I'm bored. Since the morning of March 21, 1989, when I queued at the HMSO bookshop in Holborn to pick up, hot off the press, the Monopolies & Mergers Commission report on the tied house system, the report that would, nine months later, give birth to the Beer Orders, the pub industry has been in turmoil. That's been enough to keep up my interest over the past couple of decades. But now I'm bored.
It was the latest BISC inquiry what done it. If the MMC report made history, this was history repeated as farce. And I've always thought farces are boring. All that running in and out of rooms, people losing their trousers and ending up back where they started.
In case you missed it, the government has agreed with the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee that the big pubcos have made "insufficient progress" since the last inquiry, but is not going to legislate, as it appeared to promise it would.
Instead, the codes of practice introduced to regulate the relationship between landlord and tenant are to be strengthened and made legally binding, and official arbitration and advice services will be set up.
Which is nice. But it's not going to make much difference.
What gets me, though, is the failure to address reality on both sides of this acrimonious debate. The government response cites the evidence, much-repeated by the pubcos, that freehouses are closing at a faster rate than leases and tenancies.
This may be true, but it fails to take into account the dynamics of the situation. Punch, Enterprise and Admiral, the big three, have been madly disposing of pubs over the last two or three years, and the least promising specimens have finished up as cheap freehold purchases – and then been delicensed.
The pubco model has certainly squeezed the profitability of leased and tenanted businesses, but the result has not always been the straight closure of the pub. Landlords have preferred to keep them open under ‘non substantive agreements' for as long as possible, and then sold them as freeholds.
Meanwhile, we have seen hundreds of leased pubs freed from the tie as pub owners have belatedly recognised that it's the only way those businesses can work well enough to pay the rent.
However the current government chose to act, the industry will have continued to go through waves of massive structural change that were triggered by the Beer Orders all those years ago. Now that was an intervention.
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