Town halls across Greater Manchester have paid out £1.1 million on consultants to help try and obtain Levelling Up funding.
16.03.2023 - 21:11 / manchestereveningnews.co.uk
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s ‘Brexit pub guarantee’, as announced in his first budget yesterday, has been met with confusion by the hospitality industry. Hunt announced yesterday that tax on draught beer in pubs will be frozen from August 1.
He said that duty on a pint in a pub will be ‘up to 11p lower than the duty in supermarkets, a differential we will maintain as part of a new Brexit pubs guarantee’. He went on: “British ale may be warm, but the duty on a pint is frozen.”
However, behind the buzzy 'Brexit' related headlines, some operators have pointed out that the ‘small print’ doesn’t quite read that way. Duty is in fact set to increase by £225 million across the sector later this year.
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“When the chancellor said he was going to support pubs, you kind of thought ‘well that’s good’,” brewer William Lees-Jones, managing director of JW Lees, told the Manchester Evening News. “Then when you read the small print, duty would appear to be going up by 10 percent, which is the current rate of inflation, which is astronomical.
“What the chancellor’s done, I’m not going to say he’s lied, but he’s used a lot of smoke and mirrors. When it was first announced, people were saying ‘oh it’s really good news’, then you read the small print and you go ‘oh, no it’s not, it’s not good at all’.
“Duty is going to go up, but there’s going to be a slightly lesser amount of duty in pubs. We need to know what he means by that.
“I was thinking ‘oh we’ll be able to put the price of beer down by 10p’, and then when you look at it, it says ‘[duty] is actually going to go up, and then go down’. So it’s actually going to stay the same.
“We have another three months to go from his
Town halls across Greater Manchester have paid out £1.1 million on consultants to help try and obtain Levelling Up funding.
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