Leeds: City brewery offers warm space for home workers

The brewery says people who need a warm place to work are welcome to use its converted cellar

A brewery in West Yorkshire has opened up its tap room to enable people to use it is a warm place to work.

The owners of Horsforth Brewery said they hoped the scheme would help people who were facing rising energy bills.

It comes as the latest UK inflation figures showed prices had risen 11.1% in the year to October, up from 10.1% the previous month.

Mark Costello, from the brewery, said the move to offer people a warm place was prompted by a customer's concerns.

He said: "They were saying how it is going to get really expensive for them to work from home and their office is now closed. So, we're here and we're keeping the place warm anyway."

Mark Costello, from Horsforth Brewery, says the idea was prompted by a customer

Mr Costello said his own partner, who worked from home, would also take advantage of the warm space in the brewery's converted cellar.

"We kind of costed it up and you're looking at £15 or £20 a day to heat the house and that's not really sustainable unless you are significantly wealthy," he said.

People taking advantage of the brewery's warm space included bank worker Stuart MacDonald.

He said: "I go back to last winter and I probably would have been happy to just stick the heating on for an hour or two in the middle of the day.

"Now, you really just don't want to. So it is really good to be able to come somewhere like this."

Meanwhile, charity worker Zoe MacWilliam said: "We recently got one of those smart meters installed, so I can literally see when I am working at home how much we're using and it is really, really scary."

Stuart MacDonald and Zoe MacWilliam are among home workers using the brewery's warm space

Mr Costello said all people had to do to use the brewery's warm space was to book themselves a slot free of charge.

He added that like many other businesses it was seeing its own costs rise.

According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), energy and fuel costs rose sharply in the year to October.

Food price inflation hit 16.2% in the same period, up from 14.5% in September, with the overall inflation rate now at its highest level since 1981, the ONS said.