Council: end beer tie to help pubs

A Norfolk council has urged a group of pro-pub MPs to push for the beer tie to be relaxed to help struggling licensees.

Minimum pricing of alcohol and freezing beer duty until the end of the recession have also been urged by councillors from South Norfolk District Council in a letter to John Grogan MP as chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group.

The letter from the council-run South Norfolk Rural Pubs Task Group urges the Beer Group to push for Government to implement a six-point plan:

• Beer duty to be cut or frozen until Britain comes out of recession

• Beer ties relaxed "so publicans can buy stock at lower prices, and compete more effectively"

• Councils to decide which pubs get business rates relief. At present, they can only grant relief when a pub fits limited circumstances, for example, when it's the only pub in the village and has a rateable value of less than £10,500.

• A level playing field for pubs and social clubs on business rates. At the moment, if a social club occupies premises in its own right, it is rated like a pub. If it is in a village hall, it is not, and "that's unfair competition".

• Minimum price for per unit of alcohol to stop supermarket loss-leader promotions on drink.

• Pubs to be allowed to recycle glass at bottle banks. Today, because pub bottles are classed as trade waste, licensees are banned from using bottle banks even when they are in their own car parks. The task group calls the system "absurd".

It follows a survey of licensees in the area and crisis meetings to "thrash out a strategy for ending the catastrophic run of pub closures".

Task Group chairman cllr Keith Weeks said: "Visit almost any country and major foreign city and the chances are you will find a 'British Pub', and the sad truth is that at the current rate of closures we could have more 'British Pubs' abroad than in Britain.

"It is a sorry state of affairs, but hopefully our efforts at South Norfolk will help at least some of our publicans to turn the tide.

"We can have no greater indication of the severity of the publicans' situation than the closure of the historic Cross Keys in Wymondham.

"After standing for 500 years, surviving civil wars, world wars, and several recessions, it now suffers the ignominy of having to close its doors, possibly to never reopen.

"It is not just the loss of jobs, although that is serious enough, it is the loss of a way of life."