Wetherspoon to open 30 new pubs over next year and create 1,800 jobs
Wetherspoon has revealed plans to open up to 30 new pubs in the next year - its highest for a decade.
The move comes after years where the popular chain - along with the wider sector - has been closing sites amid cost pressures and changing customer habits.
The firm, known to many as Spoons, has 794 pubs after opening three in the past year and selling nine. It is a long way below the 955 sites Wetherspoons had in 2015. When it was expanding rapidly it opened 100 pubs in one year - 1997 - including 22 in a single month.
The return to growth comes despite the firm, like others in hospitality, complaining about Labour's hike in employers' national insurance and the national minimum wage.
Pub chains have been faring better than many independent watering holes. The Mirror has been highlighting the plight of local boozers through its Your Pub Needs You campaign.
Wetherspoons founder and chairman Tim Martin told the Mirror: 'We're not throwing our hat in the air yet but are hopeful of better results in spite of challenging regulatory and tax regime.'
On its plans, he said: 'We probably opened some pubs too close to others, which has held us back a bit. We can now concentrate on new openings more. In addition, we have only recently started franchising, which opens up locations such as universities and holiday parks where we've been unrepresented.'
Around half the 30 new pubs planned for the coming year will be managed by Wetherspoons itself, the other half will be run by franchisees. They are expected to create around 1,800 jobs in total.
A recent example was one of Wetherspoons largest ever pubs that has opened at a Haven holiday park in Devon. The pub can pack in nearly 700 punters, and is expected to serve as many as 2,000 pints a day.
Asked what his message would be to Chancellor Rachel Reeves ahead of the autumn Budget, Mr Martin said: 'We live in a world of polarised politics. Try and steer a pre-economics, middle path.'
Mr Martin said its sales, by volume, were only recently back above pre-pandemic levels. Takings rose just over 5% in the three months to July 20, boosted by the hot weather and punters flocking to beer gardens.
Richard Hunter, head of markets at online firm Interactive Investor, said: 'This was achieved despite the challenges arising from the Budget measures, where the group previously reported rather morosely that increases in labour rates and national insurance would add some £60million per year to its costs, equivalent to £1,500 per pub, per week.'
Full year profits - to be released in early October - are expected to be in with City forecasts, the firm said. Mr Martin singled out a number of successes in a trading update. Sales of Villa Maria New Zealand wine and Prosecco from Italy were both 'shooting the lights out', he said, with demand for Irish stout Guinness also continuing to strong.
He went on: 'On the food front, breakfasts, terribly slow post-pandemic, have recovered their lustre and are now well ahead. Chicken, also, has put in a clucking good performance and volumes in recent weeks are up by about 50% compared to pre-pandemic levels.'
Julie Palmer, partner at business advisory firm Begbies Traynor, said: 'With estimates that many pubs are at risk of being lost this year, Wetherspoon's scale and financial discipline will insulate it from the pressures that are pushing independent operators to close their doors.
'As such, we may be heading towards a world where pubs have to deliver a strong gastro, unique after-work captive audience offering or become a well-run giant like Spoons.'
Mr Hunter at Interactive Investor added: 'Wetherspoon has fought its corner for many years and has overcome some serious hurdles, but the outlook for the wider domestic economy and the higher levels of staff costs continue to weigh heavily.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
33 minutes ago
- Spectator
Letters: Don't blame Andrew Bailey
The Bank's breakdown Sir: Your cover story with its attack on Andrew Bailey ('Broke Britain', 19 July) tells only half of the grisly story. All the major central banks had a sort of collective nervous breakdown during the Covid crisis, but none of the others lost its mind quite like the Bank of England. The banks printed money by buying in their country's sovereign debt, at high prices. Most concentrated on short-dated stocks, where the potential capital loss from rising interest rates was smallest. The Bank bought in long-dated debt at prices which looked like madness to some of us at the time. These stocks are now being sold back into the market at a massive capital loss. One example: in May 2020 it bought gilts repayable in 2061 at a price of £101. It has recently been selling them back into the market at prices as low as £28. Christopher Mahon of Columbia Threadneedle Investments has been shouting about this. By its own earlier calculations, the Bank estimated that total losses from this process would add up to a scarcely believable £115 billion. The sluggish fall in interest rates recently means that is almost certainly an underestimate. It amounts to incompetence and stupidity on a massive scale. No wonder the Bank is hoping nobody is listening. Neil Collins London SW10 Don't blame Bailey Sir: Michael Simmons is wrong to criticise Sajid Javid's appointment of Andrew Bailey to the governorship of the Bank of England. After the tenure of the narcissistic and overtly political Mark Carney, a solid and boring functionary was what he thought the Bank needed in order for it to regain its place as an independent central bank. An event as huge and disruptive as Covid-19 – and the government's reaction of promising enormous unfunded subsidies to all and sundry – could not be foreseen. Global indebtedness following Covid was not created by the Bank of England. Bailey was under the influence of domestic politics on one hand and peer pressure from abroad on the other. True, he might not have been the best of choices, but to place so much of the blame on him and on the Old Lady is disingenuous and unhelpful. Anthony D.M. Peters Great Rollright, Oxon The rest is slander Sir: No one loves reading an outrageous claim in the pages of The Spectator more than I do, and so I commend you for employing Dominic Sandbrook to peddle an entire host of them (Historian's notebook, 19 July). I don't know which was more entertaining: his insistence that Britain should have stabbed our gallant Gallic ally in the back in 1914, or the braggadocio with which he boasted of being able to hold his own in an Irish pub. One calumny, however, cannot be allowed to pass: his suggestion that my regrettable inability to join him on his Dublin pub crawl was due to any lack of stamina on my part. I will not go into details, it being poor form for those engaged in top-secret charitable work to boast of their good deeds; suffice to say that – had circumstances only been different – I would have relished the chance to join Paul Rouse in drinking Dominic under the table. Tom Holland London SW2 Pas un saucisson Sir: Even if we white male novelists make it into print ('Who'll publish my toxic book?', 19 July), we struggle for space in the literary pages of national newspapers. My new novel NUNC! (a corker, by the way) was published by Little, Brown. The Tablet and Church Times raved about it. The Mail ran an enthusiastic paragraph. The Times seemed to like it. But from the rest: pas un saucisson. Literary editors are under pressure to commission clickbait arguments. That is easier with non-fiction. The country would be saner if it read more fiction, but madness is better for the bottom line. Quentin Letts How Caple, Herefordshire Cobblers unite Sir: Reading the Barometer piece about 'grandly named trade unions' (19 July) I was reminded that the first trade union I joined (in 1965, at the edge of 15, while working weekends at a slipper factory in Blackburn) was the 'Rossendale Union of Boot, Shoe and Slipper Operatives': RUBSSO. It only had about 3,000 members and later was merged into the even more grand National Union of Knitwear, Footwear and Apparel Trades (KFAT) – itself subsequently merged in the early 2000s into the boringly named 'Community Union'. James Kay Birkenhead, Merseyside Rhodes rage Sir: A.N. Wilson, in his overheated review of The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes by W.K. Storey, makes at least one assertion that is factually wrong (Books, 19 July). Concentration camps were not, as Wilson states, 'that British invention'. The term was first used by the Spanish army in 1868 during the Ten Years War in Cuba. Even earlier examples can be traced to the USA for the internment of the Cherokee. What Wilson also seems to ignore is that Rhodes was a man of his time, not some uniquely evil colonialist. Dr Brian Austin West Kirby, Wirral Restoring Bishop Auckland Sir: Charles Moore describes the wonderful rejuvenation of the Bishop's Palace and Castle at Bishop Auckland by Jonathan Ruffer (Notes, 19 July). During the visit of the Rectory Society last week, I too was able to see the buildings, the Zurbarans, the huge walled garden planted with vegetables and flowers. It is an amazing achievement by Ruffer and his wife Jane. Now he has an even bigger project, which is to rejuvenate the town centre, with its fine Market Square and many empty shops and cafés. I wish him every success. Cessa Moore Hereford
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
What's the score on ‘score'?
The courtship rituals of the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility last ten weeks. The consummation is a fiscal event, such as the Budget coming in the autumn, if we survive. Eligible young ladies used to have dance cards on which to enter the names of their suitors. The Treasury has a scorecard on which its proposed measures are drawn up for the OBR to score. The analogy is with the cricket field rather than the ballroom. The OBR score indicates its forecast for spending, receipts and public debt. It also takes into account knock-on effects of a policy change. This is called dynamic scoring. I had to ask Veronica about this and, since it's years since she split up with her unsatisfactory City trader, she might have got it wrong. In 2021 the OBR had to explain that the dynamic effect of a rise in tobacco duty was so large that 80 per cent of the increase was lost to the Treasury. After the increase, people changed their behaviour: some gave up cigarettes, some rolled their own and not a few got cigarettes from illegal sources. Is that where all those Turkish barbers come in? There was a response that benefited government coffers when it cut the top rate of tax from 50 to 45 per cent in 2012. The static effect would have cost the Treasury £3.8 billion. But behavioural changes, such as hours worked, meant the OBR's estimate of the loss of revenue was only £100 million. Dynamic scoring shares an etymology with the score cut in pork skin to make crackling – from a productive ancient Germanic word that also gives us shear, shard and share (used for ploughing). Dynamic scoring is also a variant of the scoring done by our Anglo-Saxon forebears cutting a score in a stick every time they'd counted 20 sheep. 'The days of our age are threescore years and ten,' says the Psalm, 'and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow.' We know the score.
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
Can anything stop Reform?
A close associate of Nigel Farage received phone calls from three civil servants in the past week, asking how they might help Reform UK prepare for government. Officially, mandarins won't begin talks with the opposition until six months before a general election, which might be nearly four years away. And Reform currently has just four MPs. But behind the scenes, the source reveals: 'I'm personally getting middle-ranking civil servants in various departments asking if they can help – people who actually understand how to get things done. They don't want to lose their jobs, but they want to tell us what's going on.' MPs may have departed Westminster for recess, but that also marks the firing of a starting gun on a highly consequential political summer. In Downing Street and the Treasury, work is under way on Sir Keir Starmer's party conference speech, the next Budget and a reorganisation of No. 10, in what's seen as a vital reset after Labour's turbulent first year in power. The government is facing two political onslaughts. The first is from Reform on crime, as Farage's six-week campaign, launched on Monday, promises 'zero tolerance' policing, 'nightingale prisons' and 30,000 new police officers. The second is from the Tories on the economy, as the Treasury prepares for tax rises this autumn. The question is no longer 'Could Reform win?' but 'Can anything stop them?'. The expectation is that Farage's party will pick up thousands of seats in the Welsh, Scottish and local elections next May and emerge as the largest party in 2029. 'The polls are much stickier than we expected,' a Reform source says. 'We could be the next government.' They are optimistic of winning in Wales and making gains in outer London boroughs next year and are eyeing councils in Norfolk, Suffolk, Hampshire, Coventry, Dudley and Tameside. One answer to what can stop Farage might once have been Farage himself, whose intensity used to waver between elections. Now allies describe a man for whom a working day of 4.30 a.m. to 11 p.m. is not unusual. 'All his bodyguards are ex-SAS and parachute regiment and they're knackered trying to keep up,' one friend says. 'He spent three days preparing for that crime press conference so he was across the detail. There is a seriousness there. Does he want to be prime minister? I'm not sure he does. But he feels: if not him, then who? He feels it's his duty, and perhaps his destiny.' Farage's allies point to an incident before his return to frontline politics last year, while he was campaigning in Skegness. 'This guy said to him: 'Thank you for coming here, Nigel, but why are you letting us down?' You could see Nigel's eyes go down. He knew he needed to get back in and fight for these people.' Another answer might once have been the sense that Reform is a 'boys' club' – yet at his press conference on Monday Farage was flanked by the Reform MP Sarah Pochin, a former magistrate, and Laila Cunningham, a Westminster councillor and ex-prosecutor who defected from the Tories. On Tuesday he announced the defection of Conservative Laura Anne Jones, now the party's first member of the Welsh Senedd. 'We used to be testosterone city,' says an insider, 'but these women are not window dressing.' A third answer might once have been media scrutiny by the centre-right press, whose loyalties tended to lie with the Tories. In 2019, the Daily Mail harangued Farage to back Boris Johnson to 'save Brexit'. Yet Farage met senior media figures for 'peace talks' and coverage is now much friendlier. Farage (hotfooting it from Royal Ascot) turned up wearing union jack shoes at the summer party held by News UK, which owns the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times, and also dined recently with Victoria Newton, the Sun's editor. Reform sources say that Rupert Murdoch 'has always liked Nigel because they are both disruptors'. Paper insiders say Murdoch is attracted to backing Reform, though his son Lachlan, the titular head of the company, is both less interested in British politics and less convinced by Farage. Newton apparently urged Farage to show that he is taking preparations for government seriously. 'Nigel doesn't need to be told these things,' a close ally notes. Farage's nemesis could still be the Labour government with its huge majority. But he's not alone in being urged to get serious. 'There have been a procession of people, including Tony Blair, telling Keir 'This isn't working',' says one of those advising him. 'He needs far more good people around him and he needs to get serious about being prime minister and not just assume everything is going to turn out fine. He needs to use his power, not just occupy it.' The PM's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, has three priorities for the summer and autumn: getting Starmer's conference speech and the Budget to tell the same 'story' about what Labour is about and where it wants to take the country; getting the best people into No. 10; and improving relations with the parliamentary party. A No. 10 reorganisation is coming, along with a reshuffle, probably in September. McSweeney is studying a report by Nathan Yeowell of the Future Governance Forum and Helen MacNamara, the former deputy cabinet secretary (published in mid-August), which recommends the creation of a new Downing Street department, with its own chief operating officer. Some would like to see MacNamara – the one official whose brains and cunning Dominic Cummings rated alongside his own – return to government. The reorganisation is intended, in part, to bypass Sir Chris Wormald, the cabinet secretary, who is seen both as a block to reform and as the PM's most perverse appointment. 'They can't fire him,' explains an exasperated ally. 'They're just having to find ways to work around him.' Wormald's critics are busily sharing two stories. The first is that he told another official how to bamboozle politicians by going into every meeting 'with a few QI points' – fascinating facts like those presented on the comedy quiz programme – to divert attention. The second is that he tried to impose Jeremy Pocklington, the permanent secretary at the Department of Energy, on the Ministry of Justice, against the wishes of Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood, because Pocklington needed the experience if he was to become cabinet secretary one day. This reinforced the idea that Wormald is more interested in civil service careerism than getting the best people to drive political change. Mahmood won the day. Another key appointment will be an economics adviser for Starmer, a job which still lies vacant. There is talk of Torsten Bell, the pensions minister, taking the role, but others want a bigger hitter. Former Treasury mandarins Jon Cunliffe, Tom Scholar and John Kingman are all on the wish list. 'It has to be someone who can speak with authority to the Chancellor,' says one senior aide. Starmer's critics will also have a close eye on his policy team, a frequent target of disapproval. Liz Lloyd, a Blair-era retread who runs delivery, led policy discussions at a recent cabinet away day. But ministers say her views differ from those of Olaf Henricson-Bell, the civil service policy chief, and Stuart Ingham, the PM's longest-serving aide, who many see as a problem. '[Ingham's] great at having a conversation about the history of progressivism, but he's not right for a government which needs snappy ideas that deliver,' a senior Labour figure says. If Starmer fails to sort all this out, then not only will he be unable to face down Farage, he might even have to confront a leadership challenge. While Angela Rayner is the favourite, both Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan, the mayors of Manchester and London, are expected to make returns to parliament with half an eye on the succession. Labour strategists are acutely aware that the party's annual conference is in Liverpool, where Hillsborough campaigners (supported by Burnham) still aren't happy with the government's plans to impose a 'duty of candour' on public servants to avoid a cover-up like the one which followed the deaths of the football fans. 'If they don't sort out Hillsborough, Andy will kill them at conference,' says one MP. Could the Tories prove a thorn in Farage's side? The return of James Cleverly to the front bench in Kemi Badenoch's reshuffle this week gives the Tories another good media performer, but most of the others promoted are barely household names in their own households. Party membership has fallen by 8,000 since she became leader. At a summer party for Politico last week, one of her senior aides had a drink-fuelled argument with two former cabinet ministers over their demands for her to 'step it up'. The appointment of Neil O'Brien, one of the brightest brains in the party, as policy chief was widely welcomed by Badenoch's critics. But the decision to make plain-speaking Yorkshireman Kevin Hollinrake party chairman was interpreted as evidence that Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) is still not match-fit for the local elections. His predecessors, the co-chairs Nigel Huddleston and Dominic Johnson, are both said to have contemplated resignation in recent months. 'The operation is a shitshow,' says one former CCHQ hand. 'They had so little power and were sick of carrying the can for failure.' Another former aide is circulating details of a recent focus group in which Badenoch was described by one voter as 'repulsive'. So what might stop Farage? The best answer might be Reform themselves. Nick Candy, the treasurer, has not raised the millions he promised. Insiders say he has been distracted by his divorce from TV actress Holly Valance. 'She was more political than him,' a party source admits. 'Money is tight.' Then there are the internal rivalries, which burst into the open again last week when Zia Yusuf, the former chairman, went public to accuse Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary, of 'covering up' the decision to grant a superinjunction to hide the leak of data on Afghans who worked for Britain. Her husband, Rael Braverman, who defected from the Tories to Reform several months ago, resigned in disgust. 'Suella was quite close to defecting,' a source says. 'Rael urged Zia to take it down and he doubled down.' Farage, in short, is not without his internal party problems and he might yet succumb to external attacks. 'Nigel is at the 'could' be the next government stage rather than the 'will' be stage,' an ally notes. But while it may be a long-distance race until the next general election, Reform remains the pace-setter of British politics.
