Polarised views can't help pubs
Remember that chant in Animal Farm — "four legs good, two legs bad"? Well, it's becoming that heated and polarised in the pub trade these days.
And the pubcos are very clearly cast by some radical licensees as the ones with two legs.
The problem with this extremist approach is that it leaves no room open for negotiation. It's a "we win — you lose" situation, and it brooks no opposing argument. You're anti-pubco or you're not, and if you're not, you're no friend of the licensee. Yet surely there's still a place for win-win? There has to be.
The hard-liners who think differently have now turned on the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group and portrayed it as a poodle of the pubcos — and, therefore, an enemy to licensees. Such views informed a TV documentary last weekend, which suggested the APPBG's report on community pubs was deeply flawed because it did not examine the effect the tie is having on the trade.
The makers of the report had clearly been so extensively briefed by the Fair Pint team that they accused the APPBG and its chairman John Grogan of being no better than pubco lackeys. As the group's funding comes from the leading pub companies and brewers, ergo the APPBG can never produce a report that will address the "real" problems of the trade.
This one-eyed view is deeply unfair to both John Grogan and the group's founding spirit Robert Humphreys. Both have laboured tirelessly to help the pub trade — and that's the pub trade in its entirety, companies and licensees together.
They, and many, many others, believe there is still a commonality of interests between the corporates and the individuals — and they perform sterling service in focusing on tricky issues that need resolving in the interests of the trade as a whole. And by doing so, often behind closed doors in Whitehall and Brussels, they have resolved difficulties that have led to improvements in the lot of licensees, as well as corporations.
It is ridiculous of the Dispatches programme to impugn the APPBG over its lack of independence just because it receives its funding from pubcos and brewers. What's wrong with that? How else it is going to operate? Who else is going to pay for it? The Portman Group is paid for by the trade — but everyone acknowledges its efficacy.
The APPBG's report on community pubs raised crucial issues that Parliament needs to address. We should all be grateful for that report. Yes, there are issues with the tie — the level rents should be set at, discounts, support — but the APPBG never set out to look at those. Other politicians were already doing that.
Yes, these are heated times. But let's keep a sense of proportion and reality, please.
