Kid gloves off, iron fist out

The long-awaited Community Pubs inquiry has come up with a whole series of entirely sensible suggestions for how Government can do more to help ailing pubs.

One of the most pertinent recommendations relates to the need for further regulation to be properly thought-through before it's imposed willy-nilly on the trade. The inquiry suggested regulators should be obliged to spend time in the trade to see how proposals would work in practice before legislation is forthcoming.

It's truly ironic, then, that the Home Office and Department for Culture, Media & Sport should propose draconian action against pubs causing noise nuisance and other problems.

Gone, under the guidance, is a softly-softly approach to pubs involving authorities working with them to resolve problems. Instead, the new guidance encourages local authorities to act in a much more absolutist way to clamp down on the trade. Reading like a charter for the over-zealous, it contains a raft of proposals that amount to public pillory. Problem pubs would be obliged to display a yellow sign in their windows — a move as certain to reinforce a negative spiral in trading terms as a local authority declaring its town or city centre an Alcohol Disorder Zone. Other recommended conditions include installation of CCTV to cover every point of sale, insisting the licensee authorises every alcohol sale, and the out-right banning of an individual drink category, such as cider or alcopops.

Everyone in the trade understands the need for local authorities to act against pubs that are causing real problems in the community. If these pubs fail to respond to calls for improved standards, they deserve to be closed down.

What is worrying though, is the tenor of the new guidance, with its clear inference that the authorities need to come down on pubs like a ton of bricks, rather than try to work with them to resolve problems.

To say the latest figures on beer sales from the British Beer & Pub Association are a worry is a pretty massive understatement.

On-trade beer volume dropped by a huge 8.1% between July and September, compared to the year before. The latest drop means on-trade beer volumes have decined by a precipitous 20% in just three years — pubs are selling one pint in five fewer compared to three short years ago.

It's not as if the smoking ban can be blamed — these latest figures compare to the three soggy months after the ban came in. Meanwhile, Coors, the UK's second- largest brewer, has filed accounts showing wafer-thin margins of less than £2 per barrel profit.

If there's one thing harder than being a licensee at the moment, it's brewing beer.