A new way to pull a pint?

Thursday September 29, 2011

Tom Miers wonders how we could breathe new life into Britain’s pubs

The price of a pint is becoming distressingly burdensome. In my local last night a beer brewed using local ingredients just five miles away cost me £3.60. According to the brewer the cost on leaving the keg is about £1.

Beer poured in the pub has always commanded a premium over that bought in a shop, and rightly so. You’re paying extra for the service and mellow companionship of the bar, and sometimes the freshness of the beer itself.

I recall a piece of medical research some years ago that urged men in particular to visit the pub regularly as part of a healthy regime to combat stress. This may have gone down badly with the housewives of the land, but, for many, visiting the pub is a special experience. It’s that feeling of the worries of the world being suspended for a while as you enter the tap room.

The public house is one of the great British institutions. Other countries have their bars, their brasseries and their cafes, but the travellers of the word envy us that particular vision of rural homeliness or urban neighbourliness that is encapsulated in our pubs.

So it is more than a tragedy that some 1,500 pubs have shut every year in the British Isles since 2004. It is also a social disaster.

A free society must find voluntary ways of bringing people together, to build the informal glue that binds society. The pub is a very important way of achieving this. A vibrant pub culture brings people together at a level largely untouched by the school gate, the church or the parish council. It also has a role in dealing with that curse of the modern age, excessive drunkenness.

You would have thought that revitalising pubs would be a worthy cause for this government, bringing together as it does the conservative and liberal political traditions. Eric Pickles, the jovial Secretary of State for communities. would make a splendid champion of the pub and sensible drinking. So what could he do to rescue British pub culture?

The smoking ban is one reason why pubs have become less attractive to the community. But let us assume for the moment that the Government will be reluctant to amend or rescind this unhelpful legislation. Is there another approach to liberalising communal drinking on third party premises?

A first step could be to devise a less burdensome licensing regime for pubs that focussed on this core function. Perhaps there could be a new category of public house that served only, say, draught beer below a certain strength. The beer itself could be taxed less. The licences could be cheaper. It could be a simpler matter to open such an outlet, with rules devised to lessen the burden of staff costs, health and safety regulations and other red tape. Village halls or old farm steadings could be used, giving them a new lease of life. The bars could be manned by local volunteers who apply for this special status. They could open up when demand occurred.

Some or all of these concepts already exist in one form or another here and elsewhere. Think of the bar in the grocer’s shop in the French village, or the honesty box in the country hotel lounge.

These ideas are not suited to every location. A voluntarily run outlet with flexible opening would not work on Piccadilly. But the problem of vanishing pubs is most acute in small rural communities that cannot muster the economies of scale to pay for the huge burdens that now accompany selling beer on licensed premises.

Rather like enterprise zones designed to stimulate commerce in post industrial areas, ‘pub-lite’ regulations could be introduced in dormer villages and other areas most affected by the decline of the great British public house.

Then, if they proved a success, the process of de-regulation would have found a practical beginning.

Tom Miers is editor of the Free Society