If the countryside is a jigsaw of interlocking interests the village pub is a central piece. Whether it is a cricket club dinner, a hunt meet, a shoot lunch or just a couple of pints on a cold January evening, many of our lives are hugely enhanced by a good pub. We see the value of village pubs and the pride local people have in theirs every year in the huge number of entries in the Countryside Alliance Awards pub category. I am always amazed at the effort and investment so many people put into keeping their local pubs going, whether through community cooperatives or private investment. 

For all that effort, however, running a village pub is becoming increasingly challenging. It does not feel as if these should be fragile enterprises by nature. Many have endured for centuries, surviving wars, depressions and pandemics, adapting to changing tastes and reinventing themselves. The fundamental challenge at the moment is not a lack of demand for a good pub, but a sustained accumulation of policy decisions that fail to recognise the realities of rural life. Energy costs, wholesale price inflation, higher National Insurance contributions, increases in the minimum wage and now business rate hikes have all piled pressure onto businesses that cannot simply do more to compensate as costs rise. A village pub does not have the footfall of a city bar, nor the option of cutting staff without cutting service altogether.

The first hit the current government delivered was the changes to National Insurance introduced in its first budget which particularly affected employers of part-time and younger workers. This disproportionately affected pub businesses. Now the government is introducing changes to business rates which will have a significant negative financial effect on many rural pubs. Ministers want to promote new permanent tax rate reductions, but the reality is that the end of pandemic-era rate relief and big increases in property valuations outweigh the benefits of those reductions for most rural pubs and mean that they will be paying more, not less.

The problems do not stop there. Just this week the government brought forward proposals to reduce drink-driving limits. We all understand the desire to reduce road traffic accidents, but at the very least the evidence base for this change is arguable. A reduction of the limits in Scotland does not seem to have led to a reduction in accidents. Whether or not you support the policy, the suggestion from Ministers that pub users can simply use public transport or a taxi reveal a limited understanding, or consideration, of rural realities. A situation where a single pint in a village pub could lead to a drink driving conviction is not going to help an already challenged sector.

The tragedy is that the loss of a rural pub is never just the loss of a business. It is the erosion of a community asset. Remove it and the social fabric frays. The Countryside Alliance has long argued that rural pubs matter because rural communities matter. If government is serious about levelling up, about wellbeing, about vibrant local economies, it must start listening to the people who keep the lights on in village pubs.