20% of pubs suffer as turnover drops

http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/forum.ma/view-thread/8810?PagingData=Po_20~Ps_10~Psp_Id~Psd_Asc

Fat chance of pubcos releasing any information like that JD "commercial confidentiality".

Besides it's all been done before but everyone has a short memory: GMB got hold of a vast array of Punch churn stats a couple of years ago, showed that an unbelievable number, something like 60% of the estate in total, had churned in a period between 2006-2008. When I say unbelievable it is in the sheer volume of movement that was literally breathtaking. My Fair Pint colleagues and I thought we knew a LOT about the filth and murk behind the scenes of the massed pubco towers but to find this out was truly shocking. It was business churn stats, not number of pubs that had changed hands so for example many of the individual pubs had had three lessees in the period, others two so the number of pubs affected was less than the amount of business failures in the period.

Some people at the time said the whole leak from Punch was a hoax or prank by some outfit like Fair Pint and that the figures were all bogus. Well, I know the figures were genuine, I saw the original document before GMB got it. I KNOW a major national newspaper was interested in covering it. They didn't have the budget or journalist time to number crunch the stats and do the necessary research to verify the story AND they got leaned on hard by Punch and backed off. This was just before the world financial collapse. GMB got hold of it and did do the necessary research and published the damning results. IF the figures GMB produced had been untrue, or in any way inaccurate, you could guarantee they would never have been published because they would have been sued for £millions. Instead the pubco kept quiet, it hit the trade press and blew over without the broadsheets taking it up and running with it.

There was coverage of this in MA at the time. 'Third of Punch pubs 'churned' in three years' follow the link for the story: http://bit.ly/dU0wzv

edited by: J Mark Dodds at: 17/02/2011 18:50:15