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Pub Guide

Opening Times

Issue 140 Autumn 2009

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CAMRA BID FOR FAIRER TIE

CAMRA is calling for pub companies to work together to deliver a fairer beer tie and has lodging a ‘super-complaint’ with the Office of Fair Trading under its new ‘super-complainant’ status, granted by the government to a select number of consumer groups. This requires the OFT to act within 90 days with proposals to resolve issues raised. CAMRA is hopeful that this could be a fast-track solution that will force pub companies to adopt voluntary legally binding agreements for fairer beer tie arrangements with its lessees.

CAMRA’s action follows a Commons Business and Enterprise Select Committee report which criticised the unbalanced relationship between pub companies and their lessees and recommended a ban on pub companies imposing restrictive covenants that prevent buildings being used as pubs after sale.

An end to restrictive covenants would boost competition and consumer choice but CAMRA is wary of moves to refer the beer tie for lengthy investigations by the competition commission or the European Commission.

One of the Commons Select Committee’s recommendations was to refer the beer tie for investigation by the competition commission. And the ‘Fair Pint’ campaign, run by a consortium of publicans, the GMB trade union and the Confederation of Small Businesses, challenges the beer tie and is calling for it to be reviewed by the EC.

The UK beer tie is allowed by an exemption from European competition law that expires next year. The tie is supported by CAMRA provided there is a balance between rents and beer prices charged to lessees and a right to stock a guest beer.

In the 1990s the government beer orders restricted numbers of tied pubs for large national brewers and led to the formation of huge pub companies that had no restriction on numbers of tied houses provided they did not own a brewery. Although some independent brewers benefited by buying up tranches of the national brewers’ pubs, others exited brewing to focus their businesses on running pub chains.

CAMRA sees any end to the tie as a catastrophe for pub owning brewers in the face of the discounting power of the global brewers, with pub owning cask beer breweries closing and pub operators growing their businesses by focussing on heavily discounted brands – mostly lagers and nitrokegs from the global brewers. This would mirror the situation in many countries that do not allow a beer tie and where local scale brewing has not survived.