Mike Benner: let's reward good pubs

From a motley army of beer drinkers, CAMRA has become a real force for change, holding its own on both trade and political stages. And much of that is down to chief executive Mike Benner, reports Phil Mellows.

The man has no beard. We should really have got beyond this by now, but it can't be ignored. He has no beard and still, somehow, after all these years, after all the stereotyping and the tired jokes, this is a significant fact. Mike Benner, chief executive of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), is clean-shaven and, more than that, clean-cut, suited and trim.

Benner conveniently symbolises a change that's come over CAMRA in the past decade. In its first 30 years the organisation merely established itself as arguably the most successful consumer campaign the world has seen. In championing cask beer it saved an entire product category from the jaws of keg oblivion — and quite a number of brewers with it.

How do you follow that? Benner has shown the way. From being a rag-tag army of beer drinkers CAMRA is now a bigger rag-tag army of beer drinkers, only with a shiny, professional cutting edge. Its influence has spread beyond the brewing industry into the machinery of government. Its best days could yet be to come.

Some 150 of the MPs sitting in the new Parliament have signed CAMRA's Beer Drinkers and Pub Goers Charter, an ambitious 12-point strategy for the community pub. They may have done it to look popular, but it gives CAMRA a powerful political base if they can be mobilised.

The charter is a culmination of the structured approach that Benner began to apply back in 1994. He was one of 1,000 applicants for the apparently plum position of CAMRA's press officer.

"For some bizarre reason they gave the job to me," he says, with typical modesty. It may not have been such a bizarre decision for an organisation starting to take itself more seriously to hire an economist with motivations that went beyond a nice pint of beer.

"I wasn't a member of CAMRA, but I was interested in pubs and I liked the work CAMRA had done in the beer industry. I think they wanted someone with a strong academic background in a relevant discipline, and I knew how to put a good story together.

"They were interesting times. It was great!"

So great that when Benner was lured away to work for accountants Ernst & Young it didn't last long. In CAMRA he'd found his true home.

"What I like about it is that it's an incredibly diverse organisation. It's got its fingers in many pies. The challenge was to focus its resources on the key issues and not spread them too thinly.

"When I became chief executive in 2004 I had the chance to give it a more structured approach, and I produced its first business plan, which was based around growing membership."

Since then membership has passed the historic 100,000 barrier and it continues to rise. Benner describes it as his "KPI" (key performance indicator). It gives CAMRA weight in arguments. And he's proud of its diversity as well as its size.

"There's a CAMRA stereotype, but the membership is a broad church," he says. "They join for 100 different reasons. There are younger people coming in now and a quarter of our membership are women."

But don't the members give him grief sometimes? Hasn't he ever had to do things he doesn't like? Benner plays a straight bat.

"I can't think what policies I might have disagreed with. Policies are set by the membership and the professional staff are guided by the volunteers in the organisation. My job is to deliver focused campaigns."

There are some CAMRA policies that continue to annoy outsiders, and seem to get in the way of bigger issues the organisation has performed so well on. The "full pint", for instance, for all its impracticalities, is part of the charter.

"It's inevitable people will disagree with some of the things you're putting forward," says Benner. "It's a compliment, really. CAMRA is all about the debate."

And the remarkable thing is the progress CAMRA has made in forming alliances with the trade and the industry on issues such as taxation, community pubs and the Cask Report.

"In the early years CAMRA was seen by the trade as the enemy. That's changed completely now. We've very much moved to partnership campaigns. When we see eye to eye with someone we work with them.

"But we take it issue by issue," he adds. "If we have to stand alone on something then we will. It's important to maintain our independence as a consumer group that's not tainted by the industry.

"We've stood alone on the full pint, and as a consumer group we should do that."

Yet the beer in the glass, the issue on which CAMRA is founded, is a small and diminishing part of its overall work. While efforts continue to broaden cask beer's appeal, and beer festivals are thriving, Benner admits that "it's more about pubs these days".

In fact, 90% of our conversation is about community pubs and the tie. Especially the tie. CAMRA has appealed against the Office of Fair Trading's rejection of its "super-complaint" and the result is expected in August.

It's not something Benner wants to let drop, despite recent moves by major pub companies to put their houses in order.

"There's still a need for regulatory intervention. We need a full OFT (Office of Fair Trading) market study. If the industry delivers in the meantime that's fine. There are signs of progress — but we need to see the code of practice delivering on the issues in the BEC (Business & Enterprise Committee) report.

"The guest-beer clause in new leases is very welcome, but there must be a free-of-tie option too. The tie is still causing huge problems — the lack of investment in pubs, the closures. It's not the only factor, but there's a need for rebalancing so we get a true partnership, with the risks and benefits equally shared between landlord and tenant.

"We have never been against the tie. Family brewers would not be able to bring their products to the market if it wasn't for the tie. But we have to make the tie work better. We are in a situation where the quality of pubs has fallen and too many are not viable businesses. The big pubco business model is not working.

It will come down to the RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) review on the way rents are set and how we can ensure that a tied tenant is no worse off than a free one," he continues. "Official figures show they pay 40% to 50% more for their beer, and our research says it's even higher than that. Then you have to ask what the benefits of being tied are worth. The OFT's assumptions were fundamentally flawed on that. It has to be looked at again."

For Benner, the stakes are high.

"This is about whether the trade can encourage entrepreneurs or whether it's a road to nowhere. Is the pub trade offering enough to attract the right people behind the bar? A lot of pubs are run down and not able to offer what the consumer expects — because the tenants don't have enough money.

"There are people who are saying it's good for the industry that pubs are closing, but what worries me is that people are going to get out of the habit of going to the pub, and that's a bad thing. There has to be a good, accessible pub in every community.

"What I'd really like to see is a measure devised for the social contribution of a pub, a way of defining what pubs do for a community so they can be recognised. My dream is a scheme to reward pubs, and reward them financially, for being the centres of their community. That will raise standards across the board."

And every licensee can raise a glass to that — even if it isn't a full one.

My kind of pub​

"You must be able to walk through the door and feel welcome, comfortable, completely at home. It must be somewhere you can talk to people you've never met before.

"Dorset is a place I like to go back to and I always end up in the Square & Compass at Worth Matravers. It's got great beer and interesting people. Someone will always strike up a conversation with you."

Key dates​

• 1971 — Campaign for Real Ale founded