The ban hurts, but it's right

We have now lived for a year with the biggest revolution in the pub trade since all-day opening 20 years ago.

To a greater or lesser extent, the smoking ban has altered the fortunes and the character of every pub in the land. As in all revolutions, there have been winners and losers. The biggest winners have been the great British public. According to a OnePoll survey conducted exclusively for MA, nearly 80% of us are pleased with the ban (42% of smokers are pleased too).

And even though the economic downturn means we have a lot less to spend, nearly one third of the public say they visit the pub to eat and drink more often as a result of the ban.

It follows that pubs that have tapped into this demand have also been winners. Pub companies and licensees with a good food offer have seen this part of their business grow strongly, though wet sales are often down. These are probably also the people who put in place good smoking solutions and invested in their pubs' fabric too.

The losers in the past year have been licensees unable to switch away from their traditional dependency on beer, fags and machines. And even though some have grown food sales, the big drop in wet trade has made them net losers. The thousands and thousands of licensees in this boat feel the ban has been an unmitigated disaster. They blame it for driving away their old crowd, or for encouraging punters to move on after just a drink or two in order to smoke on the way to another pub, or more likely just to go back to their smoke-all-you-like sitting room with the plasma TV and the supermarket booze.

These are often the licensees whose pubs have been churned out of the biggest pubco estates. In the exhaustive self-analysis conducted by every switched-on pubco before the ban, these pubs were identified as potential losers and sold on in their thousands. They are the ones now most likely to be closed in the next few years as the pub universe contracts in line with the marketplace.

The inevitable loss of these pubs is a tragedy for those concerned. Their lives will need to be rebuilt elsewhere. But for the industry as a whole, it is no bad thing if these breadline licensees are put out of their misery and allowed to move on with the minimum possible loss of dignity. The pubs that survive will be better run, look and feel better, and be better positioned for when consumer confidence returns.

The smoking ban has acted as a catalyst for the trade. It has accelerated the decline of pubs that could not adapt to modern lifestyles. The credit crunch has further accelerated that process. Once we are through the present pain, and that may take a few more years, the trade will emerge in a far healthier position and the great British pub trade will once again flourish.