Alcohol - Health Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers 340-359)

DR PETRA MEIER AND MS LILA RABINOVICH

14 MAY 2009

  Q340  Sandra Gidley: Surely the industry must have done some research on whether people drink more if they are standing up and there are no chairs. I cannot believe that such a sophisticated industry would not have done that research. If not, you are missing a trick.

  Mr Blood: Thank you for the advice. I have been in the business for 20 years and I have never done that research. What I would recognise, and I am not trying to be clever or blase« about it, is the industry does design some town centre venues to suit younger people—not under-age people, younger people—for more active evenings out, and they do want to mix and mingle with a wide number of people, so they do not want lots of banquette seating and small tables, they want a different style of social interaction. Yes, it is a successful and proper way to run town centre venues, but we do not do it to increase the rate of drinking.

  Q341  Sandra Gidley: You mean to tell me you are a business and you do not do things to increase the sale of the alcohol. Come on!

  Mr Blood: I did not say that. I said we do not do it to increase the rate of drinking. Those pubs are designed in that style to attract those people on Friday and Saturday nights. The vertical nature of it or the open spaces are not done, in my opinion, to increase the rate of alcohol consumption.

  Q342  Sandra Gidley: Let me put the question to you in a different way, because I am finding it very hard to believe that nobody in your trade has done any research on this. When a pub has a refurb and chucks out all the chairs and changes to the more modern vertical drinking style, what effect does that have on beer sales? What is the average percentage increase or decrease? Surely somebody has noted those figures in their takings every week.

  Mr Blood: Yes, absolutely. If you do a refurb of a pub you would expect a rate of return on your capital, otherwise they would not be refurbished, absolutely, and it will lead to consumption, but your question was, "Are you doing it to increase the rate of consumption?", and that is not the purpose. The purpose is to increase the number of customers that you have and make the place more popular. It is not about the rate of consumption, it is about making a place that is attractive to people on Friday and Saturday nights.

  Q343  Sandra Gidley: Surely you do not really care as long as you sell more beer. I will be honest: if I had a pub and was selling beer, I would be thinking of ways to increase the takings; it is business. When pubs have had that refurb from one style to another, what is the average change in sales?

  Mr Blood: There is no average change, because sometimes refurbishments are successful and sometimes they are not successful; sometimes they can double sales, sometimes they can increase sales by 20%. There is no formula or mechanic for saying if you take out chairs you will increase sales, or if you turn the volume up of the music you will increase sales. Many pubs are more successful for the demographic, the market opportunity in that town centre. There is no formula for doing it.

  Q344  Sandra Gidley: So your organisation has absolutely no data on this.

  Mr Blood: No data on what happens to the rate of consumption, no.

  Q345  Sandra Gidley: Let us move away from rate of consumption. Do you have any data on sales?

  Mr Blood: Obviously; yes.

  Q346  Sandra Gidley: So what is the effect?

  Mr Blood: There is a huge variation.

  Q347  Sandra Gidley: Are you able to release some of that data to us so that we can see that variation?

  Mr Blood: Yes, on some of our capital investments for a variety of styles, but capital investment in community pubs does prove that the provision there will increase sales and volumes, and if you refurbish a pub it will increase the sales of that pub because it makes it more appealing to more customers.

  Q348  Sandra Gidley: I think you are avoiding the point, with respect. Let us try a slightly different tack to see if you have a little bit more idea about this. A lot of pubs offer spirits alongside a pint of lager. Does that increase the rate of consumption?

  Mr Blood: No pubs that we have do those styles of promotions, so I do not have the data specifically. Presumably they would not do the promotions if they did not the feel it affected the rate of consumption. Where people do it they believe that there is a commercial benefit, and that will be related to how much alcohol they sell.

  Q349  Dr Taylor: Going on still with you two, I am afraid, to chains of pubs. We are told that Enterprise Inns and Punch Taverns control about a third of all pubs in the UK and that these chains usually require the tenant landlords to source their beers from a particular supplier. Is this a beneficial development?

  Mr Benner: Certainly from CAMRA's point of view, we are supportive of the principles of the beer tie. It has worked well for many companies for 100 years or so, and I think if the beer tie was scrapped it would lead to a lot of unintended consequences, not least a struggling environment for the various family brewers in the country that rely on that tied estate system. As you are aware, the Business and Enterprise Committee has recommended to the Government that this issue is referred to the Competition Commission. CAMRA's position on that is that the Office of Fair Trading should carry out a market study to establish whether the relationship between lessees, tenants and the pubcos is fair before we go to what could turn into a two or three-year investigation and all the upheaval that that would cause for the industry and for consumers.

  Q350  Dr Taylor: We have all got pictures, probably in country areas, of our own ideal country pubs with the avuncular bearded landlord behind the bar. How effective can landlords be at stopping serving to people who are obviously having too much? I am looking at you really, because I think you are a pub owner yourself.

  Mr Blood: I think there are two or three things that they can do: (1) The style of pub they run very clearly determines how successful they are in controlling the environment, (2) it is about good training and good intervention, and I know that many of the pub companies (and I think this is one of the benefits of the pub companies) can develop good training for bar staff and licensees on how to deal with that tricky moment. It is not the easiest thing in the world to say no to someone to serve a drink, and I think all the pub companies have got very good training and are learning from the repeated experience of that training as to how to train people and give people the confidence to say no to somebody.

  Q351  Dr Taylor: Would it be another advantage of these companies that, if there is a pub that is turning out drunks left right and centre, they can actually get rid of that landlord?

  Mr Blood: I do not think they can get rid of that landlord under the terms of most leases. It would require action from the enforcement authorities. If one of our landlords, under the lease arrangements we have, falls foul of the licensing regime and that is picked up upon, then we can act on it, but we cannot act on it on our own opinion because that would give us carte blanche as pub owners to say, "We do not like you. We do not think you are doing it properly", and take away their business and pass it to somebody else. So it is important for the individual lessee that the judgment of whether he is a fit and proper person to run a pub falls with the licensing authorities rather than with us. Again, it is one area where I would argue that stronger and better enforcement would help the industry.

  Q352  Dr Taylor: But they could at least take note of the problem.

  Mr Blood: Absolutely. All the time we will talk to people about neighbourly complaints and how they can change the style of the way they run their business, but we cannot kick them out, because that would be wrong.

  Q353  Dr Taylor: Is it fair to blame pubs for the increasing violence in town centres?

  Mr Blood: No, it is not right to blame pubs. You should blame the individuals who are drunk and violent.

  Q354  Dr Taylor: Is there evidence to say that more of those come from nightclubs, illicit drinking in parks, than actually in pubs?

  Mr Blood: Again, if you do research about how people spend their evenings, people will probably drink at home, they maybe go to a pub, they maybe go to a nightclub and then at the end of the evening have an accident, have a fight, or something like that. As I say, it is quite hard to determine which behaviour led to the anti-social behaviour.

  Mr Benner: There is evidence from Liverpool, John Moores University, on preloading, that groups of young people, as much as 50% of those groups, are likely to drink at friends' houses or their own houses to save money, because of the huge price differential between on and off-trade, before they go out on the town.

  Q355  Dr Taylor: Do you think the licensing law liberalisation has made any difference to the safety of town centres?

  Mr Benner: No, from my position, I think that it is a bit of a myth, the 24-hour licensing idea. My understanding is that the average time that a licensed outlet has stayed open following the new Licensing Act is 21 minutes. I think it is not responsible for the problems that you read about in some newspapers.

  Q356  Chairman: Can I ask you a bit further on that, Mike? Do you think that, probably over the last two decades now, when you have wanted to build something that you would call entertainment (and they may not have alcohol in them) that they have been directed to town and city centres in part because they could not disturb, even in urban seats like mine, the rural nature of villages? I have had them turned down, where they wanted to put nightclubs in big pubs that were running out of customers, because of the changing culture in my constituency, and that has been refused on the basis that they can only go into town, and town centres and city centres are where these bigger drinking establishments are being put now, not by licensing law but by planning law. Would you agree with that? Have you ever looked at this?

  Mr Blood: I think in many cities and towns the "night-time economy" is a well-used phrase and planners do want to focus that style of entertainment in certain parts of towns. There is also a network effect where, if you are running that style of outlet, it is helpful to be near other outlets that have that style as well because people like to go to more than one of those venues in an evening. So there is a network effect, there is a planning effect and a view from many cities that they want to encourage the night time economy. Several of those features I would recognise in the way that the on-trade has developed in the last 15 years.

  Mr Benner: In the mid 1990s there was an obsession that we could create a cafe society in Britain, and that led, I think, to too many new establishments opening up in town centres, but, of course, you cannot really have that cafe society if it is too cold and it is always raining, so it did not quite work, and I think that was to the detriment of other licensed premises, possibly around those town centres, which are more community based.

  Q357  Dr Naysmith: Mr Beadles, why do you think the size of wine glass servings in pubs and restaurants has increased significantly in recent years?

  Mr Beadles: There is data that shows that the standard measure in the pub trade is a 175 ml glass rather than a 125 ml. I think that varies greatly from region to region. There are lots of more rural parts of the country, certainly in the north of England, where a 125 glass is still prevalent. In city centre establishments we see more 250 ml glasses prevalent, and I think that that has been a move in a lot of city centre establishments because that is what consumers have wanted in terms of not wanting to return to the bar. I think we are seeing a trend more recently in terms of people buying a bottle of wine to share and, therefore, the size of the glass is not relevant at that point: you buy a bottle and four glasses. Our perspective is very much that consumers should have a choice of a 125, a 175 or a 250 ml glass. They should not have a choice of glass; they should have a choice of measures. I do not advocate that we should all have to buy new glasses but, I think, a different measure of wine.

  Q358  Dr Naysmith: You think it is in response to consumer demand.

  Mr Beadles: Yes, I do.

  Q359  Dr Naysmith: Although there is lots of evidence that some people say they would rather have a small glass, the 125 glass, why is it that in some establishments they do not provide 125 ml glasses?

  Mr Beadles: As I say, I think they should. I think that the establishments should provide 125, 175 and 250 measures and give consumers a choice.


 
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