Luff sceptical over pubco ability to change

The MP behind the highly critical Business and Enterprise Committee report into pubcos says he is "sceptical" about the ability of pubcos to implement change in the industry.

Tory MP Peter Luff told the Politics Show​ that he was "not too disturbed" about the decision of the Office of Fair Trading to clear the tied model and maintained he had "severe reservations" about how the tie worked in practice.

"What I am encouraged by is the big bodies in the industry, like the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, have taken on board our recommendations and are coming up with a new approach to the valuation of pubs," he said.

"The pub industry is introducing itself a really quite robust code of conduct. The big question is they said they would do this five years ago and they didn't — they let us down.

"But the pubcos have proved rather slippery and elusive customers in the past in terms of their relationship they have with their tenants, so the question is are these new proposals going to be good enough or does the Government need to go for a Competition Commission reference. I'm not sure.

"We will wait for the Government response and produce a further report."

He added: "The problem is we did give them this chance five years ago and they blew it and so we don't have much faith in the pub companies and their reaction to our report was unhelpful, accusing us of relying on anecdotal evidence and hearsay and lacking evidence but in truth we had a very good base of evidence.

"The fact they were keen to rubbish our report makes us very sceptical about their appearance to implement a proper code of conduct.

"But the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) has shown me the draft. It's a great improvement on what we used to have and if they can persuade us they can enforce it and make it stick then perhaps it might make a difference."

Luff said that the Beer Orders, on which he had worked previously, had not achieved what they had hoped to do.

The BBPA has maintained that its new Framework Code of Practice on the Granting and Renewing of leases will provide a "lasting settlement" for the industry.