Hamish Champ: Going to Hell in a handcart?

'Two weekends to save the high street', screamed a headline from my newspaper on Saturday.

If the weather over the weekend wasn't enough to tip even the most optimistic person into the abyss - and dear reader you know I'm not that kinda guy anyway - this sort of doomsaying would do the job.

Despite the best efforts of UK retailers, the recent flurry of pre-Christmas sales has apparently done little to calm fears that the retail sector is sailing down the swanny without so much as a piece of driftwood shaped like a Mk 1 Ford Cortina to help steer the stricken vessel back towards the riverbank.

Meanwhile more and more retail businesses are seeking advice from firms of accountants and banks on how to restructure their operations in order to survive. As recently as Saturday Orchid Group announced it had sorted out some such arrangement with a team of finance whizz kids (see the City section on The Publican​ website for more details).

Orchid is unlikely to be alone in talking to such people in these turbulent times.

But if companies don't pass muster with the banks and beancounters do they deserve to go to the wall?

Some companies fall on hard times due to circumstances beyond their control, others through incompetent management.

I heard an emotive argument last week from someone who believed that 'pre-pack administrations' - where a company's owner bungs the business into administration and buys back the best bits almost immediately at a knockdown price - should be made illegal.

'Pre-packing' may save jobs, as some point out, but suppliers are certainly left high and dry. They lose out too, jobs in their businesses equally at risk thanks to being unsecured creditors on a business that has effectively been hung, drawn and quartered.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: examining this stuff at government level wouldn't go amiss.

However, with all that the current administration has on its plate right now I doubt it will get a look-in for a while yet. If at all.

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For those interested in this sort of thing I'll be doing a review of 2008 in the first issue of The Publican next year, as well as predictions for 2009 from some of the industry's leading personalities.