Caroline Nodder: CAMRA had its own reasons for super-complaint

The fact that CAMRA wasn't exactly up front about the decision to withdraw its appeal over the beer tie says a lot about how it thought the move would be perceived.

I wrote about CAMRA's initial submission to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) asking it to refer the tie to the Competition Commission way back in 2009. Given the group's position as a consumer organisation it seemed a trifle odd at the time for it to get involved in an issue relating entirely to business practices. It is widely accepted that consumer choice and the price paid over the bar are not issues affected by the tie, so the grounds for CAMRA's objection seemed shaky.

And so they proved to be. The OFT threw out the request. CAMRA then said it would appeal the decision. And now, finally, while looking for something completely unrelated, The Publican team stumbled upon the fact the appeal had been surreptitiously withdrawn.

My own view is that CAMRA had its own reasons for making the approach in the first place - partly to flex a bit of muscle, to underline its super-complainant status, and also partly perhaps to try and bring what has become a destructive internal trade wrangle to a close. I am surprised it even considered an appeal, however, given the nature of the ruling. Either way, the news won't have done anything for the anti-tie campaigners' case, since, whether or not you agree CAMRA had a right to intervene, the intervention will be seen as having failed. However, I think the only thing that was ever destined to encourage change was time and money, so interventions like that of CAMRA were always going to be mere distractions. There is no black and white when it comes to most issues and the tie is no exception.

Not all tie agreements are bad. But not all tie agreements are good either. The key is to change those that are unfair and to do that you need a scalpel, not a chainsaw. The myth of the monstrous evil scheming pubco is unhelpful in the extreme - pubcos are businesses the same as any other, and need to be approached as such. In some cases, the tie has failed to keep up with changing business and consumer behaviour. Some licensees have suffered unfairly because of this, and some pubcos - being huge unwieldy, City-pandering behemoths - have taken a knee-jerk approach, pushing in a conveyor-belt of ill-prepared, ultimately unsuccessful tenants just to fill pubs. Never a long-term solution, and the cracks appear more quickly in recessionary times, so eventually the cost of conveyor belt pubs had to start to hurt.

So what now? The next milestone for the tie is this summer when the Westminster committee set up to look at it will decide if the pubcos have done enough to change. The BII has played a good role in pushing codes of practice for new tenants, pubcos couldn't afford to continue with the conveyor belt, and there are now fewer pubs in the UK leaving more consumers to go round, so my hope is life for tenants has improved and will continue to do so.

Let's just hope the two sides in this particular argument can start to appreciate grey.