Turner: beer tie inquiry hugely damaging

Fuller's chairman Michael Turner has warned of the negative consequences of a referral of the beer tie to the Competition Commission.

He said the result would be two-and-half years of "hugely damaging" uncertainty during which time companies would be very unwilling to invest.

Turner said any inquiry would be the 19th such investigation since 1966. "They all came up with the same conclusion," he said.

The Fuller's chairman said that the market tended to be the best corrective for companies not operating the tie correctly.

"The landlords who don't get it right gradually lose their tenants," he said. He described the tie as the general expression for the 30,000 contractual agreements that exist in the marketplace between landlords and tenants, with a lot of variation between and within companies.

Turner said the tie needed to flex in the light of changing circumstances. "You can't make laws to change all these agreements because they're not all the same."

He pointed out that the Beer Orders had led to the destruction of the British brewing industry "as we knew it". It has also led to the creation "of some the (pub) landlords people are now complaining about".

Turner said that everybody in the industry needs to look at the very widespread criticisms made by MPs on the Business and Enterprise Committee "really hard".

There was an urgent need to "gather information" on the industry. Turner said that every company in the industry had to "come on board" in dealing with that was now an "industry-wide problem".

"Public rhetoric is not going to do it," he said.