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Friday, November 16, 2012

Regarding Self Regulation and Sociopathy on Trade Forums


Referencing an article in the Publican's Morning Advertiser

Interested Observer and paxalcolico always post mischievously - no point getting into dialogue with either - t
he implication they promulgate is that there is a silent majority of tied pub tenants out there - thousands of satisfied pubco 'partners' who do not get involved with debate, or comment about the pub sector or participate in public forums - because they are comfortable with the Pubco tenant relationship, and their Codes of Practice. They are busily beavering away making a fair and decent living out of their leased premises, taking holidays at their second homes on the continent, making pension contributions, sending their kids to school, enjoying the long term luxury of their well appointed accommodation above their tied lease pubs, looking forward to selling their business at retirement and living off the proceeds of their life's work.

Well. It's not like that.

The reality is very different. Thousands of Tied Publicans do not take part in public debates, they do not comment on forums. They do not read the Trade Press. They do not March on Whitehall. They do not sign petitions. They do not join 'Independent Tenant Representative Bodies'. The thousands of them who do not participate are at work every morning noon and night. Up for the dray, the deliveries and the cleaning. To bed after the break down the washing cashing up. These people are running businesses, they are employing people they are working their socks off keeping their livelihoods going. They don't have time to be represented or to raise a holler to the rooftops about their pubco taking the piss and the profit out of their every waking effort to meet the rent and supply invoices.

Tied Tenant Publicans are not represented specifically because they are tied - literally, practically, physically, psychologically and metaphorically - to their businesses, day in and day out, working excessive hours under conditions that most of society would be shocked by and consider to be  a clear case of bonded labour. They are broke, knackered, dispirited, underfunded; kept in the dark by their freeholders, isolated from fellow tenants by circumstances and by design. They have no way out. Except down.

This is the way it is meant to be. 

For the best part of thirty years Pubco's and Family Brewers have systemically asset stripped the nation's pub stock through the tied lease business model. They've taken all the profit from the people who run the national pub estate - the tied lessees - through excessive rents and capital investment projects their tenants pay for, combined with punishingly high supply prices. Those excessive profits taken by the top have left all investment in tied estates to come from tenants who've got nothing left to put back into their businesses. It's a deliberately applied mechanism of denudation of the nation's pub assets.

The stark evidence is in the thousands of failing, dilapidated, run down shut and boarded up pubs all over the UK. All these pubs for sale suitable for alternative use are abandoned by customers because they have become unfit for purpose, not invested in for decades. 

It's a Cultural Crime.

You don't need verified mass representation of tied tenants to see clearly where the pub sector is failing regarding self regulation. It's blindingly obvious. LOOK at the state of the pub industry. What you see is the result of thirty years of catastrophically bad management of the UK's pub sector.

And the pubco's continue giving their employees bigger and bigger salaries as their estates and share prices implode and their buildings become ever more worthless and their balance sheets reduced to damp confetti, their only solution to the fiscal cliff they've created for themselves is to squeeze MORE profit out of their tenants.

And Interested Observer and paxinickerbockerglory just keep sniping around posting snidey side swipes at any and all criticism levelled at the people who have brought Britain's pub sector to the brink of oblivion.

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