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.