Ten years after the Brexit referendum, the bosses of Britain’s biggest pub companies remain deeply divided over whether leaving the EU has helped or harmed their industry.
The leaders of major pub firms are typically united in their complaints about the tax and regulatory burden on the hospitality sector, but on Brexit they speak with very different voices.
Share prices across the UK’s major listed pub chains paint a troubling picture, with each firm having shed significant value since the 2016 vote.
Marston’s has fared the worst among its peers, spending much of the past decade in negative territory, while Mitchells and Butlers held up initially before suffering a sharp decline after the Covid-19 pandemic.
FTSE 250-listed JD Wetherspoon (JDW) stands out as the only London-listed pub company whose share price rose following the Brexit vote, a fact not lost on its outspoken chairman.
Tim Martin, the chairman of JD Wetherspoon and a prominent donor to the Brexit campaign, argues that dire predictions about job losses have simply not materialised.
“Hospitality’s fear about lack of immigration has been proven wrong. Immigration has actually increased,” Martin told City AM, pointing to the 2.4 million jobs he says the UK economy has created since Brexit.
Martin acknowledged that the outcome has not been without complications, saying: “All in all, not the sunlit uplands but, chaotic though it is, the UK has chugged along outside the EU.”
He added that he “regrets” the government did not cut “EU-era” tariffs on goods such as bananas, and argued that Labour’s 2024 and 2025 Budgets have since made employment considerably more expensive for hospitality businesses.
The share of EU workers in the hospitality industry did fall from 18 per cent to 12 per cent between December 2019 and 2023, though the total hospitality workforce has grown from 2.3 million to 2.6 million between March 2016 and 2026.
Net migration climbed to a record 944,000 in March 2023, according to the Office for National Statistics, but has since fallen and stood 44 per cent lower in December 2025 than a decade earlier.
Simon Emeny, executive chairman of Fuller Smith and Turner, takes a starkly different view, arguing that Britain has gone backwards since the vote.
Emeny told City AM that the UK “unfortunately, is in a worse economic position than it was a decade ago,” and suggested Brexit is “one of the reasons” successive governments have increased the tax burden on pubs to “make up the shortfall and lack of growth.”
Jonathan Neame, boss of Shepherd Neame, the UK’s oldest brewery, said it is “difficult” to separate Brexit’s impact from other blows to the sector, including the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
“In the round,” Neame said, “the UK has gone from being arguably one of the best places in the world to do business, if not the best, to one of the most difficult places in the world to do business.”
Neame acknowledged certain Brexit “dividends,” including reductions to alcohol duty rates on draft beer intended to ease the tax gap between draught and bottled products.
However, he argued that “excess taxation, excess regulation, very high energy [costs] and very high labour costs” have weighed so heavily on pubs that these benefits are hardly worth celebrating.
Hospitality bosses have warned in recent months that their businesses are approaching a breaking point after years of rising costs, including higher business rates, employer national insurance hikes, and national minimum wage increases.
The picture that emerges across the industry is one of cautious survival rather than the promised transformation, with pub leaders largely agreeing that the sector has endured, but disagreed sharply on who or what deserves the blame.