Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley]

It is a question of what would constitute selling and what would be transferring it to a company in which the brewery had 100% or 99% of the shares. It is a grey area. The noble Lord may be right but I do not see that as a reason for having his Amendment 80 or any of the others. We can go on debating this.

I still think that Amendment 82, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, is trying to say that once the tenant has started the negotiation he has to finish it. That is very unfair on the tenant because, while he may have said that he wanted to start it, if he is not happy with the outcome it is surely reasonable that he would not have to conclude an agreement. The short answer is that he will not stay there long and will suffer severe financial hardship.

I could go on for a long, long time, but I have one last comment on Amendments 73 and 74. I did not really understand the noble Lord’s explanation to my noble friend Lord Snape. If his amendment would enable the tenant to buy his beer and other drinks at whatever price he chose from whomever he chose, why are we going through all the rigmarole of all these different adjudications? Just let him do it now. I am sure that I have it wrong, but it would be nice if at some stage the noble Lord could explain the amendment in words of one syllable.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)]

My Lords, I speak in favour of my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbots. First, given the in-depth knowledge that he has shown on the subject, I hope that he is a member of our Catering Committee because he would be an asset there. I shall speak briefly because this is complicated and there is a lot more to go. We need to spell out that if a tenant opts for a market rent only deal, there should be a completely new agreement between the tenant and the landlord, and that should take in everything, from investment to the length of lease—it is a new lease, effectively. We should spell out that there is freedom to renegotiate there.

On Amendment 80, I completely concur that, for the ongoing good of the business, it is important that an MRO should not be triggered simply by a sale or an administration. The Minister indicated that she saw things the same way, and I hope that we will hear that confirmed.

[Lord Snape]

My Lords, to respond to some of the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, I say in passing that although, at my request, he came up with some examples of landlords being happy with the tie, they did not seem to me typical of what takes place in the industry. I do not want to repeat to the Committee anything that I said on Second Reading, when I detailed some of the problems that my daughter and son-in-law have had. Their treatment by Enterprise Inns is a lot different from the cases outlined by the noble Lord when he moved his amendment. Similarly, on Second Reading, with the permission of a couple called Dawn and Michael Shanahan from the Bulls Head in Old Whittington near Chesterfield, I read out a letter showing how they had been treated, which, I am sure that the noble Lord would agree, is a lot different from either of the examples that he gave to the Committee this afternoon.

The fact that more than 70% of pubco tenants have expressed their unhappiness to CAMRA indicates that far more of them have been and are being treated as in the two examples that I gave on Second Reading than in the two examples that the noble Lord has given to the Committee today.

I thought that the noble Lord was seeking to intervene; he looked a bit restive. I thought that he was going to come up with even more examples of happy tenants, but there are not that many of them around. He has probably exhausted the lot of them with those two.