 30/3/2014
The Campaign For a Freeze In Beer Duty
CAMRA (Campaign For Real Ale) has recently been campaigning for a freeze in beer duty in the UK as part of the 2014 spring budget. After a big win in 2013 with beer duty cut by 1p, the further cut in tax announced yesterday as part of the 2014 budget is a great achievement for them and will go some way to helping pubs and brewers across the country in the long term.
Over the last four years beer duty has increased by 42%, meaning that beer consumption has slowly moved away from pubs to off licences and supermarkets as the UK consumer seeks to avoid paying these tax rises. If you were to divide out a pint at your local by cost, then you would see that a third of it went to the government in tax. Therefore this further reduction in tax could be a real turning point for brewers large and small.
Investing In The Future
The change in tax will almost certainly free brewers to invest further in their business and their production lines (as mentioned by SIBA on their website), as consumers feel more confident about buying beer in their local pubs and off-sales outlets, but how can they ensure that they invest effectively?
Cost effectiveness is key – those in any beverage industry need to be able to react flexibly to changes in production such as packaging design, substrate or code content. Therefore having a completely up to date coding machine that produces high quality codes reliably and without errors is essential to avoid potentially costly downtime.
However it is not just about the codes that the machines create, the coding machines need to be cost effective in of themselves. Long service intervals and lower cost consumables help to reduce the cost of coding to the brewer over the long term and the savings make a real difference to a business.
Some brewers may even find that thanks to the reduction in beer duty they have the resources available to invest in a laser coder for their production line, a technology that requires no consumables and is therefore certainly a long term investment in the future.
Whatever the outcome in the 2014 budget, it was an important time for brewers and those in the alcoholic beverage industry as a whole to consider the costs that are attributed to production. |
