The Future of Pubs

Dan Rogerson Excerpts

Thursday 9th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)]

Like others, I congratulate my hon. Friend on the huge amount of work that he has done on this subject. He talks about developers converting pubs and denying others the right to make a success of them. Are there not also examples, however, of owners who sell a pub on and, even though they do not wish to convert it themselves, make it clear by means of covenants and so on that they wish to prevent anyone from running it as a pub in the future?

[Greg Mulholland]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. I was coming to that, but I will cover it now. I have already raised with the Planning Minister some companies’ continued use of restrictive covenants, in which the company says, with no thought to the community’s rights, that a pub must never be allowed to be a pub again. That is a scandal. The previous Government said that they would outlaw that practice, which was a hugely welcome step. I am disappointed that the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) is no longer here, because I worked closely with him and I commend him on his work to support pubs. I ask the Minister to give us the good news for which we have all been waiting—CAMRA, in particular, has campaigned for this for many years—and to say that he will outlaw this totally anti-free market and anti-community practice once and for all.

Let me return to planning. I hope that I can address the concerns of the hon. Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths)—Burton is, of course, one of the most famous centres, if not the most famous centre, for brewing in the country. The save the pub group says that we need to include two things in the planning process for community pubs. First, we need a genuine period of community consultation, which some councils have and some do not. Secondly, there needs to be a viability test. If a small business is viable, it should have the opportunity to continue as a small business, and should not simply be closed because someone can make a large killing by closing it, as my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands said.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

I, too, will be brief. Is there just one more Member to speak?

[Dan Rogerson]

Two more.

[Rory Stewart]

My apologies. I will limit myself.

This is an enormously interesting debate partly because—rocks hitting the building aside—it is a debate that we would not have had in the past. When Winston Churchill tried to talk about pubs, it was an incredibly controversial subject. When he was a Liberal, he ran his entire campaign attacking the Tory Government on the basis of the open hand at the Exchequer and the open door at the pub. In my own constituency, pubs were a taboo subject. This whole debate would have been like arguing for a larger salary for Jonathan Ross. It would have been a suicidal debate in this Parliament before the second world war.

So I am grateful that this debate is happening and I am grateful to the Members of Parliament who have spoken so eloquently about the glory of our pubs. For example, my hon. Friends the Members for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti) and for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) spoke in an extraordinary way about what a pub means to us. It is not just about the young farmers’ club—I have also cycled from pub to pub with the young farmers’ club—but about what pubs mean for the broader economy. In my own constituency of Penrith and The Border, pubs are important for tourism. For example, the George and Dragon at Garrigill is an absolutely essential pub for tourists on the coast-to-coast route and the Pennine way. People need to stop and eat. Pubs are essential to the broader economy.

I represent the most sparsely populated constituency in England. We have 280 pubs in the Eden district alone for 50,000 people—a density of pubs that is more than six times higher than the national average. That reflects the nature of our communities and the nature of our identity.

However, the problems that these pubs face are not problems that we can belittle or try to micro-manage from Parliament. Structural issues across the country have meant that, since 1997, 2,200 schools, 550 clinics and hospitals, and 330 police stations have all closed. The pubs are part of that broader movement of the stripping-out of rural services. These are structural issues. In France, they are fighting to protect the French bistro. France has lost 6,000 bistros. So we cannot imagine that these events are simply accidents of pricing or smoking policy; instead, they are a whole shift in culture.

The small solution that I want to propose in the limited time that I have available is community pubs. The community buy-out of the Crown at Hesket Newmarket was, of course, the first in the country. Cumbria is now repeating that fourfold. However, these are very difficult things to do. The problems that communities face in buying out pubs are the same problems that they face with everything: problems with financing; problems with organisation; problems with regulation, and problems with landlords who refuse to sell. As Members of Parliament, we have a unique role to play on behalf of communities, convincing landlords to sell and convincing communities to come together and find financing, through the Plunkett Foundation or the big society bank.

In the end, however, two things remain. The first is that communities know more, care more and can do more than people in Westminster, and the second is that we need to recognise that, with all our orthodox attachment to the free market, this sector is an example of where it may be necessary to have subsidy and regulation, to protect something that cannot be quantified simply—a value that spreads into the deepest recesses of English civilisation.

In a room such as this one—a wooden hall—one of the very first elements of law saw King Edgar the Peaceful introduce legislation on the licensing of alehouses in 965AD. It is with that point that I conclude—and with a great testimony to the introduction of music. Let us say, as Churchill and our other predecessors could never have said, “Let us sing, let us eat, let us drink, let us be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

[Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)]

Thank you, Mr Benton. I will obviously be brief.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) on securing this debate and the hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) on introducing it so thoroughly and persuasively, by framing the issues that face us. I should also declare myself as a member of the Campaign for Real Ale, as others have done before me.

Last Saturday, I had the honour of reopening the Masons Arms in Bodmin. It is a free house and a pub that I may owe a great deal to, given that it was my parents’ local before I was born. Perhaps, therefore, my very existence may be in some way connected with that pub.

The Masons Arms has gone through the journey that has been described by many other hon. Members today. It was a very successful free house; it was built up and extended, a restaurant was put in by the owners, and then it was bought up, with an offer that the owners could not really refuse from a pubco, which paid silly money for it. It was then run into the ground over a number of years by various tenants. The kitchen was stripped out and sold off. Then the pubco had to put it on the market for much less than half the amount that it had bought it for. It was a crazy model for the pubco and it was very destructive for the people for whom the pub was their local. However, I am delighted to say that a local businessman has bought it and a local couple have taken it on and reopened it. I am sure that it will be a great success.

Other Members have also mentioned the use of pubs for a range of purposes in their communities. I would like to mention the Tree Inn at Stratton, where a couple of years ago the local post office, which had been closed because the owner wanted to sell the building off and turn it into flats, was taken on by the couple who run the pub and it is very successful now in that location.

Given the limited time available to me, I will just say that I absolutely echo the points made by the hon. Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley) about live music. Live music is hugely significant and part of what we enjoy about our pubs. We need to protect live music in our pubs and make it far easier for pubs to encourage local musicians and so on to carry on.

I also echo what hon. Members have said about tax and duty. The Government may be able to look at those issues, to protect real ale in particular but also to protect community pubs in general.

The Minister who I know will do a fantastic job for the pubs industry, is also the planning Minister, as has already been mentioned. I would say to him that the issue of planning is crucial. The hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), who is no longer in her place, was concerned that imposing restrictions might lead to more boarded-up pubs, but I would argue the opposite. It is the hope that companies have that, at some point in the future, they might be able to turn pubs into flats that leads to pubs being boarded up. If it is absolutely clear that a pub will be used only as a community pub or that type of community facility, it will have to remain as a pub and whoever owns it will have to make preparations for passing it on to somebody who thinks that they can make a success of it.

I do not think that it is any accident that the pubcos are suffering, because their business model does not seem to have worked. What is a good-news story, however, is that many of the pubs that have been owned by pubcos and that have failed, for example in the town of Bodmin, have come back on to the market. In the last few years, I can point to three or four pubs in my area that have now been taken on by local people who are running them as free houses, and they seem to be functioning successfully, despite all the other factors that we have mentioned this afternoon.

So I think that there is a very positive future for the pub. Community pubs are crucial, doing a wonderful job for our communities in urban and rural settings, and I am certain that this coalition Government will do all that they can to ensure that those pubs have a very successful future.