Pubs Get a 20% Rates Break But Your Local Restaurant Won't

Andy Burnham has welcomed a planned business rates discount for English pubs as progress, but hospitality leaders say hotels and restaurants are being left behind in the cold.

A 20% business rates discount for eligible English pubs is set to arrive from April 2027.
Hotels and restaurants are excluded from the relief, drawing immediate criticism from the wider hospitality sector.
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham called the cut a first step rather than a finished answer.
The move comes as pub closures across England continue to outpace openings for the third consecutive year.
Industry groups say the carve-out leaves tens of thousands of hospitality workers in limbo.

It was a Wednesday in July when the government handed English pubs something they hadn't seen in a while: a discount. From April 2027, qualifying pubs in England will receive a 20% cut to their business rates — a relief measure that Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester and a politician who has never been shy about the cultural weight of a good local, described as “a first step.”

The phrase matters. Because for the broader hospitality trade — the restaurants, the hotels, the late-night diners keeping town centres from going dark — there is no step at all. The cut applies to pubs specifically, leaving other food-and-drink businesses on the same rates footing they've been struggling under through two years of squeezed margins and post-pandemic foot traffic that never quite returned to form.

Hospitality UK has been pushing for a sector-wide revaluation for the better part of three years. The argument isn't complicated: high street venues pay rates calculated on pre-2022 property valuations that no longer reflect trading reality. A 20% pub discount is, in that context, a start — but only for one type of venue on the street.

For now, the corner gastropub that files its returns as a pub rather than a restaurant may qualify. The Italian two doors down, almost certainly, will not. Trade bodies are already drawing up the paperwork for the next push, with a full business rates review — long promised, long delayed — still sitting somewhere in the government's in-tray.

April 2027 is nine months away. A lot of pubs won't make it that far.