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After a pandemic-dictated period of closure, pubs have this week reopened indoors in England and Wales. Some – those that sell mainly beer, with little or no food – have been shut since the first lockdown in March 2020. And some will not reopen at all.
The COVID legal requirement in force in England for periods last year, that you could only drink in a pub if you also had an ill-defined “substantial meal”, also brought into relief the extent to which many modern pubs had already been forced to rely heavily on food for their profits, given that tax is a major element of the cost of drinking.
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Armitt believes the private sector should be responsible for installing networks of chargers, albeit under direction from Westminster, but also made it clear that central and local government have a role to play in helping to improve charging networks by 2030.
“Clearly the planning laws can have an influence on it,” he said. “[The] government and local authorities could be saying ‘car parks should have 20% of the spaces allocated to electric vehicle charging in the future’. That’s a fairly easy thing to stipulate. The local authority might not own car parks, but it will have powers over how they’re operated.”