The Big Interview: Mike Benner, SIBA

Mike Benner is warm, friendly and charming — but there’s a hint of steel behind the easy-going exterior.

He describes his 20 years at CAMRA as “tough campaigning” and he’s swapped that role to take on the equally demanding job as head of SIBA, the voice of Britain’s fast-growing independent brewing sector.

He says his main role is to develop a strategy for SIBA for the next few years — something he did successfully at CAMRA. He jokes that his task will be easier by having far fewer sub-committees to deal with than at his previous employer, where groups were formed to deal with everything from beer styles to the naming of the office cat.

Perceptions​

Benner sums up his job as managing director of SIBA as “building a future for British beer at the quality end of the beer market. There has to be a big generic promotion for beer. It’s Britain’s drink and it needs collective action to get people back into drinking it in pubs.”

He’s careful not to be too critical of the Let There Be Beer campaign that to date has emphasised mass brands and even drinking “from the neck”. He feels the promotion will evolve and reach out to the quality end of the industry, but that the “big boys” of brewing are out of touch with consumers and the changing perceptions of beer.

Benner’s working pattern will change dramatically. At the CAMRA headquarters in St Albans, in Hertfordshire, he had an office with a small but dedicated back-up staff.

Now he works from home, but will regularly visit SIBA’s two small offices in Burton-on-Trent and Yorkshire. He is already clocking up the miles, visiting SIBA regional groups as part of his remit to plan a strategy for the future.

DDS​

Benner will work closely with Guy Sheppard, SIBA’s new chairman, who runs the Exe Valley brewery in Devon. They have, in Benner’s words, “a blank sheet of paper” to devise a clear role for the organisation following a conference decision to merge its lobbying arm with the commercial side based on its highly-successful Direct Delivery Scheme (DDS), the brainchild of Nick Stafford at Hambleton Brewery in North Yorkshire.

The scheme has cut out the middleman, with SIBA delivering beer directly to pubs that would otherwise never see a pint of ale from an independent brewer. Sales from DDS were worth £12m in 2013.

“DDS has been highly successful,” Benner says. “It’s a market-access solution that works well for both pubs and consumers by supplying more interesting beers.”

But will the beer bubble burst? There are now around 1,200 breweries in Britain — is that number sustainable in a market that is in overall decline?

Benner thinks eventually there won’t be any new entrants to the brewing industry, but it hasn’t reached saturation yet. “Beer is enjoying an evolution,” he says. As a trained economist he thinks the current number of breweries has increased competition, but in the long term only the best will survive.

Welcomed​

In common with many others in the industry, he’s amazed by the apparent contradiction of pubs closing at an alarming rate while breweries continue to open. It proves, he says, there’s still room for growth and, to be successful, pubs need to stock beers from the independents.

SIBA started life as the Small Independent Brewers’ Association but has long since dropped “small” from both its name and its thinking. It has 800 full members, plus associate members and people hoping to launch their own breweries. Has there been any opposition to his appointment from within SIBA’s ranks, as not all small brewers are fans of CAMRA?

On the contrary, he says, he’s been warmly welcomed and the few critics of the campaign within the brewing fraternity — a vocal Scottish brewer in particular — are not even members of SIBA.

He says CAMRA and SIBA have a lot in common and he brings to his new role years of lobbying experience that will help improve support for independent brewers from politicians in Britain and Europe.

Slick​

Benner, a youthful 48-year-old who enjoys jogging and cycling to keep fit, joined CAMRA in 1994 as a press officer and was promoted to chief executive 10 years later. For the next decade, he threw himself into a series of major campaigns aimed at saving pubs, reducing duty and tackling the power of the giant pubcos.

He dismisses criticism that has been forthcoming from some CAMRA pioneers that the campaign became too slick under his stewardship. “I respect those pioneers,” he says, “but the world has moved on. CAMRA was unique back in the early 1970s, but now there are campaigns for everything. To succeed in challenging the status quo, you have to be slick and professional.”

He points to CAMRA’s “remarkable membership growth” — currently 162,000 — as evidence of his strategy paying dividends. “We changed the focus of campaigning,” he says, “to saving community pubs. More people were attracted to CAMRA when we said that pubs needed to be saved from closure.”

His greatest success was undoubtedly the campaign to scrap the beer-duty escalator and win a reduction in the price of a pint two years running from the current chancellor. It was a campaign that cemented the long association between CAMRA and SIBA.

Cynics claimed CAMRA would never raise the necessary number of signatures on an e-petition to spark a debate in Parliament on the level of beer duty. But the petition succeeded, the debate took place and George Osborne duly scrapped the escalator.

Confidence​

And now, working again in harmony, CAMRA and SIBA have wrung from business secretary Vince Cable a bill that will have a code of conduct for pubcos and an adjudicator to sort out rent disputes between publicans and their landlords.

Benner describes this as “a huge step forward and a major success for campaigning. It will bring confidence back to brewing and pubs. CAMRA and SIBA have to work together to get people back into pubs and that will have a knock-on effect of creating more jobs within the brewing industry.”

He says one of the main demands of his new job will be to widen the opportunities for independent brewers to get their beers into more pubs.

“We have to open up the market more,” he says. “Whatever the outcome of the 2015 general election, we have to make sure the Government understands the market value of the independent brewing sector. In the run-up to the election, SIBA will have to make its voice heard among MPs and candidates to make sure they understand the value brewers and pubs bring to their communities.”

Energy​

He says a key strength of the sector is that just about every constituency in the country now has at least one brewery. This means all those standing for Parliament will be aware of the importance of the sector and the jobs it creates and sustains.

Carrying over his CAMRA experience and combining it with his evident enthusiasm for his new role at SIBA seem to be proving effective.

We met — for coffee — in a Stonegate pub, the Blacksmiths Arms in St Albans, where a T-bar of keg founts has been replaced by additional hand-pumps to serve more independent brewers’ beers. At 11.30am there was just a sprinkling of customers. One-and-a-half hours later, the pub was packed, with customers tucking into hearty lunches and glasses of beer.

People are indeed returning to the pub — and both producers and consumers owe a deep debt of gratitude to Mike Benner for his energy and commitment in helping to make this outcome possible.

Mike Benner's CV​

Age 48. Lives in Bedfordshire; married with four children. His wife Helen teaches sociology and has just been awarded a professorship. Benner studied economics at Middlesex University and lectured in marketing and economics at Luton Polytechnic.

In 1994 he joined CAMRA as a press officer, going on to become chief executive in 2004. In June 2014 he was appointed as managing director of SIBA.