Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord Berkeley

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 28th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

I hear what the noble Lord says. Actually, I am not sure that the British Beer and Pub Association does approve of these amendments. It is concerned at further restrictions being placed on the operation of pubs which will deter investment. What the British Beer and Pub Association favours, with which I entirely agree, is a review of the operation of the asset of community value system in the round. We are taking a sledgehammer to crack a very small nut. The danger is that we will miss the nut and damage the industry.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, for once sticking up for the couples who run pubs. We have been listening for the past two or three years to him, virtually single-handed, opposing the ACV system that both the Labour Party and the Government supported. There are still problems with it, as we know; we need not get into it. It was, however, good to hear him stick up for the small pub couples. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, is wrong. Pubs are closing. They are closing and having change of use when the community does not want them. It is very easy to stereotype. I live in Cornwall, in a little village by the sea; if the two pubs there were to close it would be a disaster for the community, but the owners would make much more money selling them as desirable second homes. The same applies in London, because the property prices are so high. Many owners would rather sell their pubs and turn them in to luxury flats or something rather than keep them going, especially when the business rates issue is coming to the fore and there is fear of an enormous growth in the rates they will have to pay.

It is perfectly reasonable and very desirable that these amendments are supported. Pubs, as other noble Lords have said, are an essential part of the community. There have been examples where people have walked down the road and found that their pub suddenly has a barrier around it and is closed for good. They did not know that was going to happen as it was all done in secret.

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[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My question is: is the noble Lord now questioning property rights for individuals? If someone has an asset, should they not be allowed to dispose of it?

[Lord Berkeley]

There are many types of property in this country that have different constraints on them, and from my point of view pubs should be one of them because they are a very important part of the community. These are reasonable amendments and I fully support them.

Enterprise Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord Berkeley

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

Certainly. The noble Lord is a businessman to his bootstraps. He knows perfectly well that if you are running a public company, you will be required and encouraged by your shareholders to take on a certain level of gearing. He would; I am sure that he does in his own businesses, which no doubt he looks after splendidly. The idea that somehow a business should be run with a completely different model because it happens to be in the pub sector does not hold water. It is bound roughly to march to the beat of the same drum that applies to public and private companies generally.

I promised the noble Lord, Lord Snape, that I would get to the specific amendments, of which there are three. Amendment 53ZD is obviously concerned with introducing all pubs. That really has absolutely nothing to do with anything that the Minister has said or any part of our discussions earlier in the year. Managed pubs are an entirely different matter and are run in an entirely different way. They are run by employees, who have a bonus system and a wage system. To say that this is a way of gaming the system, as was said by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, is not accurate at all. If the amendment were passed, some companies that have no tied pubs at all would be caught, so the tied pub area would not even be further dealt with. I cannot see that Amendment 53ZD has any relevance to what has gone before, to what the Minister said, or to tackling the basic problem that we have been considering.

Amendment 53ZC has exceptionally vague wording. One important aspect of maintaining pubs is for there to be some effective secondary market. Pub companies rebalance their portfolios where they have too many pubs in one part of the country and want exposure in others. To be perfectly honest, some pubs will operate better with individual ownership and should therefore be sold to individual proprietors. An acceptance of this amendment, with its broad powers and imprecise determinations, would freeze up that secondary market and make it almost impossible for new entrants to come to the market, or indeed for existing pubcos to operate effectively.

Amendment 53ZF is about parallel rent assessments. Although the noble Lord has specified Section 43(5) I think that he means Section 42(5), but we do not need to worry about that. As I understand it—if my noble friend does not support me on this, I shall go down in flames—when the market rent option is triggered, there will be an opportunity for the PRA to be introduced. That is provided for in the consultation. Therefore, no tenant undertaking the MRO route can be precluded from the parallel rent assessment. He or she can make a judgment as to which is the best route to follow. That answers the point about the dangers of the PRA being unduly sidelined.

Finally, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Snape, believes that somehow big pubcos want to close pubs. I was the director of an integrating brewery; we wanted to sell our beer. We wanted good pubs because that meant that we managed to sell more beer. We wanted to find every way to make our pubs do better. The same may not be true of the pure pubcos that do not have brewers in them, but I urge noble Lords to be careful what they wish for. There is now the concept of a real estate investment trust, or REIT. It would be perfectly possible for a pubco to create a REIT to remove all the support from their pubs. They would make quite a lot of money in the short run because quite a lot is spent on supporting their pub chains. Over time, some or many pubs would fail and they would close them down and sell them off. They could do so within the very tax advantageous structure of a REIT.

We have not even reached the stage of implementing the results from the last set of consultations and already people are starting to think about how things should be tightened up, changed and altered. We should at least allow some time for the structure to settle down so we can see how things develop. Creating further uncertainty in a sector that is under extreme pressure, as I have explained, would be a grave error. It would not help all of us who would like to see the maximum number of pubs maintained in a way that is fair to all parties.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

The noble Lord said he wanted to have good pubs and that he was worried about uncertainty in the sector. I recall that in the Committee and Report stages that my noble friend referred to, the noble Lord repeated that but could not answer the questions of so many landlords who are working very long hours for very little money. There seems to be a turnover of landlords in many pubs of not much more than a year or 18 months. That does not make a good pub and it creates uncertainty. There may have been one or two cases when landlords were not performing but probably the financial pressures from the pubcos were so high that they could not cope. Does the noble Lord not recognise that that is at least as much of a problem as the one he is talking about?

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

Of course I understand the pressure on tenants. But the noble Lord must agree that the pressure on the sector is terrific. If your primary product can be bought down the road at 25% of what you sell it for you are under pressure. You will find it exceptionally difficult to buy a pint of lager for less than £3 in a pub. But I will take the noble Lord out, when Committee ceases to sit this evening, and we will find lager at 75p a pint within two miles.