I’ll drink to landlord freedom and pubs staying in business
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Version 0 of 1. In November 2014, MPs voted to untie pubs from large pub chains (pubcos) – before this, the agreement was that in return for reduced rents each individual pub would only buy beer from the designated pubco. The problem was that rents weren’t that much reduced, and the beer was inflated beyond any sense of reason. The difference it made to the casual drinker is debatable; the main point was that publicans weren’t making any money. They were just about managing to pay themselves £10k a year, taking no holiday and still going bust at the end of it. In fact, 39 pubs a week were closing down by the time the Liberal Democrat MP Greg Mulholland put in his early day motion about it. A few things struck me while I listened to this being debated on the Today programme: the first was that pretty well all markets that have four big players (in this case Enterprise, Punch, Admiral and Greene King) end up with a … excuse me while I find the most diplomatic word … an asymmetrical power structure. It could be pubcos or services companies (G4S, Serco, Capita), but the results are always curiously similar: a business or service that worked OK before suddenly requiring everybody to be paid as little as they can humanly manage on. Second, the arguments in favour of the status quo are always the same, whether a person is pressing for pub landlords to remain in a de facto serf relationship, or for the Scots to remain in the union: it is always – “these changes you’re suggesting are incredibly risky, the risk being that livelihoods will be lost”. Literally always – I feel like designing an app, I would call it the Conservatron, into which you could input any keyword and it would provide you with your argument. “Unfortunately, your request for universal free higher education would result in universities going bust, and thousands of jobs could be lost”. “Sadly, your desire for community-owned solar panels on bus stops could discourage investment in fossil fuels and thousands of jobs could be lost”. They must take us for mugs. They do, actually. Third, early day motions are not as useless as they look, and nor are (some) Liberal Democrats. Fourth, I wonder what the impact has been on craft brewing. You would have to go back 70 years to find as many small independent breweries in the UK as we have today. And even if they do not present serious and immediate competition to the large brokers of very cheap beer, I wonder if they just cracked open the sky a little bit, and made the hegemony look less inevitable. |