Calling time? New data on pub closures

"Some 28 pubs have been closing every week" listeners to the BBC's Today programme were told this morning.

This particular statistic has been propping up the bar for several years, and Full Fact first checked it back in January 2012.

At that time, figures from the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) showed 28 pubs calling time for good. But 14 new pubs had also opened. So the 'net' rate at which the options available to drinkers were diminishing was 14 pubs per week.

We got in touch with the BBPA to ask if it had any more up-to-date figures, which they helpfully provided us with. These show that the number of pubs closing their doors every week is... 28.

This time the figure refers to the net number of closures. In the nine months between March and December 2013, 1,927 pubs closed (49 per week) while 835 opened (21 per week).

This detail is important, because many of the 'closures' and 'openings' in the data might actually refer to pubs who merely change their business model. If a pub starts serving food, for example, it might 'close' as a 'local' pub and reopen as a 'restaurant', conceivably without its clientele noticing. A pub can move between 68 categories of classification in the data.

The data provided by the BBPA also shows that the number of pubs closing has crept up in recent months, after the weekly closure rate fell from 52 in the first six months of 2009 to 12 in 2011/12.