Wigan bars businessman slams Government coronavirus support scheme

Mr Pagett said a combination of a 10pm curfew on bars and pubs and the fact staff will have to work a third of their hours to be eligible for top-ups from the Government makes the roles occupied by his 41-strong staff unviable.

SL Leisure Facilities owns Morty’s, Reef, The Wiend Bar and Party House and Mr Pagett said the vast majority of its takings happen after the time bars now have to shut by law.

That means the business is simply not taking in enough money to be able to pay the staff to work enough hours.

Mr Pagett described the calamitous drop in takings SL Leisure Facilities have seen since the new measures were considered and then brought in. He called for the furlough scheme, which is set to be wound up at the end of October, to continue and spoke of his frustration that the new measures to help firms through Covid-19 do not seem to work for the hospitality sector.

And he said he fears for his business’ future if the more stringent coronavirus restrictions last for six months, as prime minister Boris Johnson has hinted could be the case.

He said: “On a typical Friday night before lockdown Reef would take more than £5,000. The Friday just gone we took £129.

“The 10pm curfew has absolutely killed the late-night trade. We make most of our money between 11pm and 1am. We’ve not got enough coming in to cover the payroll to back up Rishi Sunak’s scheme.

“It has basically made 41 viable jobs into 41 unviable ones. I don’t know where we’re going to go from here.

“The staff have to work a third of their normal hours to qualify for the new scheme but if we’re not taking any money it’s impossible. We’ve already had to make some redundancies.

“It’s not worth opening late-night venues. People just don’t want to go to them earlier on. This is just not sustainable for six months. I don’t think we will last six months to be honest.

“I think the furlough scheme needs to be extended, in particular for hospitality which has been harder hit than anything else.

“I just feel that hospitality has been completely abandoned. There has been no real support for our industry. When we reopened we were just told: ‘off you go’.”

Mr Pagett also raised the possibility that an early curfew would lead to people leaving bars, where stringent measures on social distancing, hand sanitise stations and caps on numbers are in place, to drink at home in unregulated environments where the virus could spread more easily.