A BAR owner is calling for the 10pm curfew to be scrapped when drinking places are permitted to reopen.

Tony Martinez, owner of Rioja in Ulverston, said the curfew ordering bars and restaurants to close at 10pm ‘did not work’, since the nation is going back into a second lockdown.

The late night trading restriction was introduced on October 1 after the UK’s Covid-19 alert level rose from three to four, meaning transmission of the virus is ‘high or rising exponentially’.

Politician Michael Gove told BBC Breakfast there was evidence the 10pm closing time has had a ‘beneficial effect’ on the spread of the virus in areas where it has already been tried. However, pubs, bars and restaurants owners across the country, including Mr Martinez, claim otherwise.

He said: “I don’t think the 10pm curfew worked since we are still going into a lockdown. There were so many restrictions put on the hospitality industry which I think we all adapted to really well – it shows how diverse the industry can be.

“I think that’s the reason the rate of infection slowed down – not the 10pm curfew.

“There is no evidence closing bars a few hours earlier has any impact on transmission rates. Education is where the virus is spreading – schools, colleges, universities – rather than bars and pubs.”

Mr Martinez fears the four week lockdown will be extended until Christmas or longer.

He said: “The main thing is that staff are furloughed which is what I’m happy about. But it depends how long it goes on for. The curfew hit us really hard because we were losing ten or more trading hours a week. It’s a difficult time for the hospitality industry all round.”

In September, 100 major hospitality firms signed an open letter to the Prime Minister calling for the 10pm curfew on pubs, bars and restaurants in England to be reviewed every three weeks.

The letter warns that half of the UK’s 100,000 hospitality firms already feared they would not survive beyond the middle of 2021, before the restriction on late-night trading was introduced.