Happy New Year! Coming out of hibernation in the second week of January, I find CAMRA’s comparative drinking programme of Pub of the Year voting and Good Beer Guide selection well under way. Pubgoers should use any such excuse to combat the predictable if unintended consequence of the ‘Dry January’ fad: the threat of closure of yet more community pubs.
Successive statistical surveys towards the end of last year, the more compelling coming from the Office of National Statistics, highlighted the proportion and the sheer number of London pubs – thousands – that had closed since the Millennium. Not surprisingly, I was contacted by student journalists among others wanting to know what was going on. I agreed to two or three evening interviews; pubs need customers and, for that matter, CAMRA needs young members.
Nationally I see two main reasons for continuing pub closures. In the countryside, there’s the lack of late evening public transport. In the cities and larger towns, the value of most pub sites for alternative use is the major threat, especially here in London with such high residential property prices.
Within living memory, local breweries owned clusters of pubs and their tenant publicans could make a living from selling plenty of their beers. Nowadays property companies seem to own most pubs, often with a view to their conversion or replacement for greater profits. Faced with unsustainable rent increases from such landlords, the Dispensary in Aldgate and the Telegraph on Putney Heath have already closed this year.
An aggravating factor, well documented in this magazine, is the entitlement of a property company to dictate which beers and other supplies a tied publican can stock, from whom to buy them and at what price – for beer typically twice the price of buying from a brewer directly. This is an historical anomaly that operates against the interests of small brewers, publicans and customers alike. My young interviewers were intrigued as our host publicans verified the facts.
To help save pubs, CAMRA is calling for urgent reform of the Pubs Code (under which tied tenants of the largest pub owning businesses should be no worse off than if they were free of tie), for a comprehensive review of business rates – pubs with a rateable value between £51,000 and £100,000 are now worse off than before the autumn 2018 budget – and for consideration of lower duty rates on draught beer. We lobbied our MPs on these three counts in November.
This month I’ve been looking again at the draft New London Plan. What the planning system can do is make clear that applications for change of use from pubs will now be approved only exceptionally. Policies in place need to be enforced by Local Planning Authorities and the Planning Inspectorate, to whom developers but not local communities can appeal, should respect LPAs’ enforcement decisions. The draft Policy HC7 and the related explanatory paragraphs should establish a much stronger strategic planning regime for London pubs. For the Examination in Public I have written a supporting statement on behalf of CAMRA.
Geoff Strawbridge
CAMRA Greater London Regional Direct