The real cost of the £1 Pub

The real cost of the £1 Pub. It is a heresy today to be ‘anti business’ in any way shape or form. Small and medium sized enterprises form the bulk of our economy; therefore to be ‘anti’ their interests is, by extension, to be anti-jobs, anti-wage earners, anti-families, anti-community and anti-everything. The prevailing ideas that shape our economy tell us that no matter how harmful the business or destructive it is to those very same families and communities, as long as it is legally sanctioned it is beyond rebuke. The profusion of betting shops and payday lenders represents choice, not harm, and only ‘do gooders’ and ‘busybodies’ would seek to limit the influence of these enterprises. The language of freedom, choice and self-expression was long ago hijacked by vested interests who sell harmful or addictive products or services to vulnerable and addicted people. It has been used to present the addiction industries as crusaders for consumer rights, preventing the joyless pettifogging bureaucrat from taxing or regulating the nation’s fun away. This rather skates over the fact that this ‘fun’ periodically results in family breakdown, suicide, despair and loneliness; bookmakers, brewers and high calorie food manufacturers all adhere to the flimsiest of industry ‘responsibility’ codes which have little function other than to present them as good ‘corporate citizens’ when the reality is that they are powerful forces of social destructiveness. The argument that all business is good business will no doubt be resurrected in the coming weeks and months as a series of £1 pubs open their doors. The pubs, who sell a pint of beer for £1.50, less than half the average national retail price for alcohol, will start trading at 8am. The very idea that there is any sense of moral or social responsibility at all here is laughable, as only the most vulnerable, addicted and desperate drinkers will be looking to buy knock down price beer as soon as they wake up. Amazingly, someone, somewhere has already thought long and hard about the people they will exploit and in some cases who’s deaths they will hasten. This same individual has looked at the projected profits from this enterprise and thought that the suffering of others is more than sufficient a price worth paying. Raising any kind of moral objection to this gross irresponsibility tends to lead to the claim of being an anti-business heretic, so instead, here is a business argument, should an application for a license for a £1 Pub be applied for in Cardiff. Just as there are economic goods, it is also common for economists to describe certain products or services as ‘bads’. As you might expect, a ‘bad’ is a net drain on the economy, causing a greater loss in material resources to the community than it creates. If a new pub employs ten people at ten pounds an hour (a generous estimate, chosen for mathematical simplicity only) and hires them all for ten hours a day, then pre-tax wages will be £1,000, roughly £800 of which will circulate in the economy. If the same pub attracts vulnerable, marginalised, addicted drinkers, it must add an enormous multiplier of value to pay for the doctors, nurses, social workers, policemen, probation officers, community psychiatric nurses, addiction specialists, drop-in centres, unemployment and sickness benefits and street cleaning workers needed. In addition to this, the loss of economic productivity caused by alcoholism also needs to be factored into the decision to open a £1 Pub if we are seriously attempting to make a business case for it. Last year it was reported that nearly 17 million working days a year are lost to alcohol, which surely makes a business case for closing a few pubs down. It is sad that we must make our arguments in this way and that the rationale that ‘this will harm people’ is not enough. Discount selling of alcohol isn’t a way of putting money into our communities; it’s a non too subtle way of siphoning it off. The £1 pubs that have opened in Stockton and Middleborough will add to the impoverishment of those communities and we must be vigilant that Cardiff does not suffer a similar fate.