Publicans pushed to brink by Chancellor’s tax raid

The number of publicans facing eviction has hit record levels, a charity has warned, as more struggle to maintain their livelihoods after Labour’s latest tax raid on the sector.

A barrage of levies introduced in last year’s Budget, and a looming business rates bombshell in April, have piled both financial and emotional pressure on pub owners.

‘It’s a hammer blow really,’ said TV star and landlord Jeremy Clarkson, who owns The Farmer’s Dog in Burford, Oxfordshire. His comments came as the Drinks Trust said ‘record’ levels of publicans were facing the prospect of eviction.

The industry charity is worried about landlords being made homeless next year, adding that requests for financial support had surged by 20 per cent following Rachel Reeves’s Budget on November 26.

‘Hammer blow’: Publican and TV star Jeremy Clarkson has decried the taxes

It also said requests for financial support had gone up by 278 per cent since the Chancellor’s first Budget in October last year, as pub owners struggled to pay their mortgages while forking out even more cash to cover their running costs.

And the bleak situation is set to become even worse as hospitality owners face business rates bills rising by £318 million over the next three years, as well as higher minimum wages for workers from April. Nicola Burston, the chief executive of the Drinks Trust, said there was ‘an increasing sense of desperation from those in the most severe financial need who are turning to food banks, charities and anywhere they can just to put food on the table and pay energy bills’.

She added: ‘Pub owners can’t pay their mortgages because they are choosing to try and pay staff and keep their business afloat. More people are out of work as outlets close.

‘And those that are still operating are doing so on skeleton staff and not hiring anyone new because of the cost.’

It is not just landlords who are struggling. Burston said there had been ‘a knock-on effect all through the supply chain in the drinks industry’.

People working across production, logistics, sales and marketing are being made redundant ‘as an industry that has been battered by rising costs, duties and taxes, shrinks to adjust to the lower sales and reduced profits’, she said.

Anger reached boiling point last week as a slew of publicans, including Clarkson, began banning Labour MPs in a show of protest at the rapid rise in their bills under Keir Starmer’s Government.

Their fury was echoed by Greene King chief executive Nick Mackenzie, who oversees 2,600 pubs. He said last week that the sector had been ‘let down’ by Labour.