Your say

Young licensees simply don't fear debt

With reference to the leader comment last week (MA 12 June), I thought deeply about it and my first reaction was to defend myself and my colleagues over the remarks (that licensees should be young).

But times are changing — just think back to when Andrew Pring was a young man: nobody had a telephone, not many people had a car, mobile phones were the ones you nicked from telephone boxes, and no one had debt. Well they did, but they paid it off weekly.

These young people have energy and enthusiasm, but experience can only come in time; young people today don't see debt as a problem —they will walk away, while older people still see having debt as a stigma, which is brought on not by themselves, but by the pubco they are attached to.

Edward Cant

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The real reason pubs are going to the wall

I write with regard to "FLVA criticises Portman" (MA 12 June) Pubs are not being driven out of business by cheap alcohol in supermarkets. It is the impact of tied tenants paying excessive rents and very high prices for their produce. Pubs need to move forward and improve their offer to the consumer. The problem is that tenants are barely surviving and have no scope to reinvest. Many pubs have their survival further threatened by pubco demands of cash with order and no credit.

Tony Payne knows that and he knows that supermarkets get about the same discount as pubcos, but that supermarkets pass on the benefit while pubs cannot because it is denied to them.

Also, price has no bearing on bingeing. Parental and police control are elements that may have some effect. The statistics for drunkenness from 1985 to 1995 halved and then halved again between 1995 and 2005. That is fact! Also we all know that binge drinking appears to have increased.

The reason? It now takes police six times as long to process one drunk as it did 10 years ago. The police cannot afford the time to introduce any real control. That is the fault of both the Government and the Police force for kowtowing to political pressure and the fantasy of "political correctness".

Brian Jacobs

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Asda stacks it high and sells it cheap

My wife did her weekly shop at our local Asda on a Friday night.

Supermarkets have always maintained shoppers buy their alcohol as part of a weekly shop.

Perhaps someone could explain then how she counted 18 individual groups of males purchasing only alcohol within the space of an hour? This was on the day Asda went from offering two cases of beer for £16 to offering three for £20. I don't know what is more annoying — the stupidity of our Government, or that the supermarkets think we licensees are as stupid as the Government.

George Halliday

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