The Future of Pubs

Debate between Rory Stewart and Dan Rogerson

Thursday 9th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[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.”