Every country has its own bar culture. Britain’s pubs are so established in the national psyche that they’re often a tourist draw in their own right. In an effort to support local communities, the UK government is moving to stop pubs from being redeveloped to other, more lucrative, uses.

Housing secretary Angela Rayner has clamped down hard. Pubs can now only be redeveloped if they have been on the market for at least a year as a pub, and there is no reasonable prospect of running a viable watering hole. The rules will also take into account a bar’s historical popularity to prevent businesses being deliberately run down.

The decline of the tavern trade has been a long‑running theme; a quarter of all pubs have closed in the past quarter century, leaving 45,000 hostelries still open while the UK population has risen by a fifth. Supporting local communities is politically appealing, but curbing redevelopment potential will lower property values for existing landlords and may discourage new investment.

The best the UK can do is to remove excessive drags on hospitality businesses: recent jumps in business duties and employer taxes have hit labour‑intensive pubs hard. There’s about 2 per cent net profit in a pint, calculates the British Beer and Pub Association. Leaving landlords with a reasonable head would be a better way of avoiding unnecessary closures.