Village pub landlord appeals for help after losing £4K a week

Nick Holden, who has run the Geese and Fountains at Croxton Kerrial with partner Kate Ahrens for five years, gave a sobering insight into the financial devastation the need for social distancing and restricted opening hours is having on the hospitality industry.

The pub was able to keep going thanks to a £25,000 government grant during lockdown and then increased custom trigged by the Eat Out to Help Out scheme which ran through August and gave customers the chance to enjoy half-price meals with pubs and restaurants able to claim back the discounted portion from the treasury.

But since then, Nick said business was struggling badly and, with a £6,000 weekly turnover needed to break even, his pub has taken just £3,162, £1,548, £2,255, £2,149 over the last four weeks.

He told the Melton Times: “Since March we’ve been trading at a loss and that’s just not viable.

“For September and October we calculate we are losing between £3,000 and £4,000 a week.

“The way things are going around the country we now realistically don’t expect the situation to get better before next spring or summer and we can’t sustain a £4,000 a week loss for that period of time, noboody could.

“I would be surprised if we are able to see out the year if nothing changes.”

Nick says he expects the government to come to the aid of hospitality businesses because there would be a huge knock on effect for breweries, food producers and other suppliers of pubs and restaurants if many of these businesses were to fold.

He added: “We’ve been asking for a whole number of things, the whole industry has been.

“We need grant support because the bottom line is the amount of trade we are doing now doesn’t pay our bills.

“All of the restrictions and the precautions we’ve put in place mean that we have more staff on duty than we used to do.

“So our costs have gone up in order to comply with all the rules but our takings have gone down and that’s an impossible situation to be in.

“Both the furlough and the new job support scheme are completely useless for pubs and restaurants because we don’t really have lots of staff who are sitting at home twiddling their thumbs and even if we did we couldn’t afford to pay them a proportion of those hours which is what the new scheme expects is to do.

“For the hospitality trade we’ve got most of our staff at work and the government refuses to help with any of their wages because they are working and therefore they should be making us a profit.

“We can’t afford to pay people more than the hours they are working which is what the government expects employers to do.”

Nick called on local people to support local pubs and restaurants rather than buying cheaper alcohol from supermarkets.

The 10pm curfew for all hospitality businesses makes no sense, he says, because customers are leaving a safe environment of wearing masks and socially-distancing to mix with others on the streets and in other’s homes.

The new restrictions are stopping from going to pubs and restaurants, he said, which is putting their viability at risk.

“It is either because people are nervous about going out or because various bits of the government rules mean that they can’t socialise with their friends in the way they used to,” Nick explained.

“All those things add up.

“Even though we are only in a tier one area, and the cases numbers for Melton are not too bad compared to other parts of the country, we have noticed a massive drop off in our B&B bookings because a lot of the B&B trade for us tended to be either from people travelling for business, which has been massively reduced at the moment, or people travelling for family events such as weddings and so on and all of those have been cancelled.

“Belvoir Castle used to hold lots of weddings, a lot of the larger pubs and hotels around the Vale of Belvoir had a lot of wedding business but all of that’s gone.

“We are trading about 20 per cent of our usual B&B business, food trade is down roughly by about half and our drinks trade is down by more than a half.

“That’s because we are a traditional village pub and what people like to do in a pub like ours is sit at the bar and have a natter.

“They are not allowed to sit at the bar, they are not allowed to sit with anyone that they don’t live with.

“We are trying our best to keep people safe and we don’t want to bend the rules and that means that the whole experience of coming to the pub is very different.”

Nick believes the government is better off keeping hospitality businesses afloat and protecting jobs in the industry rather than having to pay the cost of unemployment benefits or retraining those people.

As it stands, he doesn’t think the pub will make up lost revenue from the traditional Christmas and new year boost to trade because people won’t be able to celebrate with their friends in the way they normally do and they will likely to stay at home with family instead.

Nick clearly loves being in the industry but he has real concerns about the immediate future, adding: “It’s been a tough industry for 20 or 30 years, probably longer, it’s a long time since people went into hospitality for an easy life retirement way to make money.

“It’s a hard slog. You work long hours. We’re in the kitchen at 7am cooking people’s breakfasts and we are still at work at midnight cashing up and cleaning and that’s a seven day a week commitment.

“We know that when we take on pubs and restaurants but there is nothing like the buzz of lots of people in your place and they are enjoying the food and the drinks, they are socialising, happy and you’ve put a smile on 30 or 40 people’s faces.

“But right now that job is made a million times more difficult and at the end of the day, we lock the doors and we look at the money we’ve made and that money isn’t enough to pay the bills.”