Tuesday 21 January 2014

Fun Online Polls: Idiot lobbyists campaigning against the wrong thing

A spokeswoman for the pubco lobbying body was on Radio 4 this morning, ostensibly complaining about moves to introduce a "statutory code of practice" for the way that pubco's treat their tied landlords (who are in fact tenants), a deeply unhappy relationship at best.

She waffled on a bit about "self-regulation" and it being a free world, nobody is forced to become a tied landlord, it's cheaper paying rent than borrowing money to buy your own pub etc, fair enough, I have no strong opinion one way or another.

But she highlighted what a bunch of idiots they are when right at the end she said it wasn't pubco's killing off pubs, it was the government doing it with Beer Duty, which according to her "has increased 42%" but without saying since when, so that's a meaningless statement.

Apart from the fact that it was the smoking ban, something supported by a majority of the population, which is killing off pubs, can you spot her deliberate error/omission?

See if you can guess, using the widget in the sidebar.

6 comments:

Physiocrat said...

So not the smelly toilets, then?

Bayard said...

My brother is in the wine trade and has many members of what he calls "the hostility trade" as customers. He reckons that when a pub fails, it is most likely because of a bad landlord (pub landlord, not pubco landlord). The most unsuitable people think that they would be good at running a pub and, unsurprisingly, fail at it.
BTW why is the proprietor of a pub called a landlord, when he's usually a tenant?

Lola said...

B Agreed. But, most of the Pubco tenancy agreements are written in a way so that when the tenant increases sales and possibly profits by his own efforts, the rent goes up. Whatever the tenat does the extra he or she adds goes back out in rents to the pubco. This is definitely what has been doen to our local landlady. She rues the day she signed the agreement.

Bayard said...

when the tenant increases sales and possibly profits by his own efforts, the rent goes up.

Shades of absentee landlords in C19th Ireland. Such a good model to emulate.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Ph, what's wrong with smelly toilets in a pub? That's part of the fun.

B, yes, I mentioned that.

L, that's how rents work for everybody in the long run. Ricardo's Law Of Rent.

B, I think it is a bit more finessed than that - the pubco sets a fairly low basic rent but then overcharges for the beer.

Bayard said...

Well, some friends of mine took a concession on a tea-room and the deal from the caring, sharing Nazional Trust was a rent of a percentage of the turnover (not the profit) with a minimum value for the turnover below which the rent didn't decrease. If the pubcos follow that model, I can see why they are unpopular.