Captains of Britain’s ailing hospitality industry today blasted the Prime Minister’s ‘absurd’ four-week delay to Freedom Day, warning that many businesses will go under this summer with the Prime Minister responsible for an ‘absolute disaster’.
Pub and restaurant bosses also warned of thousands of job losses and a £1 billion-a-week cost to the industry of persisting with social distancing measures. They pleaded with Boris Johnson not to leave the UK in ‘Never Never Land’. While rock star Frank Turner says festivals now cancelled at the last minute will likely go bust and music venues up and down the land may ‘sell up’ or never reopen again.
The hospitality sector faces losing crucial sales in the middle of the peak summer season as the new Freedom Day is pushed back four weeks to beyond the end of the Euro 2020 football tournament on July 11. Pizza Express entrepreneur Hugh Osmond said: ‘It is outrageous that they are delaying it a month, when daily deaths are in the single figures. There is a complete lack of understanding by the Government of the human issues involved.
‘The nightclubs who were all expecting to open, those pubs whose businesses haven’t been viable for over a year. Each and every one of those is a livelihood – how do you balance 100,000 jobs against a handful of deaths?’
Read More: If pubs lose their summer, they won’t survive’
