A pub landlord who famously booted Sir Keir Starmer out of his pub has welcomed new Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s cuts to business rates.
Speaking to GB News, Rod Humphris expressed his support for the move which “favours small businesses over big ones”.
In his third day as Prime Minister, Mr Burnham announced that business rates will be cut by 20 per cent for pubs, clubs and live music venues across England.
Beginning in April next year, the cut to rates will apply to nearly 32,000 British hospitality businesses.
Offering his reaction to the measure, Mr Humphris admitted it will “help” his pub in Bath and the move is “welcome”.
He told GB News: “It will help. The truth is, this is welcome. It’s not enough necessarily if things go bad, because we’re all subject to the economy.
“If my customers don’t have enough discretionary spending money, then we’ll still be in trouble.”
He added: “But I also like it because it’s a measure which seems to favour small businesses over big businesses, which is unusual. But, yeah, fundamentally, thank you Andy, I’ll take it!”
Asked what other support he would like to see implemented to help save British pubs, Mr Humphris called for a “reduction or removal” of the minimum wage.
He told GB News: “The things I would kill for are either reduction or removal of the minimum wage so that I can start young people and train them before I’m forced to pay them any given amount.
“And a massive reduction in NIC, employment related costs, forcing us to pay pensions and employment taxes.
“Because you can’t serve beer without staff. You can’t. Usually our biggest bills are our staff, and every year since I’ve been trading, 20 years, it keeps going up. Can we please wind it back a bit?”
Asked for his verdict on Mr Burnham’s plans to “unfreeze the tax free allowance”, Mr Humphris admitted that it “might help”, but his customers are “really struggling” with the cost of living crisis.
He said: “It might help. One of the things I’m proud about the Raven, we have a very wide demographic, so I have people from the trades who up to this point have generally done pretty well, but obviously quite a lot of white collar customers, too.
“And generally speaking, these are the people you’re talking about, they’re really struggling. The amount of tax on our middle classes is actually very, very high.
“You’ve generally got two people working very hard just to have a house, raise their children and therefore their opportunity to go out for a family meal, things like that is very tight.”
Questioned on whether the move may be “too late” for some of Britain’s pubs, Mr Humphris stressed that within the industry, it is a “fight to survive”.
He concluded: “We all know that the whole landscape has been changing and it’s become a fight to survive, and that’s for many reasons. Some of them are cultural. I’m old enough to come from a generation where we would normally go for a beer after work. It still happens to a degree, but it’s largely gone.
“The vibrancy of our city centre in Bath is not too bad, but the feeling of it has got so much more controlled. We need much more freedom for small traders to open shops.
“To start a business in the city centre is a massive cost, both in terms of bureaucracy and capital.
“If we can do things like get out of the way of that and let small businesses take risks and then tax them when they succeed rather than forcing them to pay upfront, we could perhaps get some life into our city centres, which would help everybody.”
