Where is the Business Sense in Punishing Licensees Who Are Turning a Profit at Their Pub?

article by Phil Dixon in Morning Advertiser

Boring. Nothing new. Same story all over the UK.

Just look around you wherever you travel in the UK, what these pubco'd have been doing to this landscape over the last twenty years is a national disgrace, a Cultural Crime that's historically unprecedented which will leave a scar on our social psyche as deep and long lasting as the dissolution of the monasteries.

Phil has been dallying around these points he makes for a very long time; a real shame he crumpled in his Select Committee hearing a couple of years ago. His testimony, if delivered openly, honestly and transparently would have made a profound impact on the assembly. Instead he left the room looking like a broken man who'd been coerced into perjuring himself under threat of his family being bumped off.

The process Phil describes here happened to me. My pub, boarded up September last year the day after my eviction, is still boarded up. I was paying a totally unsustainable £65K rent, £29K rates and buying £150K+ worth of beer from Heineken that would have cost more like £80K if I'd not been tied. S&NPC took all my profit and always wanted more. I didn't take any earnings from the pub for the last five years. S&N told me they had a load of people interested in the rent and conditions I was enduring. They took me to the wire, telling me 'surely you can find a way round this? The rent is clearly sustainable - even the arbitrator agreed'.

It's happened to people I know, Enterprise, Punch, S&NPC, Marston's, Greene King and loads of the small bottom feeders are even more belligerent than the big fellas when it comes to shifting tenants out of their premises in the downward spiral they've put the pub trade into...

It's just blind greed Phil, combined with very dumb outdated business economics from the 1960's, mumbo jumbo securitisations and pay awards that should be turned into jail sentences for the CEOs responsible.

The whole short term unsustainable mess the pub sector is locked into is utterly ridiculous.