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Pub Companies

Pubs are not just places we frequent to buy beer; they are vital community hubs that can be fundamental to our lives. I can say that, given that I met my wife in a pub called the Chetwynd Arms in my constituency back in 1997. Given that it was in 1997, I conclude only that it was probably the only good thing to come out of that year. Since those heady days, we have lost much of that community heritage that our pubs give. At the moment we risk the continuing demise of the good old British pub. Part of the demise has no doubt been exacerbated by the relationship between the pubcos and their lessees. History tells us that the arrangements between pubcos, lessees and tenants, which emanated from the break-up of the estates of the large breweries back in the 1990s, were not initially dissimilar to the situation that obtained under the breweries. Where the model differs tremendously, however, is that the pubcos are middlemen—yet another middleman between the product producer and the end user of the product. That has necessarily added costs over a number of years. The costs seem to have been met quickly by the tenants and lessees who have seen many changes over that period: metered pumps, tighter reins on guest ales, loss of machine income, reductions in the will to help with refurbishments—these are probably only a few of the additional burdens that lessees have had to face. We need to be aware that much of that stems from 1980s legislation in the context of the fundamental shift towards the large pubco estates that we now have. I welcome much of the work done by successive Select Committees on the practices of pubcos, but I think we should be careful about what we wish for as we look to legislate now. We could end up out of the frying pan into the fire because we are in a very different world today than we were when the Select Committee first considered this issue in 2004. Back then, pubs were still in decline, but there has been a huge aggregation of issues since. We have had the smoking ban, increased regulation on alcohol sales, beer duty rising by 35% over the last four years alone, below-cost selling at supermarkets becoming more prevalent and, to top all that, we have suffered the deepest and longest recession since the 1930s. These factors have no doubt strained even further relations between pubcos and their lessees.