Something strange has happened to Britain’s high streets.
Walk through almost any town centre and the old independent coffee shops are disappearing. In their place come the chains: Starbucks, Costa, Caffè Nero, Greggs masquerading as cafés. The coffee is often perfectly acceptable, the décor reassuringly predictable and the toilets generally cleaner than the independents they replaced.
Yet something has still been lost.
The same process, I suspect, is happening to pubs.
This matters because pubs are not just businesses. They are social institutions. Or at least they used to be. Alongside churches, working men’s clubs, trade unions and football clubs, pubs were once among the places where British communities actually happened.
And like coffee shops, the economics increasingly favour scale.
Big operators can negotiate lower prices from suppliers, spread costs across hundreds of sites and survive on lower margins than independents ever could. A local landlord trying to keep alive a pub in Peterlee, Bishop Auckland or Hartlepool is competing not just with changing habits and rising energy bills, but with chains capable of squeezing profits to levels that would bankrupt a standalone business.
The Government is trying to move the UK from a low wage/low growth economy to a high wage/high growth economy. There are some signs that this is working. But attempts by the Government to move employers away from low wage employment is a problem for hospitality. Big operators like Wetherspoons can develop apps for ordering for example, which means that they can operate more efficiently with fewer staff. Local independent operators can’t do that.
Which brings us to Reform UK.
Nigel Farage’s party has launched an aggressively pro-pub policy package. It includes cutting hospitality VAT from 20% to 10%, reducing beer duty, abolishing business rates for pubs and reversing National Insurance increases for hospitality businesses.
Politically, this is smart.
Reform understands something many parties have forgotten: people feel the loss of pubs emotionally. They understand instinctively that when the local disappears, something else disappears with it. A village without a pub feels different. A town centre made up entirely of betting shops, vape stores and empty units feels poorer in ways GDP statistics struggle to capture.
In many parts of the country, pubs are among the last surviving pieces of social infrastructure.
There is, however, a problem.
The biggest beneficiaries of Reform’s policies may not be struggling independents but the largest pub chains.
No one illustrates this more clearly than Tim Martin, founder of Wetherspoons and a vocal admirer of Reform UK. Martin has long argued that hospitality is overtaxed and overregulated, and he is not wrong that many pubs face extraordinary cost pressures.
But Wetherspoons also happens to be unusually well placed to benefit from exactly the kind of broad-based tax reductions Reform is proposing.
Cut VAT and Wetherspoons benefits across hundreds of premises. Reduce beer duty and a chain selling millions of pints gains enormously in aggregate. Abolish business rates and a company operating large high-volume sites receives substantial relief. Reverse employer National Insurance increases and firms with thousands of employees gain far more in cash terms than a family-run local.
This is not corruption or conspiracy. It is economics. Untargeted tax cuts in concentrated markets strengthen firms with scale advantages.
We have seen this before.
Supermarkets did not kill independent grocers because consumers suddenly became evil. They won because scale allowed lower prices, wider choice and greater resilience. Coffee chains spread because they could tolerate thinner margins, absorb shocks and standardise the experience. When markets get tougher, the strongest firms tend to survive.
Pubs are heading in the same direction, small numbers of national operators owning the market, with independents reduced to niches.
If Reform’s package works exactly as intended, Britain could end up with more viable pubs — but fewer independent ones. The result may not be the revival of the old local so much as a country increasingly dominated by large chains capable of undercutting everyone else.
That is not necessarily an argument against helping pubs.
Britain probably should do more to support them. The decline of communal spaces has had real social consequences. Loneliness, isolation and political anger flourish in places where people no longer gather.
But if the aim is genuinely to save the local pub, then Reforms plans are too blunt an instrument.
A policy serious about preserving social institutions might instead target independent landlords, community-owned pubs and neighbourhood locals that provide something chains struggle to replicate: rootedness.
The irony is that Reform may be right about the problem but wrong about the economics.
You can cut the price of a pint.
But rebuilding the social world that once surrounded it is rather harder.