It felt like a punch in the gut to the entire industry to see net pub closures rise last week from 18 to 26 per week when we are supposedly emerging from recession and when we have triumphed in persuading the Chancellor to drop the duty escalator.
But, of course, the impact of the escalator hasn’t yet kicked in, and Mike Benner was surely right to strike an optimistic note in the Campaign for Real Ale’s (CAMRA’s) press release on the updated figures, predicting a turning point in pubs’ fortunes moving forward.
The reaction in other places was understandably gloomy, and in parts frustratingly myopic. Reading the bulletin boards below PMA articles is never advisable at the best of times for anyone without mental health issues who doesn’t want to develop them. But the reaction to this story was a perfect illustration of how incapable we are of mounting a positive response to bad news like this.
Some posters actually blamed CAMRA for the decline of the pub, for a variety of reasons that ranged from vaguely understandable to strangely bizarre. Others spent their time getting increasingly angry about how the pubs that closed in the past six months obviously did so because of the smoking ban that was introduced almost six years ago.
Of course, many cited the pubco tie as the reason licensees were being forced on to the streets, and once more the whole thing descends into a shouting match about whose grievance is more legitimate than the others.
I hope this venting of anger at least made these commenters feel a little better (somehow I doubt it) but what exactly is this crying over spilt beer meant to achieve?
Nasty and pernicious
At times like this I always fall back on my first O-level history lesson, where we learned that there were seven causes of the French Revolution.
Was the influence of the American Civil War more important than Marie Antoinette’s insensitive utterances? Did Enlightenment philosophy stir people more than the agrarian crisis of 1788 to 1789? I don’t know. But the revolution happened. And all these factors played a role somewhere.
Yes, the smoking ban has had a negative effect on pub-going. Yes, the practices of some big pubcos are shafting some tied landlords, but freehold pubs are closing too. Yes, the duty escalator was nasty and pernicious, but there was also the worst recession in almost a century to consider.
These factors — and more besides — are all contributing to the pub’s decline. You’re all correct. So can we move on?
I’m not suggesting for a second that campaigners against the tie should stop what they’re doing, or that those who believe smoking regulations are damaging their business should shut up about it. What I am saying is that the problems facing pubs are bigger than these specific issues, and we’re not doing anything about them.
The biggest problem facing pubs is nearly 100 years old now: quite simply, we have an expanding range of leisure alternatives. Our research for the Cask Report showed us that the people most likely to go to pubs are also the people most likely to go somewhere else instead: they’re the ones who can afford to go the cinema or the football, or host friends at home.
The pub needs to give people reasons — or excuses — to go more often. And you have to do that in a media environment that has demonised pubs, creating a false impression that many are lawless drinking dens full of teenage thugs.
We need an industry-wide campaign that reminds people of what they love about the pub. We’ve become too entrenched in the default campaigning setting —
CAMRA’s publicity drive for its recent Community Pubs Month focused on making people think about what would happen if their pub disappeared — you’d better go, otherwise you’ll lose it.
While there’s room for such a message somewhere in the mix, there are very few successful advertising campaigns that use negative tactics to get people to do something that is supposedly pleasurable.
We urgently need to remind people what’s great about the pub, why they enjoy going, or why they used to.
We must be positive, inclusive, and to say it with one voice. Let’s lay off telling punters that the pub is doomed and that they have a duty to protect it. How about we make them really want to go instead?
Pete Brown's article was written before the launch of the new It's Better Down the Pub campaign, targeted at pub users and supported by a raft of companies.