Offering the right deal...for everyone

There's still no clear indication of the new government's stand on the pub sector and given the small matter of billions of pounds of budgetary deficit to deal with, why should there be?

Few doubt the economy will go through hoops in the near future, but there are people who clearly see opportunities in the sector. For those people there is no escaping the fact that 'quality will out'.

David Elliott, the former Greene King executive who's popped up as chairman of the ambitious Quercus Pub Company, raised the issue of pubs that are just plain awful: dirty, scuzzy, nasty.

I don't know the circumstances of the pubs he recently encountered while checking out some for his new outfit to buy. But I know the kind of place he means.

Then there is Mitchells & Butlers (M&B), attracting interest for those of its businesses it wishes to sell. They might not be core, but they're still in good nick. Simultaneously M&B is looking to raise the standard of its existing estate through investment, mining the food-led side of the pub game.

The point is that people still see a future in pubs. Yet any prosperity they are to experience will be determined by the quality of the offer. And that offer has to work in more than one respect.

Enterprise Inns' Simon Townsend says he wants the best people running his company's pubs, hoping his new leases will facilitate this. Punch Taverns' Roger Whiteside wants his code of practice to channel wannabe licensees his way.

All good stuff - and new lease deals, together with detailed and transparent codes, are to be welcomed.

But the truest test will not just be whether they make everyone's lives easier, but whether they create a more equitable situation twixt landlord and tenant.