worries are high that the new rules may prove ineffective, and cause even more measures to be introduced. Worse still, is the idea that the rules are purely an attempt to create a scapegoat for the recent spike.

“It is – like Boris Johnson’s initial cop-out during the week he said venues should stay open, but the public should not visit them – a cowardly, fudge,” said Weil. “The curfew is unlikely to have any tangible impact on transmission, but it plunges bars back into the abyss, just as light was beginning to appear at the end of the tunnel.”

Calling the new laws “lunacy”, Ball shared that he couldn’t help but feel “that this is yet another attempt to convince the British public that the Government’s failed measures are our fault.”

With “everyone drinking as much as they can in a short window and all hitting the streets at the same time,” he doesn’t expect good results. “As a result, I can't rule out another lockdown.”

Wynne agreed: “Because there is little evidence to support a 10pm curfew, my fear is that when the Government sees that numbers are not dropping, lockdown measures will be increased further on hospitality and be the final nail for us.”

For now, the industry is focusing on adapting. “Things will shift to a more day time experience,” said Anna Sebastian, bar manager of The Langham’s Artesian bar. “As a hospitality industry we pride ourselves on being flexible in everything we do, and we are left with no choice to do the same now.”

Flexibility and a willingness to adapt may prove to be the saving grace for the hard hit hospitality sector. “We are already altering our opening times and contacting people to see if they would like to come in earlier,” said Wynne. The response has been “great” so far.

In the face of it, hope does remain. “Despite everything, despite the worry and the uncertainty I remain hopeful that we will get through this,” finished Sebastian.