English pubs will receive stronger protection from closure under new planning regulations to be revealed possibly today, according to a press report.
As part of changes to the National Planning Policy Framework, to be announced by housing secretary Angela Rayner, developers will face more hurdles when they want to turn pubs into flats or offices, according to The Sunday Times.
Developers will be forced to prove there is no reasonable prospect of keeping the existing business afloat before a change of use can be considered.
Alan Simpson, chief executive of UKHospitality, said he was a little uncertain about the change. “Of course, we have to be incredibly careful before we lose these community assets, but it’s one thing to stop them being sold, it’s quite another to keep them open,” he told the BBC’s Today programme this morning.
“We need to ask why pubs — but not just pubs, restaurants, hotels — are going out of business in the first place, and, of course, that’s costs. This is a self-inflicted wound. We’re going to have maybe 2,000 hospitality venues close this year — a major increase on previous years — and that’s driven by costs, not the possibility to turn a pub into a house.”
He added: “The reality is that it’s quite difficult to make money out of a pub or a restaurant or a hotel with the current tax systems so people do end up having to find other roots. You can legislate to stop a pub being sold as a flat, but what you can’t do is legislate to force them to stay open if they’re not viable.
“Without matching this policy — which, broadly, I would support, I’d think — with genuine policies to make sure that running a hospitality venue is a financially viable enterprise, and it’s made unviable by government policy, it’s going to get worse, it seems to me, not better, unless certain changes come into effect.
“What we’ll be left with is not pubs which are open, but actually just empty premises because they can’t be used as a pub or a house.”
