Every day in 2024, one pub closed permanently. Many of them were in villages, leaving the community without their historic meeting place.

It is, of course, pretty hard to make a decent living out of a village pub and Chancellor Rachel Reeves has made it even harder. Her hiking up of the employers’ National Insurance Contributions has been a disaster for hospitality in general, but it has particularly hit publicans. Their margins were already very thin before she walloped on her jobs tax and it’s those thin margins that mean that there isn’t much of a market for pubs, so they go up for sale at much less than you’d pay for a village house. Often, that tempts people to try to convince local planners that the pub isn’t viable and, therefore, should be subject to a change of use to residential

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