Pubs are desperate to be open – but they could find out customers aren’t so keen to visit

The hospitality sector needs help, but the government has to be clear about how social distancing will work to give punters the confidence to return, writes Janet Street-Porter

Everyone involved in the hospitality industry is praying that the prime minister will relent and allow them to reopen for business on 4 July (PA)

By the end of the year, will half of our pubs have closed for good?

There’s been a steady decline for years – a quarter of premises have vanished since 2000. Coronavirus could be the death knell for an industry which has been slow to adapt to changing tastes and newer drink-driving laws. Almost a thousand UK pubs shut up shop in 2019, forced out by high rents, competition from microbreweries and wine bars and cheap supermarket booze. Four out of five of us have lost a pub within five miles of our home.

Post-pandemic, will pubs still be an essential part of the British way of life? National treasures to be preserved because they hold communities together? Or outmoded havens for old geezers clutching a beer and whiling away their final years at the bar?

Lockdown has seen the people who use them confined at home, unable to hang out with friends – many of us are meeting for a drink via zoom, which doesn’t involve dressing up (at least not below the waist), taking any form of transport, and afterwards we’ve only got to stagger to the telly or bed.

The industry is in crisis – this week, 50 of the UK’s leading breweries and pub chains wrote to Boris Johnson demanding a definite date they would be allowed to reopen. The industry claims it is losing £100m a month in lockdown, and 3.5 million hospitality workers could be out of work. Every day, another restaurant chain goes bust, because any new rules on social distancing make it uneconomic to operate.

Now, some publicans announced they are reopening and sod the government. Peter Borg-Ness of Oakman Inns (25 pubs in England) says he has “no choice” but to reopen on 3 July and is taking legal advice to see if he’s breaking the law and risking losing his licence. The battle for survival has begun.

Before the damage caused by recent events, many uneconomic rural pubs have been turned into housing, or those that struggled on forced to offer post office and shopping facilities, rethinking what they can offer to their communities – who could be sitting at home watching dozens of TV channels and movies.

In towns, the story is different. There’s been a huge rise in micro-brewing, whose premises are often former high street shops with younger patrons happy to crowd together – something that’s not going to be permitted in the foreseeable future.

Whatever the demand post-lockdown, restaurants and pubs can’t open overnight. Redesigning their premises, installing hand washing facilities and new ways of ordering and receiving food and drink all have to be planned with military precision. The industry has been drawing up their own code, ready to put into action.

Beer takes at least three weeks to brew and deliver. In spite of the fact that any male politician likes to be photographed with a pint in their hand to reinforce how “normal” they are, there has been no word from Downing Street to placate a desperate hospitality sector.

Unfortunately our leaders have been busy firefighting further accusations of incompetence after their “world-beating” contact-tracing app was scrapped to use a rival model devised by Google and Facebook. Today, there’s a blitz of “good” PR in order to divert attention away from the failures, including millions being offered to help school students learn in the holidays. But the nagging question of how to help the hospitality industry remains, and it’s not one that Boris can ignore for very much longer.

On 13 May, the prime minister laid out a “road map” for relaxing lockdown restrictions, and stated that the hospitality industry would be part of “step three” – measures that would not happen until early July. On 27 May he said he was “optimistic” that “we may be able to do things faster” and there were heavy hints that 4 July would be the magic day.

Why the silence? Johnson decided to order a last-minute review into the safety of reducing social distancing from two metres to one, or one and a half. Meanwhile, every country in the Union is pressing ahead with their own agenda. School kids in Northern Ireland can sit one metre apart and their pubs, cafes and restaurants can open on 3 July, although everyone has to be served at a table, meanwhile Nicola Sturgeon says there is “no date” in the near future to open pubs and restaurants north of the border.

Permitting social drinking in the new climate relies on customers maintaining a specified distance from each other. Pubs and restaurants with gardens will be at an advantage, as long as the weather holds. Indoor seating at tables will reduce the number of customers, in an industry which is already operating on a knife edge.

One of the most unattractive (for me) aspects of city pubs are the crowds standing boozing on the pavement you have to navigate to reach the bar. Westminster Council in London wants to help the hospitality industry return to profitability by closing roads to allow space to eat and drink outside – but the council also want to ban what they (amusingly) call “vertical drinking” claiming it will be impossible to maintain social distancing. If you drink enough standing up, you will find it hard to be vertical anyway.

Brewers are outraged – claiming that “vertical drinking” is part of our “culture”. That may not be an easy argument to win, especially with older customers. Research indicates that 13 per cent of people who normally go to bars and pubs are not planning to go back in the near future, and one in five say they will go less often.

Being compelled to sit at tables could make drinking more attractive to these fearful customers. If the government decides to impose strict numbers, how can publicans enforce them? After a few drinks, noise levels will rise, customers will strain to hear each other and want to sit closer together.

In Germany, only three quarters of pubs have reopened, with a 1.5 metre distancing rule. In Denmark, Italy and France customers are allowed to sit one metre apart, but have to wear a mask if they go to the bar. Alcohol lessens inhibitions – are licensees supposed to summon the police if customers refuse to sit down and start clustering in groups? On the evidence so far – behaviour on our beaches in the recent hot weather – the police will not get involved, as it is a hopeless task.

Everyone involved in the hospitality industry is praying that the prime minister will relent and allow them to reopen for business on 4 July. But what the brewers and publicans haven’t reckoned on is that the customers might feel very differently.