Justin Platt
CEO & Director

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Marston's Interim Results for Financial Year '26. My name is Justin Platt. I'm the CEO. And with me, I have Stephen Hopson, our Chief Financial Officer. We'll take you through the results today, and we'll do so with the following running order. I'll give some quick headlines. Stephen will then talk to the financials. I'll then come back to give an update on some of the strategic progress we've made in the first half, and then we'll take some time for questions.

So it's been a really good first half for us. It's been a first half when we've made really excellent strategic progress, and that progress sets us up for a very strong year overall. Profit-wise, we've done pretty well. So we've grown profit before tax at almost 8%; alongside that, yet another period of margin expansion. And we've done that despite some of the well-known cost headwinds, but also with some of the closure periods that we've taken as we've refurbished our estate in line with the format. The formats have been a key success of the first half. We've done 60 of them against the plan of 50. And as we've come to, they've all performed very, very well.

So all of that feels -- leaves us feeling very encouraged and positive about the second half. And hence, we maintain our view on expectations for the year. So that's the headlines. I'll let