A NIGHTCLUB owner has blasted the government’s support package for the hospitality industry as “insulting”.

Brighton-born entrepreneur Alex Proud runs Proud Cabaret Brighton in St George’s Road in Kemp Town as well as two other cabaret venues in London.

The businessman took to Twitter this week to vent his frustration after the government announced its lockdown grants for struggling businesses amid Covid-19, which he says is not enough to cover expenses.

Mr Proud tweeted: “£9k won’t cover our PAYE or insurance or IT or electricity. It won’t even cover one month. Feel our pain you rich b******s.

The Argus: Proud Cabaret BrightonProud Cabaret Brighton

“I feel actually violent with anger and disgust. A life of work destroyed by idiots. How do you sleep at night?”

Speaking on BBC London News outside his Proud Embankment venue, Mr Proud said: “This place probably costs about £50,000 a month to stay closed and we have three venues.

“For nightclubs in the UK, £9,000 is literally nothing. I’m sorry but it is spitting in the wind and it’s insulting.”

On Monday, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced one-off grants worth £9,000 per property for hospitality, retail and leisure businesses amid the national lockdown.

Under the new restrictions, these venues must stay closed until at least February half-term in order to control the spread of Covid-19, the Prime Minister has said.

The furlough scheme has been extended to April and the government is also providing monthly grants worth £3,000 to closed businesses.

Mr Sunak said the new top-up lockdown grants of £9,000 will “support businesses and jobs until the spring”.

Mr Proud also managed Stanmer House near Brighton from 2016 until last year, when the company went into voluntary liquidation.

Documents available through Companies House show Proud Publishing Limited, his company which ran Stanmer House, has debts of more than £1 million to unpaid creditors, including £275,000 to HMRC and £30,629 to Brighton and Hove City Council.

READ MORE: Alex Proud's Stanmer House company had debts of more than £1million

Mr Proud, who opened his London photography gallery Proud Central in 1998, has also offered the use of his cabaret club venues for the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out.

He told John Pienaar on Times Radio: “The government closed every nightclub in Britain back in March. There’s about 2,000 of us and we’re all sitting on our backsides.

"We have incredibly well-ventilated clubs, we have freezers and staff who can manage social distancing - this is an enormous nationwide resource.

"Why aren’t we vaccinating 24-hours a day? Again, nightclubs and pubs are used to operating at night.

“We care about our country and want to see this end and we want desperately to reopen. We are just about hanging on by our fingernails.”