The Tied Lease Pub Company

The tied lease pub company. A toxic company driven by profit that can easily be won by abuse of contract and power over people who've been conned into believing they're entering a business relationship with a concerned corporate partner sharing joint aims. Ei Group is but one example of scandalously unhealthy profiteering business revolving around a core of poisonous bullying corporate behaviour whose success is entirely dependent on the repetition of serial business failure of individual pubs across the pubcos' large estates - pubs run by thousands of individual publicans, pub tenants - pub businesses that generate ALL the income and profit for the pubcos who own them.

By and large British pub companies are not fit for 21st century purposes and contemporary expectations of responsible corporate governance and only get away with endemic abuse of their 'business partners' because their partners have so little financial strength they cannot possibly advocate - stand up - for themselves against freeholders with deep pockets and litigious legal departments designed to comprehensively screw anyone who says boo to the goose.

Pubco employees drive the corporate mission of institutional bullying and deceit with full knowledge of their role in a sociopathic corporate culture that's seen Britain's 'independent' pub estate shrink to the unimaginable state we have today where thousands of communities all over the UK have lost their last pub or are facing the prospect of having no pub to call 'Their Local' ever again.

The fact is that these pubcos are designed to dispatch proper local pub culture to history and ensure that the pub-going public has access only to large, anodyne, carbon copy food and drink outlets no one really wants to go to but have no choice but use.

It's counter-intuitive that people working for 'pub companies' are actually employed to force pubs to close forever by ensuring that all of the profit derived from the activity, dedication and sweat of publicans committed to serving the public while working to make a living, ALL of their profit is taken by the dead hand of the pubco to ensure that each tenant's failure leads to another 'under new management' tenant to suck dry through inflated rents, double open market supply prices, and broken promises such as the pubco withholding 'planned investment', so churning tenants, often perennially, through decades while the national pub estate falls into chronic disrepair through not being maintained by tenants whose businesses are constantly in a cycle of failure where the last thing to get money spent on it is the building, the amenity that needs investment most. When pubs become so run down they're so unfit for purpose that no prospective tenant is starry eyed enough to believe the pubcos' deceitful marketing ruse to take on 'a low cost entry business', churned to death the pubcos flog the pubs off for alternative use, chuck the cash into their debt pile or into opening eer more 'market leading' anodyne, big, carbon copy concept pubs no one really wants to go to... and there you have the #GreatBritishPubcoScam ... happening to a pub near you, denuding community cohesion and social capital wherever you are, all over the British Isles.

The way it works is very good value for the pubcos. You may think 'surely no one would work for such a company, and 'surely no one would be foolish enough to take on such a risk as a tied pubco lease' but it all works neatly because all the employees of these companies are self selecting: Anyone with a moral mind and standards of personal probity who finds themselves unfortunate enough to be working in the toxic environment having to con tenants into taking on leases then screwing them into financial ruin will leave the company sharpish and want to quickly forget the experience, put it behind them forever. Others, the ones who find the job palatable, the ones who find they enjoy making other people's lives miserable in name of the demands of the business make excuses for the obvious abuses: 'they deserve it, they signed the contract' and get on and enjoy the job of rendering pubs to alternative use, running them into the ground blaming their tenants and the public for not using them (so they deserve to lose them) and watching their annual bonuses come in for reducing the size of the pub estate and fundamentally changing the unique social weft of the United Kingdom