Don't empower those wanting to close pubs

In the pub trade, it is sometimes difficult to know who your friends are.

Former editor of this very publication, Andrew Pring made a bizarre contribution to the Conservative Bow Group here in Parliament. I like Andrew and he is a decent man. For someone who supports pubs, he could scarcely have been more unhelpful.

The irony of his main thrust, that the UK has too many pubs, is a silly thing to say. It is, of course, over simplistic.

One town of 20,000 people may have five pubs, another one may have 10; but it may well be that the 10 are more profitable than the five.

But it is silly because it gives a green light to all those who want to close or to fail to support pubs. It gives governments an excuse to do nothing to support pubs. It means that pub owners can justify closing viable pubs for their own shareholder interest; and it allows planning officers to rubber stamp closures, despite the fact a pub is viable, even profitable.

Andrew has swallowed hook, line and sinker the line spun by some in the trade; that there are too many pubs and some need to close to make the remaining ones more profitable. It's a flawed strategy as people will soon get out of the habit of using pubs if they can't get to one easily.

For the vast majority of the population, neighbourhood pubs are in some ways the most important and it is these that are deemed 'unviable' by those in company HQs.

I had the great pleasure to visit Bathams brewery in the West Country a few weeks ago with my father-in-law. We love the bitter, but what impressed possibly even more, was its pubs. Two I visited are precisely the sort of pubs that the money men say are unviable, yet under Bathams' stewardship, they are thriving.

The test of viability of a pub is a simple one: would the pub do well enough under a good operator, on a fair business basis, to make a reasonable return.

Each pub should be judged on that basis and when one owner has had enough, another owner should be allowed to have a go at making it a success. At the moment, that is often prevented or simply ignored and another viable pub is lost when it could and would have succeeded.

All too often the people doing the most damage are people within the pub trade, whether through careless talk or business models that rely on trading property rather than running great pubs.

The pubco model stifles entrepreneurship when we need this to revitalise pubs. We don't have too many pubs, just not enough in the hands of people who care and are allowed to make a success of them. That is what needs to change.

Greg Mulholland MP is chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Save the Pub Group​