Do we really need state-funded restaurants?

Spectator

6 days ago

Two British cities, Dundee and Nottingham, have been chosen as trial sites for a new government scheme to be piloted next year: state-subsidised restaurants. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has put up £1.5 million for the 12-month trial, initiated by the campaign group Nourish Scotland. If the restaurants are successful, they'll be rolled out across Britain – nourishing us all – with a subsidised meal for £3.
Inspired by second world war state-funded canteens, they're going to be called 'Public Diners' – clever branding, with its quasi-American vibe. Their branding matters because – as anyone who ever ate greasy slop from a tray at a state-run stolovaya in Soviet Russia remembers – no-frills, state-funded restaurants are intrinsically drained of glamour. Today's fastidious British public will require a touch of coolness to entice them in. Winston Churchill also understood that branding mattered. When those state-funded canteens got going in 1940, he decreed that their name, 'communal feeding centres', was 'an odious expression, redolent of communism and the workhouse'. At one stroke, he transformed their image by branding them 'British Restaurants'. 'Everyone,' he said, 'associates the word 'restaurant' with a good meal.'
The slogan for the new Public Diners on Nourish Scotland's website is 'an idea whose time has come'. 'They are a holistic food system intervention: for public health, climate and the right to food.' (So we're going to be preached at in noun-lumps, as well as fed.) If all goes to plan, we'll soon see these new, climate-friendly, taxpayer-subsidised diners, inspired also by Turkish public restaurants, Mexican public dining rooms and Polish milk bars. Are those countries really now our economic role models? It doesn't give one much confidence in how things are going.
Hospitality entrepreneurs and executives are neither pleased nor impressed. These diners are 'a ludicrous idea,' says Hugh Osmond, co-founder of Pizza Express. Luke Johnson, chairman of Gail's, says the idea that state-backed restaurants could operate more efficiently than the private sector is 'beyond a joke'. You can see why they're worried. Life is tough enough for restaurant owners – hit with ballooning, government-enforced overheads – without this new undercutting from state-funded establishments.
But you could argue that commercial restaurants have only themselves to blame. Their prices have rocketed far more steeply than people's pay. In the last ten years, the cost of a Pizza Express 'Margherita' pizza has gone up from £7.55 to £14.95. If the British salary had kept pace with the increasing price of a Margherita, it would have risen from £27,600 to £53,000 – whereas in fact it's £37,500. There may well be a need for 'somewhere where all of us can eat without stretching the budget'.
'What could possibly go wrong?' hospitality executives are wondering as they wait for the pilot branches of the diners to open. A contract to run them is expected to be tendered later this year. Though the restaurants themselves will be not-for-profit, the caterers who run them will be expecting to make money – as will the providers of the fittings and the produce. Governments don't have the best reputation when it comes to not being ripped off during the procurement process.
The issue of precisely what food to serve is also going to be a minefield. Nourish Scotland's consultation exercise 'showed that there are plenty of challenges ahead when it comes to deciding on what food should be served in a Public Diner'. We're no longer the unfussy wartime population who gratefully scoffed a plateful of boiled cabbage and mashed potato. The food served in those wartime British Restaurants had three chief attributes: it was soft (designed for a nation with a high proportion of false teeth), bland (designed to avoid tummy upsets) and filling (designed to fatten up a thin population). Today's populace won't be so willing to eat up whatever's put in front of them. They'll expect their individual health- and religion-based dietary requirements to be respected. An added complication is that, far from aiming to fatten up the population, this new scheme aims to tackle obesity.
The scheme also requires the food to be locally sourced, to fulfil the climate aspect of its brief. As Jeremy Clarkson showed us in the latest series of Clarkson's Farm, locally sourced food is expensive. How will that work, economically, for the taxpayer? It'll be fun seeing what dishes the various branches do decide to serve – and whether the scheme sparks a revival of distinctly British regional food. I hope the Dundee branch offers the local dish Cullen skink (smoked haddock and potato soup with milk), and the Nottingham one Sherwood Forest venison and stilton.
Are Public Diners really 'an idea whose time has come', or are they in fact an idea whose time is long gone? The scheme's brochure celebrates, with some nostalgia, those morale-boosting wartime British Restaurants which brought everyone together. There was indeed a great charm about them. Kenneth Clark's wife Elizabeth arranged to borrow paintings from Buckingham Palace to hang on their walls, to cheer everyone up. Today's utopian ideal is that strangers will meet and make friends over their plates of spicy chickpea and potato tagine – and that this will be a new way of falling in love IRL rather than online.
But British Restaurants had their moment – and that moment has gone. The government withdrew financial responsibility for them in 1949, and they dwindled away after rationing ended in the mid-1950s. The free market took over, and competitive hospitality businesses survived – or closed down – accordingly. Is this scheme really the best way to spend taxpayers' money? Essentially, those who don't go to the restaurants will be subsidising those who do. Surely our taxes would be better spent teaching schoolchildren how to fry an onion and make a cheap pasta sauce at home. This government is so much better at thinking of new ways of spending our money than of saving it.