Oakman Inns’ Peter Borg-Neal: ​Curfew policy ’chaotic and appalling’

Oakman Inns founder Peter Borg-Neal has called the 10pm curfew a “disgrace” and a “public health disaster”.

Speaking on MCA’s The Conversation, the executive chairman called Boris Johnson and his inner circle a “collection of clowns” for pandering to focus groups rather than science.

UK Hospitality CEO Kate Nicholls agreed that it was probably a symbolic decision, without any real consideration of the impact it would have.

She warned the net impact would be that it would “undoubtedly make things worse” and might result in a faster move towards a full lockdown.

Borg-Neal said: “The curfew’s just nonsense. We all predicted what was going to happen.

“I think the big point here is public health. They’ve endangered public health with their centralised command and control approach to this whole thing,

“They talk about using science and information, but surely, if they want you to understand how people are likely to behave in those circumstances, they should have talked to the guys who represent the night-time economy.

“Instead you just got this collection of clowns, who probably haven’t been out in a bar after 10pm for decades, with absolutely no idea.

“As I understand it, Johnson, Hancock, and all the other clowns came up with it as a symbolic gesture to show to the people that they were doing something, because Tracy from some northern marginal thinks it would be a good idea.

“It’s chaotic and it’s appalling and it just shows what happens when there’s no parliamentary scrutiny. You’ve got a small bunch of fairly low-quality people making really important executive decisions which have a massive, massive effect throughout our industry.”

UK Hospitality CEO Kate Nicholls added: “I suspect that somebody latched onto this as a signal to send to the general population, that things are not as normal, and that we’re not able to head to the sunlit uplands.

“I think there was a thought that this might not have a significant detrimental impact on the businesses.

“It’s evidence of decisions being made at haste without the rigour of a regulatory impact assessment as you would normally have.

“We all could have predicted the consequences of what happened over the course of the last weekend, and the big concern and frustration that you hear from many businesses is, this hits far wider than just alcohol sales.

“It’s the law of unforeseen consequences. This is not going to have the net effect that they want it to have, but it will make undoubtedly things worse, and therefore might result in a faster move towards a full lockdown.

“It’s poorly conceived and ill executed.”