Your say

Portman Group is not an on-trade ally

While broadly in agreement with almost everything your anonymous correspondent wrote about the Portman Group (3 July 2008), I feel

I must correct him/her on the role of this organisation.

The Portman Group represents the drinks organisations, not the licensed trade. As with most self-regulating bodies, the Portman Group is answerable to its paymasters — the drinks industry.

It is misleading, if not downright foolhardy, to expect the Portman Group to support any initiative that threatens the status quo of the drinks industry.

On the subject of below-cost supermarket sales of alcoholic drinks, the managing director of a major brewer had the courtesy to contact me directly on this very subject following my previous letter pointing out that major breweries supplying supermarkets makes them complicit in below-cost sales.

His justification was that if their competitors did it, they had no choice. Tesco adopted a similar position recently. It is more than optimistic to expect the Portman Group to speak out against below-cost selling by supermarkets and its consequences while its paymasters supply ammunition for most of our binge-drinking problems.

From a wider perspective, this misunderstanding over roles is symptomatic of the industry's inability to find a single voice to represent its varied membership.

The breweries and major pubcos are uniquely unsuited to representing the on-trade; while those bodies that claim to do so spend most of their time justifying their existence rather than tackling the major problems besetting the on-trade, it is little wonder that Labour's lack of government is overseeing the removal of the pub from British culture.

The Portman Group may trot out a string of statistics to justify the "good" it is doing, but this carries the same hollow ring as its masters' words, and those of the biggest problem facing the on-trade — Gordon Brown.

Is there any coincidence that Brown is also unelected in his public office?

Arthur Grun

The Rose & Crown, Brokenborough, Wiltshire

Time for licensees to take responsibility

I read with interest the MA article regarding the lease for sale for 1p.

I feel disgusted about the number of licensees citing the smoking ban, credit crunch and unfair pubco pricing as reasons for failing.

I moved into a pub in Worthing, West Sussex, last October. It is on a street full of houses occupied by OAPs, has no beer garden, and a bad local reputation. For 18 months prior to taking it on, average weekly takings were £900 to £1,000. Admiral Taverns agreed to refurbish it in January, but we suspended this due to the speed with which the business turned around.

For the 34 weeks I have been trading, the overall weekly average is £3,516. The last six weeks' average is £4,418 and last week my take was £5,137. In this 100% wet-led community pub, my GP is 62%.

My staff and I have slogged for almost nine months and break record after record every week.

We offer no food, no Sky, and no football. On a recent Saturday, doorstaff clicked in 209 customers and we took £2,480 in five hours.

I'm sick of hearing licensees blaming everything but themselves for their own lack of promotion and marketing knowledge.

Lee Mills

The Montague,

Worthing, West Sussex