El Barbudo wrote:Following Jerry Chicken's post about PubCo's (in the Obama thread), I thought a new thread would be appropriate rather than reply in that thread.
How ironic it has all turned out to be.
Back in Thatcher's reign, it was decided that brewers' tied pubs should be allowed to sell other beers and not be tied to only selling that brewery's beer.
Cue the brewers selling-off their pubs to pubco's (or in the case of Whitbread, converting themselves from a brewer to be chains of restaurants etc and a property company) ... so that now we have ended up with almost the same situation, just that it's not the brewers calling the shots but the pubco's, some of whom are far more keen to squeeze their tenants than the brewers ever were.
I haven't read the original thread so apologies if I am covering old ground, but my recollection of the piece of legislation that split pubs and breweries is a bit different.
The government wanted to break the monopoly that brewers had over pub ownership, so brewers had to decide if they wanted to brew and own a set number of pubs, or become a pub owning company and stop brewing. Obviously as a bye product of this came the fact that the majority of pubs were no longer tied to a single brewery.
At that time I worked as a rep for Allied breweries in the free trade sector and we were still able to tie up free house's with loans to make it advantageous for them to only stock one brewers beer brands.
As with a lot of government run ideas - the concept was good - it should have made a lot of tenanted pubs available for purchase by the incumbent landlord, however they failed to see the emergence of companies who would buy up all of the available pubs, put in exorbitant fees for running the pub and making it impossible for landlords to pay these fees through means other than raise the price of beer. This set of a downward spiral which we are now still on where all but 2 of my local 10 pubs have closed down - one of which won the CAMRA local pub of the year award in the same year it closed.
I believe it has now reached the point where it is too expensive to go drinking in a pub regularly for most normally paid people. It is now more of a treat than a normal weekend activity.
