Pub-goers head home after being turfed out across England as 10pm curfew begins

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Revellers who headed into town and city centres to enjoy a few drinks tonight were turfed out of pubs and restaurants across England as the country’s first 10pm pub and restaurant curfew begins.  

Customers enjoying a few drinks with friends on outside tables in Soho, central London, were forced to leave ahead of the Government’s draconian curfew, widely seen by scientists as arbitrary.

Metropolitan Police officers in face masks and yellow high-vis jackets enforced the new coronavirus restrictions while bar and restaurant staff cleared tables and chairs off the streets.  

In Preston and Leeds, students celebrating their first term of university – pictured jumping into the air with glee as they enjoyed even a partial nightlife – carried boxes of drinks home with them.  

The strict measures, which also ban customers from ordering from the bar, were imposed by the Government this week amid Tory backbench fears that Boris Johnson was gearing up for a second national lockdown.    

As darkness descended on bars in Soho, London, revellers continued to enjoy drinks on outside tables, despite all pubs having to take last orders well before 10pm to ensure the doors are locked in time for the curfew.

Others enjoyed a drink at pub beer gardens in London Bridge while for others the restrictions caused a few cancellations as revellers feared their meals would be cut short.

Just hours after the announcement was made by the Prime Minister on Tuesday, food establishments slowly recovering from months of lockdown were faced with a wave of cancellations from concerned customers.

George Madgwick, 30, who runs The Wicks Bistro, in Cosham, near Portsmouth, told MailOnline that he quickly had eight cancellations from worried diners who booked late-evening tables.

Mr Madgwick, who started up in February, said: ‘People don’t want to rush and are worried because it’s not last orders at 10pm, it’s everyone out the door at 10pm. It’s taken away our ability to do three sittings in a night. 

‘Around 50 per cent of our business comes in at 7.30pm and we get around 20-25 per cent for 5pm tables, so the 8.45pm tables is about 20-25 per cent of our nightly business.

‘We’ve already had eight cancellations since the announcement and in the last 24 hours we have had zero bookings after 8.30pm, when we would normally have three or four.’

Mr Madgwick said the cost to the business could be around £300-a-nigh, but added that the biggest impact of the curfew will be on his staff. He said: ‘Instead of working until 11.30pm everything has to close at 10pm so it will be more like 10.15pm, which is an hour and a quarter less hours every day.’ 

Meanwhile Dean Mac, owner and founder of cocktail bar 186 in Manchester also said he has lost business following the curfew announcement: ‘The 10pm curfew essentially means our bookings have been cut in half. 

‘We’ve had to follow up with each and every guest booked in and make them aware of the changes, including changing our entire infrastructure so we can look to open earlier and keep ourselves in operation. Essentially we’ve had to cancel 50 per cent of our reservations as they are often made for around 9pm or 10pm.

‘To us it felt like some form of normality was returning and we were finding our feet again, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath us. It feels like the hospitality industry has been used as a scapegoat.’ 

Another, Jennifer Hughes, brand partner at Peru Perdu in Manchester, said: ‘We’ve had to cancel a lot of bookings and have changed our last seating time to 7.30pm – effectively cutting our capability in half. A few customers have cancelled and have concerns about going to restaurants all together from the scare of the latest announcement.’

Meanwhile, James Dodd, a landlord for a pub in Cheshire which he did not wish to be named, has had to employ five new part-time staff to deal with the new table service requirements.

Mr Dodd, from Altrincham, said he believes his pub will survive but worries others in his area will go bust as so much of their business takes place after 9pm.

He said: ‘I don’t think the Government realise that this flimsy measure, which arguably will have little effect on the virus, will have catastrophic implications for the industry.

Meanwhile, Stuart Seydel, the landlord at the Old Duke in Bristol, said he had already spent thousands of pounds encasing his establishment’s bar in protective perspex but now must retrain his staff to wait tables. 

The 45-year-old said: ‘For several months we’ve been training now and we’ve set up a kind of bubble around the bar to keep them safe. Now we have to send them out from beyond that to go and give table service… in my opinion, it’s making the workplace less safe.

‘With less than 48 hours notice, we suddenly have to completely change the way we operate… and we’re losing two hours of our prime trading time. It’s ridiculous.’ Mr Seydel said his pub usually closes at 12pm so the 10pm curfew could cost them ‘several thousand’ per week.

Tom Stainer, chief executive of the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra), said the new measures pose a ‘very, very real risk’ to pubs and their staff. 

On Tuesday the Prime Minister set out a raft of measures designed to clampdown on the virus, which has so far claimed more than 40,000 lives and infected more than 400,000 people in the UK.

As well as the curfew, which Mr Johnson is adamant that premises must follow and kick out all of their customers by the cut off point, the hospitality sector will also be restricted to table service only as the Government outlawed drinkers making a trip to the bar.

All retail workers and customers in indoor hospitality settings will be required to wear masks – except when they are seated to eat or drink – while all workers who can work from home are now being encouraged to do so from tomorrow.

Fines for breaking the rule of six and for failing to wear a face covering are increasing to £200 for a first offence.

The police will now have the option of asking the military for support with soldiers potentially being drafted in to guard protected sites in order to allow officers more time to crackdown on rule-breakers.

Members of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) said the curfew would not be enough to slow the rate of infection.

But Mr Johnson insisted his approach was based on trying to ‘balance saving lives with protecting jobs and livelihoods’.

However, he said he reserved the right to ‘deploy greater fire power’ should it be necessary. 

Mr Raab said a second national lockdown could be needed to control the spread of coronavirus if the latest measures do not work.

He told Sky News: ‘We’ve always said we’ve got a sort of repository of measures in the arsenal to take.

‘I don’t think we would speculate about what further could be done.

‘But the reality is they will be more intrusive or we could end up in a national lockdown. That is what we want to avoid.’

The Foreign Secretary said that if ‘everyone plays by the rules’ then a national lockdown may not be needed at Christmas.

He said: ‘Let’s hope that we can get through the winter months if we take these measures and if everyone plays by the rules, and we go into Christmas not needing to go into that national lockdown with all the impact on society and families but also the damage it would do to businesses.’

Mr Raab also defended the Government’s 10pm curfew on hospitality, despite figures suggesting just five per cent of coronavirus cases are linked to pubs, bars and restaurants.

‘We know that in bars and restaurants, particularly after people have had a few drinks, as you go into the later hours of the evening, that there’s a risk that the compliance with the guidance ebbs a little bit,’ he said.

‘So we’re taking this measure, we’re confident based on the evidence that we’ve got domestically and internationally that it’s one element of those that we need to make.’     

Meanwhile business chiefs and hospitality groups issued a string of dire warnings over the impact of the restrictions, saying millions of jobs were now on the line.

They said the Prime Minister’s U-turn on his ‘get back to work’ message could spell doom for struggling high streets, with footfall plummeting and shops boarded up.

In a passionate intervention, a prominent entrepreneur said the prosperity of the nation was at stake.   

Julian Metcalfe, who founded Pret A Manger and Itsu, said: ‘The repercussions of this six months are going to be devastating to so many, to local councils, to industry, to people all over our country.

‘We have not begun to touch the seriousness of this. This talk of six months is criminal.’

Despite ballooning national debt, Rishi Sunak is preparing a multi-billion-pound ‘winter economy plan’ to try to protect jobs.

The Chancellor signalled the true extent of the crisis by cancelling plans for a full-scale Budget in November. Sources said he accepted the country could no longer make long-term financial decisions.

Mr Metcalfe led the backlash against the curbs on BBC Radio 4’s World at One, saying he did not know whether Itsu could survive the measures.  

He added: ‘People who work in hotels, restaurants, takeaways and in coffee shops are devastated. A great many are closing down – we’re losing thousands upon thousands of jobs. 

‘How long can this continue, this vague ‘work from home’, ‘don’t go on public transport’? The ramifications of this are just enormous.’

Mr Metcalfe accused the Prime Minister of ‘sitting down with his Union Jack talking utter nonsense’.

He said: ‘To turn to an entire nation and say ‘stay at home for six months’, and to spout off Churchillian nonsense about we’ll make it through – it’s terribly unhelpful. It should be ‘we will review the situation each week, each hour’.