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  • British pubs have survived wars, floods, fires,

  • and more than one plague.

  • The question now is can they weather

  • the coronavirus pandemic?

  • Everyone is wondering whether the pub industry

  • is on the verge of collapse.

  • So what this chart shows us is spending in UK pubs

  • compared to the same day of the week in 2019.

  • Zero here is the baseline.

  • You can see that it dropped by 100 per cent

  • - so completely - during the lockdown.

  • And then, as it reopened, spending actually

  • exceeded what happened in 2019 in the months between August

  • and even just before the beginning of October.

  • Pubs had to be closed.

  • There really wasn't a choice.

  • Those people who tested positive for coronavirus

  • were twice as likely to have been at a restaurant

  • than those who tested negative.

  • And in the chart we can see it in the blue bar, dark blue bar.

  • And that was also true in the UK.

  • We've got here some data from Public Health England that

  • shows that shopping and eating out

  • were the activities most likely to be reported

  • amongst those people who tested positive for coronavirus.

  • So the same rings true for the UK.

  • When the case count started to drop,

  • the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, decided

  • that once pubs had reopened, he would actually

  • actively incentivise people to go to pubs.

  • So people were given a discount and encouraged

  • to eat in pubs and restaurants, and bars and pubs

  • were the venues that had the most

  • windfall from this activity.

  • But these venues are hotspots for coronavirus transmissions,

  • so that's why we're here today on the last day of pubs being

  • open in England before a nationwide lockdown that

  • should last a month.

  • I don't have a crystal ball to tell you what happens next.

  • But it's reasonable to expect that amongst the millions

  • of people who work in the hospitality industry and who

  • are more likely to be young - under 35 -

  • women and in a part-time and low-paid jobs,

  • a lot of them might not come back to a job.

  • We know that the people who have been furloughed

  • are more likely to be low paid, as we can see from this chart.

  • Also, this chart really shows us what's

  • happened to the hospitality industry.

  • This is quite indicative.

  • It's weekly hours of work.

  • And we can see that the pink line, which

  • is workers in the hospitality sector,

  • have been more affected than the average.

  • I think it's important to point out

  • a bit of historical context.

  • The number of public houses in the UK

  • have been declining for a while.

  • So we've gotten this chart here - number of pubs since 2001.

  • There's actually two main events that

  • affected the decline in the number of pubs

  • and accelerated it.

  • One is the ban on smoking indoors in pubs,

  • and the other one is the financial crisis.

  • So you can see that we went from well over 50,000 pubs

  • in the early 2000s to about 39,000 now.

  • According to estimates, the number of pubs

  • could decline by 25 per cent in the future.

  • However, we do know... from this chart that I showed you

  • earlier... that British people are actually very loyal

  • to pubs, and they're happy to flock back when they reopen

  • and spend even more than they did in previous years.

  • So if you're feeling very gloomy about the future of pubs

  • perhaps it's not all bad news.

British pubs have survived wars, floods, fires,

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