'Big egos' have caused damage

The boss of a tenanted pub company has launched a passionate defence of the community local — and criticised the "big egos" that have caused damage to the sector in the past 15 years.

Admiral Taverns executive chairman Jonathan Paveley reported that his company believes it has hundreds of viable community pubs — given investment and the right rent levels. But many of its pubs had also proven unsaveable because of the way they had been run by previous owners.

Paveley, who has previously overseen strategy at Greene King and was commercial director at Punch Taverns, told the Publican's Morning Advertiser's Tenanted Pub Company Summit: "Leadership has to be honest and non-egotistical. One of the real problems of the past 15 years is that we've had pretty big egos playing out across this industry. We're still picking up the pieces as an industry.

"You've got to trust your people on the front line. I'm very suspicious of centralisation in our industry and the whole ethos in Admiral is to decentralise and give our business development managers (BDMs) total ownership, total accountability and delegation. To me, that BDM-licensee relationship is the rubber against the road.

"The upper middle class, metropolitan management teams aren't often the best people to run these pubs at an operational level. Management teams make investment decisions on pubs that they themselves would like to go to rather than pubs that the locals actually want. We need to remain focused and be brought down to earth."

Paveley reported that average rent was below £15,000 pa at Admiral. Companies had too often "pissed off" licensees by over-renting.

"There is a market out there for wet-led community pubs," he added. "But they have to be better, have better investment and have more motivated licensees."

Paveley used case studies of run-down pubs he visited when he joined Admiral nearly two years ago to make his point: "When I see pubs like this, on their knees, with accommodation you wouldn't put a pig in, it says to me that these pubs have been written off by previous owners, and there seems to be a lot of those in the industry," he said. Paveley said closures were due to market forces, self-harm by licensees and the way companies have been running them.

"That's something we are very passionate about starting to put right."