Westminster City Council has put forward a draft licensing policy that would discourage vertical drinking in the West End, where pubs and bars are central to late-night trade. The draft remains open for public comment, and council leader Paul Swaddle says the aim is safety, not a ban on standing with a pint.
Swaddle said the proposal is not meant to stop people standing at a bar. He added: “Let me be clear about what we’re trying to achieve,’’ he said. “This is about safety, not stopping anyone standing at a bar with a pint in their hand.”
Westminster City Council draft policy
The draft policy also proposes discouraging excessive drunkenness and would favor more table service and more places to sit over open bar space designed for high-volume vertical drinking. Westminster has more pubs, bars and restaurants licensed to sell alcohol than any other local authority in the U.K., so even a change framed as guidance can reach a large number of venues at once.
That scale is why the proposal has drawn quick criticism from pub landlords and senior politicians. One local landlord, Lesley Lewis, has run the French House in Soho for 37 years and said she relies on customers who stand. “We rely on those people standing up with the rents and the rates (taxes) put upon us,” she said.
Lesley Lewis in Soho
Lewis said standing drinkers are part of the way the business works in Soho. “People want to enjoy themselves in Soho, they want to have a drink outside, they want to dance. They don’t want to sit down and just be where they are, they want to meet people and chat,” she said. Her point goes to the practical effect of the draft: if Westminster pushes venues toward seating and table service, smaller pubs that depend on standing-room trade may feel the pressure first.
The dispute is now less about the wording of the policy than about how it would be applied. Swaddle says the council is targeting safety and disorderly behavior, while critics see a clampdown on a core part of pub life. The policy is still open for public comment, leaving pub owners and customers to press their case before Westminster City Council decides what the final rules should say.
Andy Burnham in Harlow
Senior politicians have also joined the criticism. A spokesman for Andy Burnham said pubs full of people standing around sharing a pint are part of British life. Burnham said at the Hare in Harlow, Essex last month: “The pubs that we’ve got are at the heart of high streets, and I think it’s really important to signal at the start of my time in office that I will be a defender for them,” and “I will speak up for them and act.”
For pub landlords in the West End, the immediate task is to use the public-comment period to push back against a policy they say could change the feel of their bars without clearly saying how Westminster would enforce it if standing itself is not being banned.
