The Lib-Dems started this, now they have to find a solution to finish it

There’s not been much to report as officials at the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) continue to scale the mountain of paperwork generated by the many submissions to the consultation.

The latest advice from the press office is that the Government’s response can be expected in the autumn — later in the season rather than earlier. But just because it is into the ‘huddle phase’, that doesn’t mean there aren’t still furious efforts ongoing to influence the outcome.

Legal challenges​

BIS has responded to various Freedom of Information applications for data relating to the process — including one with 76 separate requests — by publishing more than 147 documents over 624 pages featuring letters and emails between various parties.

You can do what the PMA news team has done and trawl the paperwork to find your personal highlights, but it is clear from the documentation that BIS will have to consider the threat of various legal challenges from pub companies if it proceeds with statutory regulation based on what they perceive as a biased consultation process with political motives and weak evidence.

Years of expensive and technical legal wrangling seem inevitable if the pubcos don’t like the outcome.

Equally it is hard to imagine the “anti-pubco coalition”, as Punch has described it, settling for anything other than a game-changing statutory code of conduct enshrining the so-called prime principle (that a tied tenant should be no worse off than a free-of-tie tenant), offering new protections to tenants against the “double overcharging” of rent and product prices they allege, and a mandatory free-of-tie market-rent-only option for pubco lessees.

Only a magician could conjure up a win-win conclusion to this intractable dispute. And I don’t envy the politicians and civil servants the task of ‘selling’ their decision — whatever it is — to the trade within the next couple of months.

Consequences​

But my sympathies for their predicament do not run deep, as this is a situation entirely of their own making. By simultaneously raising the expectations of a passionate group of tenant representatives, and implicitly promising the pub companies that any solution will be legal and proportionate (for how could it be any other way?) they have made their own bed very uncomfortable indeed.

The Lib Dem element of our coalition Government — for, make no mistake, it is the driving force behind the proposed changes — started this and it now has to finish it with a solution that’s neither a mandate for clever, expensive lawyers nor likely to cause adverse, unintended consequences on either side.

BIS’s decision will be a clear signal of whose arguments and evidence it most strongly believes — and that in itself will inevitably trigger the next phase of the war by the side that loses this battle.