Central to Britain’s community life, many of its pubs are downing shutters. S Kalyana Ramanathan on what’s ailing the industry.
Can one imagine Britain without its monarchy? Or for that matter without its public houses — its pubs? Quite unthinkable. Yet, little is being done to stop the largescale closure of pubs across the country. By some estimates, around 30 pubs are shutting down every week across the island nation. That’s over four pubs a day! The only sliver lining in this bleak climate is that the rate of closure has come down from 52 pubs a week during the height of the financial meltdown.
Pubs are not just drinking holes where tipplers meet for their favourite pint of ale or lager. They’re social institution that date back to the Roman period. The oldest pub, Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, or locally known simply as Fighting Cocks, in St Albans in southern Hertfordshire, dates back to 1129. This is how Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), the power group promoting ales, introduces pubs: “Like the church, pubs were central to the life of a community. Indeed many early public houses came into being because of the need to provide church builders with a place for relaxation.”
Pub for the British is a place where people come to meet, much like a coffee shop in any other part of the world. It is also a place where the first chimes of wedding bells are heard — a neutral ground where the boy and the girl are most comfortable, while cupid lurks in the corner pointing his tiny arrow. It is also a place where it would be hard to miss the old couple sitting at a corner table on a lazy weekend afternoon, staring at the food menu wondering what to eat that will not stress their feeble constitution.
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Today there are around 52,000 to 54,000 pubs across UK. Since 2008, a tenth of the pubs have slipped into the crevasse, according to CAMRA, mainly because of the back-breaking tax on beer. Tax on beer has increased by 35 per cent since 2008, taking the average duty and VAT on a pub pint to around £1 — that’s about the price of a regular brand of lager at a local department store. An average pint of real ale currently costs £2.84 and lager £3.02. In 2008, an average pint of real ale was £2.45, and lager was £2.65, according to CAMRA.
Beer and pubs support over 400,000 jobs and generate over £7 billion in tax revenue. The brewers’ lobby group, British Beer and Pub Association, in a 2009 white paper titled People, Pubs and Parliament said that up to 60,000 jobs — over a tenth of the total workforce — would be lost across the beer and pub industry before 2014 comes to a close.
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John Harrington, news editor with pub industry magazine Morning Advertiser, cites three key issues that pubs face today: the burden of regulation, taxes and competition from supermarkets that offer beer and ales at a fraction of the price at pubs. “For example, licencing regulation forces pub owners to send several forms in different colours and the compliance aspect can be very time consuming,” Harrington says. Morning Advertiser is the second-oldest publication in UK that started as a regular paper distributed through the network of pubs in the country and later morphed itself into a publication dedicated to the pub industry. This paper once had writers like Charles Dickens on its rolls, Harrington proudly adds.
The last meltdown also contributed, in good measure, to pulling the pub industry down, with recovery just about beginning. Ayash Mazan, manager at the St Stephens Tavern that is bang opposite the Parliament in Westminster, says that apart from the recession that led to job losses which had a serious impact on consumer spending, bad management too has contributed to the dwindling fortunes in many pubs. “Lack of good skills leading to bad customer service and spending more than what the pub is earning have also led to the problems pubs are facing today,” Mazan says. He adds that the pub he manages has so far managed to stay in the black, but says many have not been that lucky. This 125-year-old pub was closed for 20 years and reopened in 2003, restoring a landmark in Westminster that was at one time frequented by former prime ministers Winston Churchill, Stanley Baldwin and Harold Macmillan.
Some consolation, though, is that the rot has set in in only some parts of the old tree. There remain some sections that are still thriving because of a little imagination and plenty of perseverance. Old traditional pubs are reinventing themselves into gastro-pubs — the ones that serve food that can match any good restaurant’s menu in town. A typical gastro-pub derives nearly 60 per cent of its revenue from food and the balance from “wet” sales. “With supermarkets selling cheap alcohol, wet-only pubs will die out,” says Helen Gray, duty manager at The White Horse in Richmond, a relatively affluent neighbourhood in South West London. The White Horse, run by pubco (pub company) Fuller, is a gastro pub which is more famous for its food than booze off the tap. Some three years ago, it also started entertaining its guest with live music and hosting Monday night quiz (the weakest day in the week). Sales have since doubled.
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While pubcos like Fuller play their big game strategies to keep the tills ringing, the real charm is in what the local communities are doing to keep their pubs running. The most recent case is that of The Butcher’s Arms in Crosby Ravensworth village in Cumbria. The small village that does not have any high-street shop or even a post office, for the matter, saw members of its community getting together to revive their pub this summer. Local community members contributed to the scheme floated by Co-Operative Enterprise Hub, each giving from as little as £250 to as much as £20,000 to get their pub back in the business.
CAMRA says there are over 30 examples of community buyout schemes in the current climate and organisations such as Pub is the Hub and the Co-Operative Enterprise Hub are helping these community ideas become realities.
High beer taxes, with a stated intention to curb binge drinking, is, however, an argument the beer industry is unwilling to buy. Britsh Beer and Pub Association says alcohol consumption per head is 11 per cent lower than it was in 2004 and is one of the lowest in Europe, and that the number of those drinking above health guidelines has been falling for a number of years.
While the fight is about high taxes and competition from cheep booze in supermarket stores, the bigger worry for the campaigners is about saving an ailing institution. A Britain without her robust pubs, for many, is almost surreal.
To quote Samuel Johnson, father of the modern English language dictionary, “There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.” And who is going argue with that.