Young’s chief looks to toast the recovery amid Autumn Internationals party atmosphere

WITH a weekend of international rugby coming up, Young’s CEO Patrick Dardis is brimming with enthusiasm – and not just because his beloved Ireland are taking on the All Blacks tomorrow.

“As you know, rugby is massive for us,” he says to me over the phone on a busy results day for the historic pub chain. He’s eagerly looking forward to a sea of full pubs across the Young’s estate for England vs. Australia.

“You look back at the European Championships over the summer, and it was more of a pain than anything,” he tells me, referring to the still-then-enforced rules of six to a table and mostly table service. “But I’m very excited for the Autumn Internationals, and then after Christmas it’s the Six Nations.”

Perhaps it feels like a bit of a party after two years of lockdown-induced chaos – and results that suggest the worst, touch wood, might be over.

The morning we speak, Dardis’ chain reports revenues that are almost on a par with 2019 levels, and a chunky half-year adjusted profit of around £27m – not bad considering restrictions only finally levelled off in mid-July. Whilst central London and City pubs were down around 40 per cent when they first re-opened, they’re now around 12 per down on pre-pandemic times. That gap, he says, is closing every day.

“After 18, 20 months of the pandemic, it’s good to be able to look forward rather than backward,” he says, clearly also chuffed to have been able to return a dividend to shareholders.

“We’ve always said we’d be back there when the glass was even half-full and I imagine shareholders are celebrating.”

Dardis – whose first job in pubs came some forty years ago when, straight off the plane from Ireland, he was whisked on a boozy tour of south west London that somehow ended with a gig behind the bar at the Hand in Hand in Wimbledon Village – isn’t just waiting for the recovery to come, though.

Rather than stand pat and wait for restrictions to end, Dardis got the chequebook out to go on an investment spree across the estate. He was helped by the £53m sale of 56 tenanted pubs to Punch.

“We invested right throughout the pandemic, investing in our estate,” he says. The group’s results cite everything from additional tent canopies to turning car parks into outdoor drinking areas, to get ahead of ‘outdoor only’ drinking restrictions. And the plan is to keep going.

“We didn’t want to shut pubs for refurbishment after lockdowns, obviously, but in our fourth quarter (January to March) we’re embarking on our biggest ever investment programme,” he tells me. That means not just adding burger shacks and giving pubs a makeover, but adding hotel rooms where they can.

It’s quite the turnaround for a pub chain which after years of being a south west institution had perhaps failed to keep up with the competition when Dardis joined way back in 2002.

“In the next financial year we’re expecting to up that by 20 to 30 per cent again,” he says.

Dardis is on a roll – and he’s even confident, unlike many of his peers in hospitality, that Young’s will dodge the worst of issues around supply chains and labour shortages.

“We have secured our turkeys for Christmas. We’ll be fine. They’re walking around with numbers on them.” No concerns there, then. And as for staff, he re-opened in April with 4,000 staff. The chain is now up to 5,000 and while there was a period in which it was “more difficult” to hire, it does appear to be “easing.”

With that, Dardis is off – hoping to finalise the purchase of another freehold by the end of the day.

Young’s has been a historic part of the south of England pub scene for many years; Dardis appears a man on a mission to ensure it stays that way for years to come.

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