The future for pubs – catering to the young
MAYOR Andy Street’s front-page call in last week’s Post “to open pubs here before rest of country” was certainly upbeat – volunteering the West Midlands as the first region to open not just pubs and restaurants, but “hotels, theatres and tourist attractions”, as a testbed for the rest of the country.
The casual tossing in of theatres in particular prompts a “What Johnsonian medication/planet is he on?” response. Not from me, here, though – because coincidentally I was planning an at least partly upbeat column about pubs myself.
I’ve always liked pubs, and currently miss them hugely. And this despite my own past six decades and theirs being fundamentally out of sync.
When I first ventured into pubs, with a group of school mates, in the early 1960s, they were overwhelmingly preserves of mature white males, rather cliquey, and instinctively disdainful of the technically illegal intrusion of us manifestly under-18 grammar school lads.
But also, thankfully, accepting enough to place our collective orders for what seemed formidably large pints of bitter and hand our cash over the counter – 12 shillings, or well over 60p, for an eight-pint round.
No ‘table meal’ food that would legitimise ‘underage’ drinking 40 years later; just crisps and maybe a very pickled egg.
In short, we felt out of place then because we were young; now I can easily feel out of place because I’m old. But that’s OK – because literally catering to the young is what pre-Covid statistics suggested just might be reversing pubs’ decadeslong decline, and might also be their best hope in what currently looks, Mayor Street notwithstanding, a pretty tough future.
The evidence is more suggestive than solid, but the sources are sound: House of Commons Library and Office for National Statistics.
First, the downbeat stuff. UK pub numbers have continued to fall – particularly since the 2008 recession – from 64,000 in 1990 to 48,000 in 2018.
Ownership has changed even more dramatically, kick-started by the 1989 Thatcher Government forcing the former ‘Big 6’ breweries – headed by Bass, Allied, Whitbread, and Grand Met – to sell off most of their ‘tied’ pubs, thereby increasing competition.
The big gainers, however, were less the drinking public or the smaller breweries and independents than the new so-called ‘pubcos’ – chains of often thousands of pubs, some tenanted, some managed, but all operating under a more or less conspicuous brand image, selling products sanctioned by the chain ownership.
By 2000 the pubcos owned half the UK’s then 61,000 pubs; today, with at least a stuttering revival of independents, roughly a third. Too diverse to generalise about, but the headline history of now the biggest – Midlands-based but Cayman Islandsregistered Stonegate Pub Company – conveys at least a flavour.
Formed 2010 by a private equity company, after purchasing 300+ pubs from Birmingham-based brewers, Mitchells & Butlers. Moved to Luton after buying Town & City Pub Company, the Yates wine lodge chain, Slug and Lettuce, etc.
March 2020: spent £1.3 billion acquiring Solihull-based Ei Group plc (formerly Enterprise Inns), the largest UK pubco with around 5,000 leased and tenanted pubs.
April 2020: now evidently cashpoor, furloughed 16,500 staff under the Covid-19 job retention scheme – permitted by the UK Government for tax haven-based companies, unlike France, Denmark and others.
Unsurprisingly, and as their many devotees will ruefully recall, this combination of numerical decline and the ownership revolution has meant the disproportionate disappearance of small pubs (under 10 employees).
Birmingham’s small-pub total of employees fell by 60% between 2001 and 2018, from around 1,500 to 600, in an overall fall of 33%, from 7,500 to 5,000.
However – and it’s a big one – in particularly the post-recession decade the overall level of pub employment actually rose, from 418,000 in 2009 to 450,000 in 2018. And the reason: among those 450,000, while the bar staff proportion was dropping from 44% to 29%, those working in food service rose from 29% to 45%.
The average number of employees per pub has meanwhile risen from five to eight, particularly in rural pubs.
It amounts to a mini-revolution in a centuries-old industry within a decade – much of it driven, whatever I think of them, by pubcos.
These may prove significant trends post-Covid. Delayed and socially distanced reopening will surely reduce further the numbers of pubs and possibly small breweries, but not necessarily pub employment to the same extent.
I shall conclude with an illustration, prompted by my currently favourite official, if questionable, statistic from a table showing the changing numbers of pubs annually by parliamentary constituency. Ladywood obviously dominates Birmingham, with over half its roughly 300 pubs. But in 2018-19 the UK constituency (after Luton North) with the second highest percentage increase in pubs was... Northfield, with 50%, representing reportedly a jump from 10 to 15.
Personally, I seriously doubt the math – not the 15, but the 12-month jump. However, thanks to Birmingham Mail’s Graham Young (October 23, 2018), I know at least one – a “Quirky new Northfield bar called Allegro – after ‘worst car of all time’”. The ‘Allegro Lounge’ duly opened that November, just up the Bristol Road from the former Longbridge works.
Part of the pubco Loungers’ 140+ chain, all necessarily ending in ‘o’ – Arco, Harborne; Loco, King’s
Heath; Sorrento, Moseley – their plum/pink décor, breakfast clubs, Cheeky Mondays, Tapas Tuesdays, “frankly ridiculous cocktails”, smoothies and milkshakes aren’t what I look for in a pub.
But I’m not a customer they’re after. Moreover, I bet most, if not all, Lounges will survive the lockdown. Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, University of
Birmingham
Overall level of pub employment actually rose, from 418,000 in 2009 to 450,000 in 2018
back on its feet, and we have support for this from across the political spectrum.
But the clock is ticking. It is more than two months since the chancellor promised that a support package would be forthcoming for aviation, however he has yet to deliver. The communities that rely on Birmingham airport for jobs and their prosperity cannot wait much longer.
Unite is calling on everyone whose work is connected to the airport or who is concerned about its future to email their MP and call for support for the airport and the UK’s entire aviation sector. houses had developed takeaway services to tick over in the short-term.