What happened to the power of personality in pubs?

When I entered the managed-house system in 1977 there were more than 40,000 sites. It was great way to get yourself a profession in the trade without finance — for an unskilled, ex-Merchant Navy person like me it was a lifeline to a great career with tremendous opportunities and promotion.

Now I'm led to believe we are down to 11,000 managed houses having gone through a period of consolidation in the past 10 years. But the managed house system is on an upward curve in Blackpool, with Lloyds No1 Bar and Revolution both opening sites in the next few months.

Blackpool has a great night and day economy that has stayed robust for the past 50 years and still shows year-on-year growth in all its managed houses.

As companies move to compliance management, they are over-training front-of-house staff and suppressing natural personalities; their up-selling and check-back policies, for example, sound false at times. Managed companies be warned — the public aren't stupid.

This is true even when pubs have become the butt of the anti-alcohol lobbying that has been springing up faster than we sell pints.

Venture capitalists are back in the managed estates and investing millions — all good stuff for the managed house pub system, with badly-needed jobs.

But be warned — those of us whose personalities play a part in our management are still out there to serve guests, in our quirky and not very politically correct style. We're facing extinction: the personality managers are being replaced by a different breed, who take the soul out of running a business.

Some managed companies openly tell managers that if you don't like the managed world of compliance, go and get yourself a lease. The basic enjoyment of being a manager in the past sprang from the feeling that you were running your own premises, even though it was the company's business. The more money you made for that company, the more bonuses you got.

Some managers I speak to now like the managed house system and the companies that still value an entrepreneurial attitude in their training and ideology. There are not many of them left, but you can spot the ones who are employed to think outside of the box and run successful units in towns and cities.

It looks like these managers will be badly needed in the future with several companies controlling the monopoly in our towns and cities.

Let battle commence.

Dave Daly is licensee of the Castle Hotel in Blackpool​