In yet another blow to the hospitality industry, the Government has announced that all customers at pubs, restaurants and cafes must provide contact details (either written or via the NHS Test and Trace app) on entry. Previously, only one member of each group had to provide details. Doing so was voluntary (staff were only asked to “encourage” customers to provide their details). But the new guidelines state that those who will not provide their details must be “refuse[d] entry”. BBC News has the story.
New rules to help pubs, cafes and restaurants reopen outdoors safely in England on April 12th have sparked anger from industry groups.
All customers will have to sign in on entry, not just one member of the group like before. It is also unclear whether payment at the bar will be permitted. …
Under the new guidance, every customer aged 16 and over will have to check in to NHS Test and Trace before entering a venue, or give their contact details to staff.
Pubs and restaurants must take “reasonable steps” to stop people who won’t comply from coming in, or they could face fines.
Carl Ford, an accountant based in Tamworth, told the BBC he was frustrated and confused by the rules.
“I feel like it’s almost like going back to school where I have to sign in and out,” he said.
“I don’t understand why I have to do this in a restaurant or pub, but I don’t need to do this in a supermarket where you have a free for all. People don’t have to sign in and they can pick up fruit with their hands.” …
In a joint statement, UK Hospitality, the British Beer & Pub Association and the British Institute of Innkeeping said the rules would add “more confusion and inconvenience for customers and staff”.
When pubs and restaurants opened last summer, customers were “encouraged” to provide their contact details, but to do so was not mandatory (see official guidance below).
These guidelines have, however, since been updated: venues must now take “reasonable steps to refuse entry to those who refuse to check in or provide contact details”. Compliance is no longer a personal choice. It is mandatory.
Venues which do not force their customers to provide details will themselves face “financial penalties“.
After having been shut for almost a whole year, how are pubs and restaurants expected to survive if potential customers decide that – because of the new overbearing rules – it is easier and more enjoyable to drink with friends in their back gardens?
The BBC News report is worth reading in full.
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I think there will be a lot of Boris Johnsons and Matt Hancocks going to the pubs pretty soon…
The new rules do not seem to make it the publicans responsibility to ensure that details supplied by customers are accurate or even reasonable.
Just as well – as otherwise how would we give fake names?
I’ll go for Chiang Kai Chek (Mrs.).
If pubs and hospitality had any balls or sense they would have all issued life-long blanket bans against any MP that didn’t stand up against this nonsense, and additional bans on any mass-media journalist or BBC employee.
They haven’t, and as such they will be left with the mindless sheep as their only customers and they will find themselves constantly reported to the stasi for the tiniest infractions of the nonsensical bullshit rules.
I sympathise with your suggestion, but the reality is that these same publicans have had to toe the government’s line throughout the “Covid crisis”, just because they’ve been desperate to access the emergency funding and loans they needed to survive the measures that the government’s imposed.
As a result they’re just going to have to bite their lips and comply with the instructions.
(I received a response from my own MP claiming the government deserved credit for for pouring millions of (borrowed) Pounds into the hospitality sector, without any acknowledgement that it was the same government that was largely responsible for causing their financial hardship. As the main article suggested, pubs are once again being treated completely differently to other forms of commercial activity, without any apparent scientific justification.)
It’s called BRIBERY!
Serves them right
Agreed, when is hospitality as an industry going to find some teeth and use them to fight for their survival?
Many of the Welsh pubs have put a life ban on Mark Drakeford. It’s a start.
I used to give my vehicle reg as NCC1701. I used a selection names…
I do not consent to sharing my personal details. I don’t want to be traced and trapped, so I won’t be going back to pubs. As much as I want to support them, they’ve also got to stand up and fight, because if this goes down quietly without a murmur…it WILL be bloody passports next!
You’re right, HH. It’s the pubs and their owners that have to fight this. We the customers can do little, except try to buck the system.
They won’t fight it. They haven’t fought or resisted any of it. They can get stuffed as far as I’m concerned.
True, they have happily sat back and watched the government destroy their industry without a bleat of protest
Some have protested, but it’s fallen on deaf ears.
You can’t fight a government that is acting like the Stasi unless there is a mass uprising against these impositions
Support them. Run any officious Covid marshals or whoever off the premises.
I think it’s incumbent on us to provide plausible fictitious details, so the landlord can reasonably claim that he thought the entries were correct (by the time he checks our cards after we’ve paid, we will have legged it back to anonymity).
Cash??
Agreed. If pubs want my support they will have to say NO to this nonsense.
if these are ‘guidelines’ they need to stand up together and refuse to do it. I like to visit my local but I will not be wearing a mask or obeying any of these types of rules, especially to buy over priced drinks.
Like all of us the Hospitality sector needs to decide where it stands.
The hospitality industry had the opportunity to fight government interference in their business model 14 or more years ago with the indoor smoking ban. They didn’t and they got what they deserved: loss of customers.
They are going to get screwed again with government interference and this time I say; Fuck ‘em
Same, more than happy to meet my mates for drinks in each other’s gardens
I’m convinced that for even a slim chance of normality ever returning then Boris has to go … the final decisions rest with him – he gives the green light for these insane rulings and now this madness has gone on for so long that they are notably doing far more harm than good – the man leaps from one disastrous decision to the next – these bizarre rules are all so incredibly nonsensical that it makes the Mad Hatters tea party look quite sane.
Why call that turd floating on the Tory sewage ‘Boris’? It’s not even his name.
… but it’s not just him. So whether he goes or not is irrelevant. This is a wider shambles.
Time for Dan Hannan to launch a coup from the Lords, he could still in theory be Prime Minister from there.
So one twat substitutes for another? Great idea!
We’ll have to agree to differ there Rick.
Dan Hannah a twat? Why’s that?
Dan Hannan? He’s been in favour of lockdowns. Sadly I don’t think you’re going to get much support from him.
His objections to lockdowns were included in the Roundup a couple of days ago.
I’d rather have Charles Walker.
Ian Duncan Smith.
Desmond Swayne.
Lord Sumption as a cabinet advisor.
None are mutually exclusive.
It’s a worldwide shambles.
Or a worldwide plan.
Take your pick.
PG Tips Covidiot Chimpanzee Tea Party
BUSTED !
Agreed, but there are plenty of others of his ilk (kowtowing, dishonest, self-seeking and weak, to name but their virtues) to step in. I doubt very much that any of the Tory MPs who have stuck their heads above the parapet and taken fire over this insanity would want to drink from this utterly poisoned chalice.
It’s tempting to think a change of government would help, but since one party apparently models itself on the other, or somehow clones and replicates, it’s likely that there will more more of the same, with a Starmer (maybe?) imprimatur rather than Johnson’s.
Disgusting creeps getting bar persons to do their dirty work for them but the real killer is in para. 7
“I don’t understand why I have to do this in a restaurant or pub, but I don’t have to do it in a supermarket where you have a free for all . . .”
Getting the idea of vaxx Passports to go shopping into the public mind.
Yes – wedge, thin end.
Thin end of a wedge requries people to let the point slip in, the first day any vaxx passports are requested I will be visiting every local premises where the state madndates them, and I will be entering without providing any such foul document. We all need to pledge this, total defiance, make it fall apart the second they try to start it.
Why don’t you say you don’t have a ‘smart phone’ hence no app. Nothing as far as I can see to stop you using a fake name address and phone numbe.
Here in Thailand we have to put our phone numbers down
(sometimes) when we enter a shop but I never use my real number..
I will do the same when I visit England this year.
Of course it goes without saying that it will be a total balls-up as any Government computer ideas never wotk.
My thoughts exactly.
The regulations put a requirement on the staff of venues to prevent entry of those person to whom they reasonably believe to have provided incorrect data. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/1005/regulation/16
I can easily see this manifesting as a no ID, no entry policy for those without smartphones at larger venues / chains.
Nose, camel, tent.
I actually thought meat would be banned first but they are going for alcohol first, the meat will come later.
Out here in the sticks a lot of pubs have closed down over the years, the survivors do either local food or real ale. Now they will soon be gone too
Lockdown was the second wave attack on wet pubs, the first being the smoking ban which led to the closure of hundreds of small working class boozers that lacked an outdoor area for smokers.
with social credit it will ultimately only be for the elite to drink the luxury that will be alcohol – it will be excluded from the masses on all kinds of health and societal grounds, bit by bit by bit this is where it is headed
If they go there, it’ll lead to a full-on challenge from the Human Rights Lawyers. Potentially depriving people of the opportunity to feed themselves would be a prima facie contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights. This is precisely why they are picking on “low hanging fruit” such as pubs and restaurants to impose their nonsensical restrictions…
don’t give them ideas Karenovirus
Let’s see
A 5l keg of decent real ale -about 9 pints for about £25 -say £2.70 a pint at home, multipack of crisps for less that £2 OR
£4 for a pint at a pub served by a muzzleoid who asks you to put a face nappy on when you need a waz , crisps at £1.50 a packet.
Unfair and tough on publicans but I know what my choice is.
On Millenium Eve in my small provincial city many pubs and clubs decided to charge £20-£25-£30 for the privilege of entry.
So many people said ‘stuff paying to go to the same place I go to every Saturday night’ that they were ALL those venues were obliged to give those few who had paid a refund and fling open their doors or close completely for the evening due to lack of custom.
On that night local folk discovered House Parties and New Years Eve in this city has not recovered 2 decades later.
Perjaps the same has happened with the pub trade in general.
I gave my locals as much support as I could during lockdown lite, making a point of avoiding those that went overboard with Track’n’Trace.
Under these new rules I shan’t bother, preferring to get together with some mates for an al fresco piss up on the canal banks, in the woods or down the park (re-living misspent youth).
The regulations go further, in that staff who do not comply with this are committing an offence. Theoretically you could be arrested for not taking your customers’ data!
I haven’t checked the legalities, but the article suggests that the government is just changing its “guidance”, suggesting that, like so much Covid-19 legislation, there’s little chance of the draconian penalties will survive a challenge in the magistrates’ courts. However, if the publicans are already up to his ears in debt to the government through their various schemes, I guess he won’t want to take the chance….
Guidance is not law, cannot be enforced, does not have to be complied with and there is no penalty for not following it.
In writing from a FOI from the Government Legal department.
Sent same to the BBPA, UK Hospitality etc – no acknowledgment whatsoever.
The guidance is backed by law though. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/1005/contents
Those regulations specify that not displaying a QR code, not collecting personal or group details, not securely storing the data or not refusing entry to those not giving their details is an offence.
As it’s an offence, managers / owners of venues can be arrested for not complying and there is a scale of fines all the way from £1000 to £10,000
In the ATL final graphic it says ‘collecting contact details . . is a legal requirement, failure to do so may result in fine’.
I think the regs say that the person in charge of the establishment is the responsible party, and thus liable to the £1000 to £10,000 fine escalator.
As with serving underage drinkers it will land on the lowliest shoulders available, ie the bar staff.
FiatLux is correct in that
“relevant person” means—
(a)
a company, partnership, charity, corporation, unincorporated association, sole trader or other organisation having legal personality;
(b)
a person, other than one falling within paragraph (a), who has overall responsibility for the provision of a [F9listed service or activity];
So pretty much owners / managers have the liability here.
How do these draconian and ruinous measures match with this from Arch Medico Facist Chris Whitty
“No more lockdowns, Britain will treat Covid like flu . . .
‘Accepting some virus deaths is price of allowing people to live a ‘whole life’, says Chief Medical Officer.”
Which is what many of us have been saying for nearly a year (except without the Top Down word ‘allowing’).
If this story is an April Fool it’s a cheat since April Fool only counts before midday while this was posted 16.43.
I wonder what ‘virus deaths’ those would be, then?
Social Life is over. I will never submit to coercion to go into anywhere.
Get yourself a crowd of sceptics to socialise with, force your way past the track and traitors as a unified whole.
More lunacy
It’s known as ‘mission creep’ and there isn’t even a pretence that it’s about being kept safe from a deadly virus.
If you read the exact wording of the regulations, you don’t need to provide data to the venue if you have a phone that can scan the QR code. However, the regulations don’t specify that you need to have the NHS track & trace app installed or do anything with the code. So just scanning the code with any arbitrary QR code or camera app would be enough.
That’s my analysis.
They can fuck right off. I’ll drink at home, alone if necessary. I will not submit to this totalitarian bullshit
I’m done with pubs and I suspect restaurants will be take out only. I’m not being tracked and traced everywhere I go and with all these restrictions I suspect that drinking in my garden with my like minded friends and family will be a far more pleasant experience, cheaper too.
As for the pubs, they can all go bust for all I care now. They haven’t protested or challenged these restrictions at all and if they chose this path the tiny amount of sympathy I have left will evaporate.
Just caught a news item filmed in my town where “locals” are asked if they support jab passports. Of course all the duh-brains, all napped up outside, bloody love the idea because “I want to get back to normal” (facepalm!) They also want those not jabbed to basically be banished from the kingdom. Good, I say! Don’t want to spend any time with people like you anyway, with your sheep-like mentality. Its actually now going to be easier to form new friend groups with other like-minded people!
Fascists always depend upon the shit-for-brains.
Sadly that seems to be about 90% of the population. That’s why it’s so easy regimes such as Johnson’s to gain traction
Think it might be 98%
Maybe all us sceptics should look to acquire an island somewhere and set up our own sensibly run nation 🤗
I’m in!
Bring it on!
I’ll be very interested in setting up a commune far away from this crap!
And me
Yeah, I’m getting to the stage where I hope all businesses go under just to spite those who take it all for granted. They deserve it and I’ll sacrifice for it.
So the big boys like Amazon win either way?
Weatherspoons went belly up during lockdown 1. but later Tim Martin made a rights issue (? not a finance expert) raising tens of millions on the basis of being able to buy up numerous bankrupted pub sites at knockdown prices. Gnawing at the carcasse of his own industry.
To top it all he subsequently cashed in millions of his own shares.
Crocodile tears methinks Mr. Martin.
Spoons did not go belly up. Liabilities never exceeded assets.
Spoons hardly ever buy up existing pubs-they buy and convert other commercial premises.
I can’t think of anyone who has done more for the pub industry in the UK .
He has been against lockdown and is against passports.
Sorry your post is factually incorrect .
By ‘belly up’ I did not mean bankrupt, I meant just put up with the restrictions like a submissive dog without much in the way of protest.
I grew up with Spoons as a breath of fresh air in a moribund pub industry but they gave up on not occupying pre-licenced premises many years ago, probably when Tim Martin ceased to be hands on CEO.
My small city has 5 Spoons, all bar one were previously pubs or an hotel.
Fought hard for Brexit as well. Patriot.
It’s a “No” from me. I love pubs, and it isn’t their fault but I don’t think I can be around people that actively support this shit.
I read yesterday that the ECB are looking art plans to ‘allow’ people back into County Championship (CC) Cricket games subject to masks being worn. Are they quite mad?Have they ever actually BEEN to a CC game?! You don’t need to sit near anyone if you’re a confirmed misanthrope. And masks. Outside. I want to scream at this moronic crap. Do some of these people believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and the Great Pumpkin as well?
I’ve decided I despise masks more than any other aspect of this shitshow.
No, no and fucking NO!
Such a system existed in Germany before 2nd lockdown kicked in. No one verified authenticity of the data, I always entered some fake name. The more people fill the system with crap, the sooner the govt will abandon this requirement.
I am total agreement with you.
lot of customers with the name Mickey Mouse perhaps?
It’s time us scpetics started a full black-economy. No interaction with the state at all, and sceptics standing by to defend, by whatever means necessary, black-economy-businesses aganst government penalties. Refuse taxation, prevent policing, cut the cancer of government out of our lives entirely, it does NOTHING worthwhile for us any more.
We have no need of the state, we should declare ourselves as effectively an indigenous tribe, resident in britain before we were colonised by lockdownists. We’ve got to break the rules, utterly, always and together. If we refuse as a mass to be subject to them then there is nothing the state can do to deal with a large proportion of its population that have fully ceased complying.
I admired that group of women who descended on a Tescos store unmasked and not socially distancing, that is the way to handle this, go mobhanded!
That’s happening in my town this weekend.
I think this is a wonderful idea, but where are the people with a backbone. It would work, everything else is just talk and time is running out.
No
TheBBC News report is worth reading in full.Fixed that for you.
I can state quite categorically that I won’t be providing my personal contact details to anyone to get in anywhere. I simply won’t go. Sad, I like eating out in good restaurants, but I won’t go along with any more of this nonsense. Neither will I show a vaccine passport or card.
I see no point in having an experimental vaccine either if you still have to go along with this complete nonsense. This is NOT getting back to normal. This is tyranny and a complete surveillance state.
It’s not about a virus and never was. I loathe this government and everything it stands for. They’ve sold our country out.
Agree completely. It would also be good to let the restaurant/pub know exactly why we’re not eating/drinking at their place. If not, they may just put it down to scaredy cats not wanting to venture out.
We should stop calling them vaccine passports. Passport has acceptable connotations, something that you just need to go on holiday.
What is being implemented by our totalitarian regime is not a passport, it is a Vaccine ID card.
Or… Certificate of Vaccination ID…
Permit has the right totalitarian undertone.
“I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.”
“I am not a number. I am a free man”.
Not going – simple as that.
As much as I want to go to the pub it’s not worth the hassle.
Screw Government and screw any business sector that has not fought back to save itself.
There is enough evidence out there to put a stop to all this, it just needs to be used and business has it’s collective head buried up it’s rear end.
On a separate note:
https://laworfiction.com/2021/03/legal-action-to-stop-coerced-vaccines/
Fiction:
Lawyers are doing nothing to stop your employer forcing you to have a vaccine.
Law:
We are doing something. We have written about “No jab, no pay” – a criminal offence. Now we are taking action.
We are going to issue legal proceedings in the High Court to bring an end to coercion to take vaccines. Criminal proceedings might follow in due course.
If you are facing an imminent threat if you won’t have a Covid vaccine, whether its the first or second dose, please register your interest on our Ain’t Just Whilstling page. Although this applies to all sectors, we immediately have the private healthcare sector in our sights for this test case. Register here and spread the word.
Applaud Law or Fiction case re mandatory vaccination as condition of employment, subject to the one caveat, I wish they would also launch a Human Rights case against the whole vaxx passport scheme – maybe they are waiting to see if it actually materialises and to see the full details of what is coming in. Either way, LOF please please bring a case against it.
It will be unenforceable unless written in law. Every establishment should refuse to implement. It’s time to bring the dictatorship down.
It is: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/1005
This April, I’ll be mostly making my own QR codes
https://www.qr-code-generator.com
Please can you explain to me, a tech ignoramus, what you are suggesting. Are you intending to create your own QR code, which you then use to check in to somewhere? Is it really that simple?
Not sure about the qr code but one work around people used last summer was to fill out the online check-in details then simply screenshot it. Next time you go, you just pull up the screenshot, easy work around… So I Am told.
And the great British public still think we are conspiracy theorists…..
A lot of people will simply wave a phone with out the NHS app at the code and carry on with no one the wiser
I can’t be bothered to grind through the Government stuff on this again today, as once is enough. However, I recall seeing somewhere in the Sea of Bumph that someone (presumably the pub registrar) is supposed to check the phone screen.
Where are the restaurant, pub, and cafe CEO’s? Why are they tolerating this nonsense? Also, who exactly came up with this idea, no names given. They are the problem. There is a dysfunctional track and trace system. Is that the same one government proposes to use? Pour more money into this? How about spending a little time and money tackling the complete breakdown of the NHS, which performed poorly under stress.
What do you expect from an incompetent government that has been responsible for many lockdown deaths, due to lack of access to nhs, fear mongering, nosocomial COVID spread.
Exactly. Track and trace is a complete farce. We need more hospitals and beds.
Besides all of the ethical and other issues. There are GDPR/data protection issues. There have to be safeguards to ensure that your personal data is protected, as you are providing data that uniquely identifies you.
Just extra hidden costs for the pub/restaurant owner that goes along with this. Hit them with Data Protection Requests.
There is no pub in the village I live in, it closed 2019. There seems to be more and more ‘man caves’ being built in back gardens in the village, posher folk have ‘summer houses’. I thought it was just happening here until I discovered towns with a few pubs, a couple of regular pub goers are also building ‘man caves’. I see a future of pubs finding it much tougher to keep the regulars they had and closing for good, as ‘man caves’ take over. That doesn’t bode well for the neighbourhoods or the police. A pub is regulated, noise levels are easily complained about and sorted. When buying a house, it’s your choice if you buy one next to the local pub. ‘Friends’ visiting and bringing their own cheap drink to someones back garden is going to cause grief with neighbours and when you look at buying a house you won’t know you have a pub by a new name next door. Definition of the locals ‘man cave’ : Hut in garden, sometimes summer house, inside has comfortable benches along one wall, a bar with a gantry, heating, big screen TV, fridge with glass door, bar stools and… Read more »
Quite frankly the hospitality industry is far bigger than the government and the police. If they want to save their industry they should group together, stand strong and open their doors. What is the matter with this submissive society we live in????? If I felt strongly about mu future I would get together with likeminded and fight for it.
It only takes a few dozen to open up and others will be brave enough to follow. The gym owners should have had support from the rest of their industry instead of allowing their fellow workers to be picked off by stasi police.
They’re not the only industry that has went along with this. I really wish that the government hadn’t printed money and bribed all these businesses, because now they are terrified to go against the government and lose the money they were given for nothing.
I know of so many small businesses that are obeying and meeting every single demand that government and worse the council gives them, just to keep some money coming in.
Smaller businesses I have a wee bit of sympathy with but I have zero sympathy with the large companies, they were the ones with clout and not one of them used it.
I am now witnessing the idiot gym owners, still not opening up their gyms because the Scots dictator says they can’t but they can take classes outside.
Outside in Scotland, in March/April in the dark in car parks and the idiots that have sat on their fat backsides and enjoyed their furlough are congratulating these gym owners for being back.
Yes your right the hospitality industry could have opened up but they didn’t and now we’re all going to suffer the consequences.
The government hasn’t printed money. The private Bank of England has and loaned it to the Government at some unpsecified interest rate. Taxpayers will be paying that interest for the ‘furlough’ bribes for decades, along with all the other BS like Trick and Treat, not-fit-for-purpose-but-extremely-profitable PPE, etc, etc.
My next door neighbour has spent the last month building what looks exactly like that. It seems a bit OTT for his occasional barbecue so expect he may be planning to hold regular drinking sessions as the summer approaches. Quite definitely not my scene and not looking forward to it.
If I identify as a non human do I have to provide details?
This is because so many are refusing an injection. They will not tell you the correct figures. They use propaganda to say that 90% of the over 70s have been vaccinated. However, if my friends are a snapshot of society its around 50/50. Those who have had the first jab have had reactions from none at all to very severe. Two out our 17 friends being hospitalised through paralysis.
An apartheid society is being created and not one single journalist is asking the searching questions. As with social media we are heading towards the breakup of families, the breakdown of communities and the bubble of freedom fighters looking across the line at the bubble of coercive technocracy. There will eventually be a bloody mess.
My family is already broken by it.