The company is to invest more than £35m developing the pubs, including new outlets in Cardiff, Fort William, Selby, Whitby, New Brighton and Fraserburgh.
“We are looking forward to opening the new pubs, many of which will be in areas where Wetherspoon is not yet represented,” said the group’s chairman Tim Martin. “We are also pleased to be creating so many new jobs, especially during a recession.”
Martin, who founded JD Wetherspoon over 30 years ago aged just 24, said that the number of new pub and bar openings this year would have been greater but for the punitive tax regime facing the industry.
“There is no question that we would open more pubs and create more jobs in 2013 if the increasing tax burden on pubs was reduced,” he added.
Supermarket battle
JD Wetherspoon paid 43 per cent of its 2012 turnover (more than £500m) in tax and has seen its year-on-year operating margin drop. Martin argues that supermarkets have an unfair advantage on the pub industry as they do not have to pay the 20 per cent VAT.
"All pubs and pub companies are, or should be, happy to pay their share of tax, but the pub industry has been fleeced by the government, in the last decade and a half in particular – resulting in fewer jobs and lower taxes, but more supermarkets, in the UK."
Over a third of every pint pulled in the UK is now paid in beer duty and VAT. Since the launch of the controversial beer duty escalator in 2008 (which sees causing tax on beer to automatically increase by 2 per cent above inflation every year), over 5,800 pubs have been forced to close their doors.
Last month the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) organised the biggest campaigning event in its 40-year history as over 1,200 of its members and other key figures from the beer and pub industry descended upon Parliament for a mass lobby calling for an end to the beer duty escalator.
This followed on from a Government e-petitionreaching 100,000 signatures, and a Parliamentary debatewhere MPs present unanimously backed a review of the beer duty escalator.