MA300: 'Outside industries are causing pubs to fail'

"We have seen the usage of pubs going down over the years, quite significantly in the past decade. It’s not that they are not meeting the needs of the individual, but because there are huge challenges," said InnBrighton CEO Gavin George.

"We’ve got competitive challenges for the customer’s pound from likes of the supermarkets that are offering food and drink at good prices. We’ve got compliance challenges from the enforcing agencies such as the Police. We’ve got commercial challenges from people like the Government, PRS and PPL. We have cultural challenges from the way pubs are perceived in society – and that hasn’t been helped by certain elements of the press. We have community challenges with the meteoric rise of online communities and social networking which has given validity to online communities almost as much as real life ones. Finally, we have climatic challenges with the strange weather patterns almost pushing the summer out to the extremes of the year," said George.

A new business model​

George also described how the company has developed a new business model across its estate as a direct in response to these challenges.

"We’ve got the customer perspective, the client’s perspective, the cultural perspective and the commercial perspective. To bust out of our heartland of Brighton, where we have 40 sites and move on to pastures new, it was necessary to try and put a bit of science behind it," George added.