“I remember when pubs first started serving wine,” said the man opposite me — two cold pints of lager between us in the Kentish sun. These were the words of pub landlord Terry Cronin.
Growing up in his parents’ Bermondsey pub, the Cock and Monkey, in the 1970s, later following them in the early 2000s to The Wheatsheaf in Kent, Terry has seen a radical shift in that time.
He’s watched everything change: what we drink, how we drink, and what a pint now costs.
When I asked Terry about his margins on beer, he told me: “You’re more or less forced to do soft drinks, coffees and food.” The truth is, selling beer is no longer a profitable enterprise for most public houses.
Terry also reported a significant change in people’s habits since the COVID-19 pandemic, which rocked the hospitality sector. “People got used to staying in: takeaway, a few cans of cheap beer from Tesco — from the same breweries who charge me extortionate rates.”
I’ve noticed it myself. Games that used to draw a crowd — particularly big Champions League matches — hardly bring anyone to the pub anymore. As Terry put it, people would rather drink cheap super-market beer instead.
Even places with built-in advantages can’t ignore the squeeze. Malling Town Club — a members’ bar down the road from Terry’s — has had to raise the price of a pint of Guinness three times this year. No wonder the British Beer and Pub Association predicts a pub a day will close in the UK in 2025.
The knock-on effect to our communities — indeed, British society — is devastating.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates that roughly a quarter of adults feel lonely at least some of the time, and about one in ten younger people say they feel lonely “often or always”. Meanwhile, we’re spending longer online: Ofcom’s latest snapshot puts UK adults at about four hours twenty minutes a day on phones and computers, up sharply on last year.
The internet is great at serving us what we’ve just watched — like a barman who knows your “usual”. Because of this, there are concerns that increased time online – particularly by the young, impressionable, and the vulnerable – can lead to a greater risk of radicalisation.
In the Government’s Online Harms White Paper, they warn of “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles”, “where a user is presented with only one type of content instead of seeing a range of voices and opinions. This can promote disinformation by ensuring that users do not see rebuttals or other sources that may disagree…”
At the bar, bad ideas meet the counter-argument. We encounter people in the same community, with different algorithms. In the digital age, where news and entertainment are so fragmented, it’s more important than ever that we spend time in each other’s company and engage in the age-old means of exchanging information — the spoken word.
Pubs bring neighbours, friends, family and, yes, strangers together
The pub experience is about so much more than simply drinking. Pubs bring neighbours, friends, family and, yes, strangers together. Indeed, I would argue that drinking with your peers, around people that care about you, is a far healthier habit than drinking cans of Stella on the sofa watching the game — whichever game that may be — on a dodgy firestick. (Plus, there’s better beer.)
The British pub is an institution in its own right. At a time where many of our institutions are being called into question, this is surely one that must be preserved, or else we may soon live in a country where only the privileged few can afford to go out for a beverage.
This is an inequality The Guardian dubbed sobering. Alas, the cost of a pint of beer has risen at twice the rate of salaries since 1990; increasing by 300 per cent and leaving the UK average price at over a fiver for the first time.
And yet this doesn’t have to be the end of the frog and toad.
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, could lift the perception of “doom and gloom” around this Labour government — all while staying within what remains of her fiscal rules. When she stands at the Despatch Box this autumn to deliver her Budget, Reeves should reach for something simpler — a policy that recognises the difference between a fresh pint enjoyed with friends and a “tinny” cracked open at home alone.
It’s time to finish what the Brexit Pubs Guarantee started and make drinking in pubs not just the more enjoyable choice, but a cheaper one.
Right now, beer sold in pubs gets a small discount on duty through what is known as Draught Relief. Reeves should go further and scrap that duty entirely for draught beer. If, at the same time, she raised tax on supermarket beer, the policy wouldn’t cost a penny.
In return, it would offer a lifeline to an industry battered by wave after wave of setbacks and reverse the downward trend of vacancies in hospitality. It’s fiscally neutral and it might just keep the bell above the bar from falling permanently silent. When that bell tolls, as they say, it tolls not just for them but for us all.
