Smoking and pubs

We still don't know what rules will govern the re-opening of pubs on July 4 so I won't tempt fate.

According to Boris the government will publish detailed guidance later today so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the brazen attempt by Tory MP Mark Pritchard to persuade ministers to restrict or ban smoking in outdoor seated areas has fallen on deaf ears.

Apparently there is going to be a menu of options and I wouldn’t rule out some proprietors introducing restrictions on smoking and vaping, but that's a matter for them not the government.

If individual publicans do choose to restrict smoking outside, smokers who are regular pub-goers will have every right to feel aggrieved though because there was an unwritten understanding, when smoking was banned indoors, that ‘outdoors’ was for smokers.

The fact that smokers had no choice but to go outside to light up - whatever the time of year, whatever the weather - didn’t stop some anti-smokers calling for al fresco drinking areas to be ‘smoke-free’ too, although it was noticeable that their demands always coincided with the arrival of warm and sunny weather.

Pubs were ‘smoke-free’ inside by law, now they wanted outdoor areas to be ‘smoke-free’ too.

Interestingly, this is where the UK and Ireland appear to part company. In the UK it’s rare for an area outside pubs to be officially designated the ‘smoking area’. Instead it’s called a beer garden or some such and the assumption is that it’s there for everyone, although no-one should object if anyone lights up.

Funnily enough, when Forest got involved with the Great British Pub Awards in 2010 we co-sponsored an award that was initially called the ‘Best Creative Outdoor Area’, which seemed a bit silly to me because it glossed over the fact that what we were looking for was the most creative outdoor smoking area.

So the following year, and the year after that, we changed the name to ‘Best Outdoor Smoking Area’.

The problem was, some publicans didn’t want their pub nominated for having the best smoking area because they didn’t want it to be known as a smokers’ pub.

As a result the pubs with the best outdoor smoking areas often went unheralded because they preferred not to promote them as smoking areas, even when they had spent tens of thousands of pounds on awnings, furniture and outdoor heaters in a deliberate attempt to keep or attract smokers to their pub.

In Ireland publicans are far less coy about their smoking areas. In fact, you'll often hear them referred to as ‘smoking rooms’. Technically they may be ‘outside’ but they are often extensions of the pub itself.

Vintners will often push the regulations to the limit, or even break them, creating a space that is largely enclosed and sheltered from the elements.

In the UK however smoking areas are often more opaque. It’s generally understood, I think, that smoking is allowed outside but, rather like our constitution, it’s an unwritten rule that gives anti-smokers the opportunity they crave to occasionally make an issue of it.

Hopefully tolerance, common sense and pragmatism will dictate policy as pubs return to ‘normal’. After all, it's going to be hard enough patrolling outdoor areas to prevent them becoming over-crowded without having to check for tell-tale wisps of smoke and fag butts.

Update: Interesting article on Spiked today. ‘The coronavirus lockdown is only the latest blow in decades of attacks on our pubs,’ writes Paddy Hannam.

It includes a passage about the 2017 Forest report, ‘Road To Ruin: The impact of the smoking ban on pubs and personal choice’:

By 2017, 10 years after the ban became uniform across the UK, over 10,500 pubs had closed – nearly a fifth of all British pubs.

There are plenty of factors at work in these trends, rising costs among them. Significantly, the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession had a huge impact on pubs, and the fact that these two factors came shortly after the smoking ban means we have to be careful when assessing the effect of that ban on closures.

However, as a 2017 report by Forest highlights, there was a big jump in pub closures in the year after the ban came into force in England and Wales – before the financial crisis hit and certainly before most of its effects began to be felt.

In England in 2007, 1.3 per cent of the country’s pubs closed, and in 2008, a further 2.5 per cent closed. Wales experienced an even more marked change, with almost one per cent of its pubs closing in 2007 and roughly three per cent closing in 2008.

See ‘We cannot let them call time on our pubs‘ (Spiked).