East Anglian brewery welcomes support in the Autumn Budget
The chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a range of pub and brewery friendly measures in yesterday's Budget.
A regional brewery has welcomed the support offered to pubs and distilleries in yesterday's Budget announcement by the chancellor.
The policies include a cut to the number of main alcohol duty rates from 15 to 6, with spirits taxed based on their strength. There is also a reduction in the draught beer and cider duties which promises to take the cost of a pint down by 3p.
Jenny Hanlon is the Chief Financial Officer at Adnams, a Suffolk-based brewery with partner pubs across the country including in Essex and Norfolk.
She describes the measures as 'fantastic': "The treasury recognises the importance that pubs have in the community and looking a today's announcements, it seems to be one of their priorities.
"It presents an opportunity for us to offer healthier alternatives (drinks with lower alcohol levels), encourages people to go out to come out and support their community pubs so as a business, we're really pleased with these measures."
Most of these policies, however, will not take effect immediately. This means that the ongoing supply shortages are piling the pressure on these industries.
"Everyone is aware that the gin and tonic or pint that we all love down at our local pubs, is brought to that place through many different supply chains", she says before adding that they are seeing their own costs rise as a result of various supply bottlenecks.
"As a business we'll try our best to minimise the impact on the price for our customers. But the industry is dealing with so many pressures that even with a supportive budget, it will be very hard to eradicate those cost pressures that we are seeing."
Does this mean that the price of these drinks will increase?
She says: "I think we can safely say that we'll as much of the pressures as possible but there will be small price rise.
"It is in nobody's interest to have high prices though so we'll do our best to ensure that any increase is at a very small level."