Furniture thrown into skip outside closing Bognor Regis pub is 'a very limited error' owners say

Bognor Regis residents spoke out earlier this week after teams removing furniture, food and equipment from the now-closed Regis Brwers Fayre pub were seen breaking the items and throwing them in a skip.

The items included sealed food, plastic cups, and some of the pub’s furniture – and many residents felt the decision was wasteful, that the discarded items could have been donated to local charities or recycled.

The popular eatery, on The Esplanade, closed its doors for the last time on April 19, amidst plans to build a 116-bedroom Premier Inn on a site further down the seafront. Plans for the hotel are part of a landswap deal which should allow Arun District Council to go ahead with multi-million pound renovation works at The Alexandra Theatre, which joins on to the back of the Brewers Fayre pub.

Grandads Front Room, a Community Interest Company based in High Street, Bognor Regis, provides a range of white good and pastoral support to families in need. One of the directors, Danny Dawes, said the furniture he saw being discarded would have been hugely useful for the families he and his colleagues support.

"Something we have always championed with the families we help is giving them a table and chairs,” he said. “It’s so important to a family because it brings them together. We could have upcycled or recycled or reused those tables they threw away, but they were all smashed up.”

A spokesperson for Whitbread PLC, the company which owns the Brewers Fayre chain, said the decision to throw out the furniture was ‘a very limited error.’

"We agree it is disappointing to see some of these items being thrown away, including the plastic cups. This is contrary to the instructions given to the site to redeploy items where possible.

"However, on investigation this does appear to have been a very limited error – the majority of assets from this site have been deployed to others and I’ve confirmed that the food pictured was unsafe to donate or it would have been. Other items have already been donated to a homeless charity.”

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