New adjudicator too little to late to save pubs

Tuesday, 8th January 2013

Government proposals being debated tomorrow to limit the power of giant pub companies will not save the local boozer, says UKIP Deputy Leader Paul Nuttall MEP who spearheads the party’s ongoing Save The Pub campaign.

The introduction of an independent adjudicator and statutory code to regulate big pub corporations is being debated in Parliament tomorrow. The idea is to give landlords back greater power over the running of their businesses while also preventing big chains from squeezing out smaller drinking establishments. However successive legislation over the years, such as the smoking ban and increasing alcohol duty has simply made many local pubs unsustainable.

Mr Nuttall said: “We’ve been saying for years that more needs to be done to save the great British pub. They took a hard hit when the smoking ban was introduced. In Greater London alone, more than 700 pubs have closed since the introduction of the smoking ban. We have seen tax on alcohol continue to rise year on year. Proposals to introduce a zero legal drink drive limit would also hammer many country pubs which rely on patrons driving out to them in order to trade.

“I find it staggering that Vince Cable has now confessed that the smoking ban had an extremely detrimental affect on small pubs around the country - UKIP has been saying this for years. It’s now got to the stage that as many as four pubs are closing down a day, as they are unable to compete with cheap supermarket alcohol prices while they struggle with the beer duty escalator alongside increasing rents and operational costs. A third of the price of every pint is now tax, with excise duty on beer having increased by 42% since 2008.

“Once these pubs shut down they rarely reopen. The local has been at the centre of communities for decades, but now we are seeing more and more city centre lager palaces or big chain pubs with a prescriptive homogenised atmospheres taking over. They can neither provide the same role in the community that an independent local pub could nor replace the special place it occupied in the hearts of regular punters.

“The local pub is a great British tradition. But if the Government continues to introduce more and more of these interfering lifestyle laws, telling us how to live, taxing drinking and smoking, it won’t make a difference whether the costs of rents for pubs is brought down or whether a regulator is overseeing pubco-tenant relationships. People will still opt to stay at home with booze bought from a supermarket as the cheapest and easiest option, which is a great shame.”