Business
Westminster’s war on vertical drinking
Last Thursday evening I stood in a pub off Brewer Street with a pint in one hand and an elbow on the bar, talking with an old friend that I regularly find myself taking over the media world with.
By the second pint we had solved the skills crisis, where Spurs will finish next season and I’d advised him on his new electric car purchase. The doors were open, the crowd had spilled politely onto the pavement, and for ninety minutes the British economy was doing exactly what it says on the tin.
However, it turns out I was part of the problem. Buried in Westminster City Council’s new draft licensing policy, out for consultation until five o’clock this evening, is a desire for West End venues to swap “open bar space that caters for high volume vertical drinking” for seating, table service and the ordering of food. Vertical drinking, for those who have not kept up with the literature, is standing up with a drink. In a pub.
The council has since insisted there is no plan, and never has been, to ban standing up in a Westminster pub, which is what organisations always say once a consultation catches fire. But the draft statement of licensing policy says what it says, and licensing policies are not mood boards. They are the criteria against which every new licence and variation is judged. If the policy smiles upon seated table service, applicants will promise seated table service, and the West End will get it by increments, one genuflecting application at a time.
Even Downing Street felt moved to intervene, declaring that busy pubs full of people talking to each other are “not a public nuisance, it is British life, and it is thousands of jobs”, while Sadiq Khan complained that you cannot run a world-famous nightlife district with a village-hall mindset. When No 10, the Mayor and every publican in Soho find themselves in furious agreement in the second week of August, something properly daft is afoot.
And we know this particular species of daft, because we lived through it. Cast your mind back to the winter of 2020, when the finest minds in Whitehall convened to determine whether a scotch egg constituted a substantial meal, and honest citizens ordered plates of chips they had no intention of eating in order to drink a pint lawfully. Nobody voted for the substantial meal rule. It seeped out of guidance, and within a fortnight it was the law of the land in everything but statute. Vertical drinking is the scotch egg’s second coming: a rule about furniture pretending to be a policy about safety.
What Westminster is really proposing is to become the aunt with the wedding seating plan. Everyone has met her. She has decided, with laminated certainty, that the day will go better if nobody is permitted to circulate. You will sit here, beside your assigned stranger, and you will have your allocated fun between the starter and the speeches.
And the reception dies on its feet, or rather in its chairs, because everything good at a party happens standing up: the introductions, the gossip, the flirtation, the job offer scribbled on a napkin. The pub is Britain’s reception venue, and Soho is the top table. Sit it down and you kill the mingle.
Business readers will recognise both halves of the disease. The first is capacity economics. A wet-led pub sells space by the square foot, and a drinker standing at the bar occupies perhaps a third of the footprint of one marooned at a table, while being served faster by fewer staff. Mandate seats and you cut Friday night’s capacity by a third and add a waiter’s wages to every round, in a trade where the BBPA already counts two pubs a day calling last orders for good and £1 in every £3 taken over the bar goes to the Treasury before a single bill is paid.
The second is regulatory creep: rules that arrive dressed as “encouragement” in guidance documents, which no minister ever has to defend because no minister ever proposed them.
A fortnight ago in this column I suggested that the nation’s dawdling diners should eat up and give the table back, because a restaurant sells seat hours. A pub is the mirror image. Its product is proximity: strangers, upright, two deep at the bar, in the only institution Britain has ever built for the purpose. With licensed venues already going dark at three a day, the West End’s problem is not that too many people are standing in its pubs. It is that soon there may be nothing left to stand in.
The consultation closes at five o’clock today, and I intend to mark the deadline in the traditional way: upright, elbow on the bar, talking nonsense to a stranger and in this instance I hope that I don’t end up as an extra in TOWIE.
Richard Alvin
Richard Alvin is a serial entrepreneur, a former advisor to the UK Government about small business and an Honorary Teaching Fellow on Business at Lancaster University.
A winner of the London Chamber of Commerce Business Person of the year and Freeman of the City of London for his services to business and charity. Richard is also Group MD of Capital Business Media and SME business research company Trends Research, regarded as one of the UK’s leading experts in the SME sector and an active angel investor and advisor to new start companies.
Richard is also the host of Save Our Business the U.S. based business advice television show.
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NHTSA said the recall stems from a vehicle assembly issue rather than a defective component.
Dealers will inspect the second-row seat belt buckle anchors and, if necessary, properly attach them to the vehicle’s body structure at no cost to owners.
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Chipotle Mexican Grill is facing a lawsuit from a Minnesota woman who alleges a burrito bowl from a restaurant in the state caused a severe Salmonella infection that left her hospitalized with sepsis.
Kristen Behne filed the complaint in U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, accusing Chipotle of strict product liability, negligence and violations of Minnesota food-safety law. She is seeking more than $75,000 in compensatory damages.
According to the lawsuit, Behne ate a chicken burrito bowl from a Chipotle restaurant in Roseville, Minnesota, on June 24. The meal included guacamole, Fresh Tomato Salsa and Roasted Chili-Corn Salsa — all of which the complaint claims contained raw jalapeño peppers.
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A Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurant in San Francisco, California, on Aug. 14, 2025. Chipotle is facing a lawsuit from a Minnesota woman who alleges a burrito bowl caused a severe Salmonella infection that left her hospitalized. (Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
Days later, Behne developed fever, chills, vomiting, abdominal cramping and severe diarrhea, the complaint alleges. She eventually sought emergency care, was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with sepsis.
“Three days later she was in a hospital bed, febrile, tachycardic and septic — a life-threatening complication of the Salmonella infection caused by Chipotle’s grossly contaminated food,” the lawsuit alleges. “She has not been the same since.”
According to the suit, the Minnesota Department of Health classified Behne as a confirmed case tied to a multistate outbreak that has sickened at least 345 people.
“MDH recorded her illness as outbreak-associated, identified the outbreak by name as the Salmonella Javiana outbreak, and classified Plaintiff as a confirmed case,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit alleges Behne continues to experience effects from the illness.
CHIPOTLE CEO SAYS CHAIN IS MAKING ‘MEANINGFUL PROGRESS’ ON A MAJOR CUSTOMER CONCERN
A customer carries a takeout bag and drink outside a Chipotle restaurant in New York on Jan. 12, 2024. The lawsuit comes as health officials investigate a multistate Salmonella outbreak linked to jalapeño peppers. (Angus Mordant/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Plaintiff’s health has not returned to its pre-illness baseline,” according to court documents. “She continues to experience the effects of her acute Salmonella infection and her septic episode, and is at increased risk of well-recognized post-infectious sequelae, including reactive arthritis and post-infectious irritable bowel syndrome.”
The legal action comes as health officials investigate a multistate Salmonella outbreak linked to jalapeño peppers.
Chipotle said Tuesday it had removed jalapeños from some restaurants after health officials linked the outbreak to recalled peppers.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that 345 people in 27 states had been sickened, including 36 who were hospitalized. No deaths have been reported.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, on Aug. 6, 2022. The CDC said Chipotle and QDOBA stopped serving the affected peppers after being notified. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Epidemiologic and trace back evidence identified jalapeño peppers grown in Sinaloa, Mexico, and distributed by Coast Citrus Distributors as the source of the outbreak.
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The CDC said Chipotle and QDOBA stopped serving the affected peppers after being notified. Because the products were removed, the CDC and U.S. Food and Drug Administration said they do not consider the restaurants to pose a current ongoing risk to consumers from this outbreak.
Chipotle and an attorney for Behne could not immediately be reached by FOX Business for comment.
FOX Business’ Brittany Miller contributed to this report.
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