Wetherspoon reveals plans for re-opening on April 12 with payment by app and NO booking in advance – as more pub firms slam government’s ‘flimsy evidence’ for delaying return of indoor drinking amid legal challenge
- Wetherspoon chiefs have announced a seven point plan for reopening in April
- Chain, which runs almost 900 pubs, will encourage customers to order by app
- Customers will have to eat and drink outdoors, but the toilets will remain open
- Pub-goers will be encouraged to order by app and there will be reduced menu
- It comes as Government faces legal challenge over Covid lockdown road map
- Industry chiefs say indoor pub areas should be able to reopen along with shops
- Mitchells and Butlers today told MailOnline that the evidence appears ‘flimsy’
The seven point plan for Wetherspoon pubs to reopen from April 12
1) Test and trace in operation
2) Customers can come through the pub if that is the only access to the outside area
3) Customers can come through the pub if they need to use the toilet
4) Payment by app is preferable but those without the Wetherspoon app can order and pay direct with a member of staff
5) In and out routes will be marked throughout the pub
6) No booking system – meaning it will be first-come-first serve for customers
7) A reduced menu – including breakfast options, burgers, pizzas, deli deals, fish and chips and British classics
Wetherspoon has today revealed plans for reopening its outdoor areas next month – on the day another pub firm slammed the Government’s decision to keep bars closed until mid-April.
In what will be a huge boost to millions of Britons eagerly awaiting the return of beer gardens, the UK’s largest pub chain today announced its seven point plan to reopen outdoor areas in less than a month.
Customers will be able enjoy their pint or glass of wine in outdoor areas of pubs from April 12, under the Government’s current Covid road map,
However Wetherspoon chiefs say punters will able to come into the pub to use the toilet – or if it is the only way to reach the outdoor area.
In and out routes will be marked for those customers entering and leaving the pub, while test and trace will be in operation – as it was last time pubs were open.
The chain, which runs almost 900 pubs across the UK and Ireland, will encourage customers to use its app to place orders, though customers can still pay via a member of staff.
And there will be a slightly reduced menu, that will still include breakfast options, burgers, pizzas, deli deals, fish and chips and British classics
However bosses say the biggest difference to their rivals will be that customers will not be able to book places ahead of their visit.
Wetherspoon will instead opt for a first-come-first serve policy.
It comes as pub chain Mitchells and Butlers today slammed the Government’s decision to keep pubs closed until April 12, describing the evidence behind the decision as ‘flimsy’.
Meanwhile, the Government currently faces a legal challenge over its road map out of lockdown.
Hospitality trade leaders this week announced they were going to court over the ‘plainly irrational’ decision to restrict pubs and cafes to outdoor opening only from April 12 while allowing non-essential shops to reopen to customers.
Lockdown-weary Britons eagerly awaiting the return of beer gardens have today been given a major boost, with Wetherspoon chiefs announcing their reopening plan
The chain, which is owned by Tim Martin (pictured) runs almost 900 pubs across the UK and Ireland, will have to confine customers to outdoor areas until further measures are lifted
Customers will have to remain in outdoor areas (pictured: Such as this beer garden in London), though bosses say customers will be able to come into the pub to use the toilet – or if it is the only way to reach the outdoor area
Pub-goers heading to Wetherspoons will be encouraged to order their food and drink on the chain’s mobile app
How will lockdown ease in the roadmap?
Step One Part One: March 8
From March 8, all pupils and students will return to schools and colleges across England.
So-called wrap-around childcare will also be allowed to resume, paving the way for after and before school clubs to reopen.
People will be allowed to meet one other person outside for recreation, for example, to have a picnic or to meet for coffee.
Care home residents will be able to have one regular named visitor.
The Government’s stay at home order will remain in place, with travel for non-essential purposes still banned.
Step One Part Two: March 29
From March 29, outdoor gatherings of up to six people or a larger group from up to two households will be allowed. These gatherings will be allowed to happen in private gardens.
Outdoor sports like tennis and basketball will be allowed to reopen and people will also be able to take part in formally organised outdoor sports.
It is at this point that the Government’s stay at home guidance will end, to be replaced by ministers encouraging people to ‘stay local’.
However, the Government is expected not to define what constitutes local, instead choosing to rely on people using their common sense to decide on journeys.
People will still be told to work from home wherever possible while international travel will still be banned unless it is for essential purposes.
Step Two: April 12
Nom-essential retail will be allowed to reopen as well as personal care premises like hairdressers, barbers and nail salons.
Public buildings like libraries, museums and art galleries will be allowed to welcome back customers.
Meanwhile, hospitality venues and outdoor attractions like theme parks will be given the green light to reopen in some form.
However, there will still be rules on household mixing: Essentially any activity which involves being indoors will be restricted to members of the same household.
Gyms and swimming pools will also reopen from April 12 but only on the basis that people go on their own or with their own household.
Pubs and restaurants will be able to reopen but at this point they will only be able to have customers outdoors.
Any visits to a pub or restuarant will have to comply with the rules on social contact, so no more than two households or the rule of six.
The Government will not be bringing back the old requirement for people to order a substantial meal with alcohol while the old 10pm curfew will be ditched.
All customers at hospitality venues will also have to be seated when they order food or drink, with ordering at the bar prohibited.
Campsites and holiday lets where indoor facilities are not shared with other households can also reopen but trips must be restricted a single household.
Funerals will be allowed to continue with up to 30 people, while the rules on wedding receptions will be eased to allow the number of guests to increase from six to 15.
Step Three: May 17
The two household and rule of six requirements for outdoor gatherings will be ditched but gatherings of more than 30 people in places like parks will still be banned.
Crucially, mixing indoors will be allowed again. The rule of six or a larger group from up to two households will be allowed to meet.
However, this will be kept under review by ministers to see if rules could be relaxed still further.
This is also the point at which pubs and restaurants and other hospitality venues will be able to open indoors, with the rule of six and two household limit in place. But groups meeting outdoors at pubs will be allowed to be bigger.
Entertainment venues like cinemas and children’s play areas will be able to reopen, as will hotels and B&Bs. Indoor adult sports groups and exercise classes can also reopen.
Changes will also be made to sporting and performance events in indoor venues with a capacity of 1,000 people or half full
The challenge is from Hugh Osmond, founder of Punch Taverns, and Sacha Lord, night-time economy adviser for Greater Manchester, who believe pubs should be allowed to open before shops.
Mr Osmond, a former director of Pizza Express, has written to the Prime Minister saying there was ‘no evidence or justification’ for prioritising the shops over hospitality.
He said yesterday that was because the range of Covid-safety measures put in place by the hospitality trade meant ‘the risk of transmission is plainly higher in non-essential shops’.
But he told Mr Johnson that ‘time is of the essence’ for the sector and warned that ‘the cost of lockdown to the hospitality industry is £200 million a day’.
Mr Osmond also warned the Prime Minister of the ruling’s effect on jobs, citing the ‘potentially indirectly discriminatory effect’ on young people and those from minority ethnic backgrounds who work in hospitality.
He said yesterday: ‘This legal case will give a fighting chance to over three million people who work in hospitality and to the tens of thousands of businesses, suppliers, landlords and contractors large and small forced into bankruptcy.’
Declaring ‘our democracy should be better than this’, Mr Osmond raised hopes that the legal action would ‘open up a chink of light’ for all those who had been affected adversely by the Government’s anti-Covid measures.
Lawyers for the action will argue that it is ‘a matter of simple logic and borne out by the evidence’ that safety measures were easier to enforce in pubs and restaurants than in non-essential shops.
They will say: ‘Customers attending a hospitality venue for table service are easily identifiable through track and trace which they are requested to complete as a condition of entry, and can occupy their own socially distanced areas, in stark contrast to customers browsing and queuing in shops.’
The Government has until Wednesday to respond to the legal challenge, representatives for the Mr Lord say.
It come as Mitchell and Butlers, which operates brands such as Sizzling and Harvester, also criticised the Government’s roadmap.
A spokesperson today told MailOnline: ‘The evidence to support the delay of indoor re-opening appears very flimsy, and as such the Government’s roadmap out of lockdown seems to unfairly penalise the hospitality sector.’
However, the chain also said it plans to open up to 300 pubs in England on April 12.
A spokesperson added: ‘These plans assume we will have normal April weather – needless to say we have all fingers crossed for a spell of fine weather, in which case we may be able to open more pubs which we’d love to do. In pubs which do re-open, we’ll be encouraging customers to use apps to both pre-book and then to order from their table.’
Meanwhile, rival pub chain Greene King earlier this week announced its plans to reopen 442 of its managed pubs outdoors in England from April 12.
Unlike Wetherspoon, customers can book a garden table online from Friday 26 March.
However people will also be able to visit the pub outdoors without an advance booking.
Greene King Pub Partners tenants, who make up a further 875 pubs across England, will also be deciding on an individual basis whether to reopen their outdoor areas from 12 April, bosses say.
A Greene King spokesperson told MailOnline: ‘Sadly, we can only open around a third of our estate in April where we have outdoor space that will work and have a chance of being viable, but we know the vital role pubs play in communities and feel it’s important to open as many as we can to help people get back together once again.
‘We look forward to May when we can open many more of our pubs, and the all-important return to normality in June when the restrictions are fully removed, and we can start to rebuild our businesses.’
Pubs will be allowed to open outdoor areas from April 12 in Step Two of the Government’s roadmap out of lockdown.
Step One, part A, was the reopening of schools and allowing a person to meet another person outdoors from March 6.
Part B, on March 29, will see the Rule of Six re-introduced in outdoor settings, as well as the return of outdoor sports and the loosening of the Government’s ‘Stay at Home’ message, which will become ‘Stay Local’.
Shops, hairdressers and pubs must remain closed until April 12 at the earliest – the same time gyms can get back up and running.
Even at that point pints and meals can only be consumed outdoors.
Campsites and holiday lets can reopen for single households from April 12 – but international travel is completely off the cards until at least May 17.
Hospitality trade leaders announced they were going to court over Boris Johnson’s refusal to let pubs and restaurants fully open up next month. Pictured: Revellers inside the Red Lion pub in London last year
The group said they were going to court over the ‘plainly irrational’ decision to restrict pubs and cafes to outdoor opening only from April 12. Pictured: The Prime Minister speaking at the House of Commons
Social distancing rules will stay in force until June 21 at the minimum, with a government review to decide their future after that.
Another review will be held at that point to decide whether a system of vaccine certificates could be deployed within the UK to help open up the economy, something the government has previously said it is not considering.
Sports can start to return from May 17, although venues will need to work on reduced capacities.
Up to 30 people can go to weddings from the same date, but are stuck at that number until the next phase of the roadmap.
Only at June 21 will all legal limits on social contact go, and the remaining elements of the hospitality sector be allowed to open.
The PM has previously stressed that he is being driven by ‘data not dates’ and the timeline is not guaranteed.
I will fight in court to get pubs open again, writes Punch Taverns founder HUGH OSMOND
Back in January the Prime Minister heralded the new Covid vaccines as our ‘way out’ of lockdown.
Since then more than 24million people have been vaccinated but the Government has been busily moving the goalposts and I don’t know a single person who understands why we are doing what we’re doing any more.
Indoor ‘non-essential’ retail outlets will be allowed to reopen on April 12 while pubs, bars and restaurants will have to remain shut for another five weeks unless they have a garden or terrace they can use for outdoor dining.
Pubs, bars and restaurants will have to remain shut for another five weeks after April 12 when non-essential retail outlets can reopen
Not only does this long delay needlessly squander the benefits of the fast vaccination rollout, it is plainly irrational, unscientific and not based on evidence.
So, along with Sacha Lord, night-time economy adviser for Greater Manchester, I wrote to the Prime Minister this weekend notifying him of our intention to take his Government to court.
When taking momentous and unprecedented actions affecting millions of its citizens, the Government must base its decisions on evidence, not prejudice, and should be held to account if it does not.
Our case follows Sacha’s successful challenge regarding the Government’s ludicrous Scotch egg proposal last November. This ruling, you may recall, categorised the dish as a ‘substantial meal’ for the purposes of tier regulations which banned drinking in pubs unless food was ordered too.
Judges confirmed that the measure ‘lacked a proper scientific evidential basis’ and found that where a Government acts without evidence it risks having its decisions overturned. The Government reversed its decision as a result.
In the last 12 months tens of thousands of hospitality businesses – from landlords and restaurateurs to suppliers and contractors – have been forced into bankruptcy.
By returning to court in a bid to have the end of the hospitality lockdown brought forward to April 12 we hope to provide a boost for the industry’s workforce – more than three million people – and the millions of loyal customers who have been deprived of the human social interaction they experience in our premises.
if we are to impose lockdowns which have a catastrophic effect on the economy we must make sure these decisions stand up to scrutiny, says Hugh Osmond
Hospitality is essential for local communities, businesses and economies because our ability to socialise is critical to our mental health and – when it comes to Covid – our sector is significantly safer than non-essential retail where the risk of transmission is higher.
Why? Because last summer a vast amount of time, money and effort went into making hospitality venues ‘Covid-secure’.
We hired extra cleaners, implemented rigorous track-and-trace systems – complete with QR codes and phone apps – and developed strict one-way systems and table-only sit-down service so that customers could stay safely and socially distanced at their tables within their bubbles.
Meanwhile, most hospitality venues have ventilation systems of a standard much higher than that defined by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies as sufficient to prevent airborne transmission.
With all these measures in place, it is obvious that hospitality venues are safer than crowded shops.
And, as a result, the number of outbreaks in hospitality venues was significantly lower than the totals reported in other venues, settings or workplaces.
Public health directors such as Sheffield City Council’s Greg Fell tell us that ‘hospitality does not crop up as a terribly big factor’ and is ‘nowhere near the top’ of his ‘risk radar’.
In the hospitality sector revenues have been slashed by £200million a day and 660,000 jobs have been destroyed
And yet – while we remain closed – from April 12 people will resume browsing and queuing in shops where they will walk around freely, touching surfaces and handles, picking up items and getting closer to other shoppers than they would if they were in a bar or restaurant.
I understand the desire for caution and the imperative need for this to be the last lockdown we ever face.
But if we are to impose lockdowns which have a catastrophic effect on the economy and our health and welfare, we must make sure these decisions stand up to scrutiny.
In the hospitality sector alone revenues have been slashed by £200million a day and 660,000 jobs have been destroyed.
Between now and May 17 – the date set for the indoor reopening of hospitality businesses – more than 3,500 pubs, bars and restaurants will close their doors for ever.
It shouldn’t be difficult for the Government to justify its roadmap timetable if the science, data and evidence have been followed. But if the Government refuses to respond, we will issue judicial review proceedings without further notice.
I hope our case can open up a chink of light at the end of this very dark chapter so that we can – as the Prime Minister said – ‘reclaim our lives and freedoms once and for all’.
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