All over the country, pubs have been — and continue to be — lost in ever-increasing numbers. The root cause is not consumer behaviour or cultural change, but the deliberate, irresponsible management of the national pub estate by private equity-owned pub companies.
The British Queen, 34 Picton Street, Camberwell, SE5. now a block of flats
These companies devolve all responsibility for the operation, upkeep, and maintenance of their properties to tenants, lessees, and publicans. These publicans — self-employed entrepreneurs in all but name — are then held entirely responsible for maintaining buildings they do not own. They are expected to invest in repairs, modernise facilities, and deliver a level of service and hospitality that meets 21st-century expectations, all while operating on a knife-edge of financial viability.
Pubcos inflate property values, control the narrative, and exploit the asymmetry of information to extract unsustainable rents. The result is that tenants are routinely charged more than is feasible for the property — often for premises in a poor state of repair. Meanwhile, the private equity firms that own these pubs generate their return on investment through rent extraction and a second major revenue stream: the supply tie.
Under the tied model, tenants are forced to buy beer — and often wine, spirits, soft drinks, and even cleaning products — exclusively through the freeholder’s supply chain. The pub companies, with their enormous buying power, are able to negotiate ultra-low wholesale prices from brewers and producers. But instead of passing on these savings, they apply profiteering markups, charging tenants far above market rates.
This two-pronged stranglehold — inflated rent and inflated beer prices — allows pub companies to control every aspect of a tenant's business, while extracting the maximum possible income. It is a rigged system, designed to funnel money upwards while burdening the individual publican with all the risk and none of the support.
The consequences are everywhere: run-down, under-invested pubs with limited beer choice, deteriorating buildings, and exhausted licensees. People don’t visit pubs that feel unloved, unwelcoming, or unviable — and closures follow. Meanwhile, small independent brewers are excluded from vast swathes of the market, locked out by the beer tie and shut out of the managed estates of large pub chains.
At every level, consumers lose out — on quality, on choice, on value. Only a dwindling number of truly independent pubs remain: those owned outright by individuals or small pub groups not beholden to distant shareholders. The exact number of such pubs isn’t easily accessible, which itself is telling. But what is certain is that this situation — the result of decades of extractive business models — has left many communities without any pub at all.
These are often working-class communities: housing estates, former mining villages, rural parishes, and suburban peripheries. Places where the pub was once the heart of the neighbourhood. With their closure comes a loss of social connection, secular space, and local identity. The impacts on mental health, social cohesion, and community resilience are real — and worsening.
This is the pubs crisis. And it is not accidental. It is the logical outcome of a broken market, a captured regulatory environment, and a political failure to recognise the scale of the harm being done to one of Britain’s most vital social institutions.
The avalanche of closed pubs being converted to other use, all over the country is evidence of this state of affairs and no ONE is doing ANYTHING about it, except wringing hands.
Oh. The Plunkett Foundation. Mustn't forget about column inch worthy saved, all over the country, community owned pubs. Let's tot up the figures there eh? The community pubs' movement has been going since 2012 - though a few pubs had been bought by groups of locals before amatuer hour David Cameron's ideas for Big Society came into place with the Localism Act.
Since 2010 around 10,000 pubs have closed forever. Since then around 200 have been saved by their community. Genuine Bravo and PROPS to the Community Pub Movement but at the same time BOO to the miserably tiny scale of success in the face of the utterly risible failure of the pub sector - a supposedly competitive market producing the best possible outcomes for the consumer - to improve prospects for the future of the world's original social network: The British public house
No wonder the pubs crisis is accompanied by an epidemic of isolation in communities and loneliness among all age groups.
Posted this into EDP 24 on 19/08/2025
ReplyDeleteThis is true. "At the current rate of closures we’re not going to have much of a pub industry left by 2050"
And underlying the genuine impacts of clueless govt applied overheads is the MUCH bigger than the Post Office Scandal #GreatBritishPubcoScam: Rentier extraction by profiteering hedge fund backed tied lease pubcos has decimated the British pub sector. Why isn't this fact common knowledge? That's because publicans tied into contracts that amount to indentured servitude can't talk about the ties that bind them because they fear their freeholder pubco will bully them out of their business, life and home... Classic feudalism.
I posted this on 2 August
http://www.theygotmeoverabarrel.co.uk/2025/08/the-greatbritishpubcoscam-post-office.html