and welcome to the Save Our Pubs page of Malvern Hills Brewery.
LAST ORDERS AT THE BAR, BUT ARE YOU
REALLY SURE?
It has been widely reported that currently around 56 pubs are closing each month across the UK. There is no doubt that the worsening trading conditions aren’t helping the situation, but Herefordshire CAMRA has been asking some awkward questions for a number of years now and has been getting some interesting answers.
The Live & Let Live
Back in the autumn of 1996, the Live & Let Live at Bringsty Common (located off the A44 just three miles east of Bromyard), was staring closure in the face. The owner was preparing to sell to a buyer who only wanted to convert the 17th Century Grade II-listed ex-cider house into a private dwelling. No-one disputed that the owner’s trading circumstances were not viable, especially with the pub not doing food and being in a relatively remote location, but there were concerns that insufficient effort had been made to sell the pub as a going concern before considering it for permanent closure and conversion. What followed over the next six years became a cause celebre amongst pub campaigns – and has probably set the benchmark since.
A locals’ action group, called the Bringsty Action Group (BAG), was hurriedly formed, and rather than just protest, they put their money where their mouths were: with the help of CAMRA, they raised £158,000 (that’s over £200,000 at 2007 prices) in just six months, with the aim being to buy the pub themselves. This sum would have been more than sufficient to buy the pub’s freehold and undertake any necessary renovation work; a licensee was even lined up to takeover. However, the owner refused point-blank to sell to the co-operative, despite being offered £5,000 more than the amount already accepted from the buyer who wanted it as a house. It took four planning hearings (including a failed appeal) and six long years before common sense prevailed, and the pub was sold to someone who intended to run it as a business. It is intriguing that someone was ultimately prepared to buy it as a pub, despite the owner’s previous claims that ‘nobody was interested’.
A pub is often worth more as a house
It is often the case that a pub is worth more as a private house than it is as a pub. However, national (and many local) planning guidelines require a pub owner to clearly demonstrate that the business is no longer structurally viable, and part of this requires them to show clear evidence that they have offered it for sale to others as a business before considering change-of-use conversion. And here lies the rub. In the case of the Live & Let Live, on closer inspection, it became quite apparent that the efforts to sell it as a pub were grossly inadequate, and then there was the refusal to sell to the local’s co-operative too - consequently the four planning refusals.
This case illustrates that some unscrupulous owners’, perhaps motivated by an overdraft staring them in the face from a failing business, are quite content to bend an argument in their favour to get change-of-use planning permission. They’ll get more money for the pub, but in the process a community loses its social heart, and potential publicans seeking that elusive first freehold business opportunity will be frustrated – yet again.
The Live & Let Live – the pub that refused to die
Many people said that the Live & Let Live was a lost cause. In November 2007, it finally re-opened following a remarkable five-year renovation, and is now trading very successfully, therefore, vindicating the actions of both the locals and Herefordshire CAMRA. It seems inconceivable looking at this unique pub today that anyone would wish to convert it into a house.
Wake up call
The case of the Live & Let Live was a wake up call for Herefordshire CAMRA: it was now alerted to the actions of those less scrupulous individuals out to make a quick buck, who were trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the planners to get planning permission for conversion - regardless of the potential viability of a pub. Herefordshire CAMRA soon became involved in a number of other contentious pub planning applications across the county from 1996 onwards. In the case of the Ancient Camp Inn at Ruckall, near Hereford, a planning application was refused to convert the delightful, and once very successful, riverside inn into a private house, after the owners were unable to explain the 130% increase in its value in just two years of ownership. In the case of the Red Lion Inn at Kilpeck the owners were also unable to explain their valuation, and they were refused planning permission and lost the subsequent appeal. Only this year, the Vine Tree Inn in Ross-on-Wye was subject to an audacious planning application for conversion to residential flats. A refusal by planners in March, 2008, was quickly followed by a modest reduction in the asking price, and it changed hands as a pub business on the 27th May, 2008. The list goes on.
The Vine Tree Inn – another non-viable pub re-opens
2008 looks like being a better year for Herefordshire pubs, with a number of pubs that were previously described as “non-viable” to support change-of-use planning applications, reopening successfully under dynamic new ownership. The Red Lion is one such pub.
Pubs closing unnecessarily
Mark Haslam of Herefordshire CAMRA explains: “What these cases seem to suggest is that we may in the past have allowed potentially viable pubs to close unnecessarily. It is a sad fact of life that some pubs will close in the future – it is not for us to swim against that trend, but we need to be increasingly vigilant to ensure that there has been proper scrutiny of the circumstances first. If ultimately a pub is properly marketed and no-one ultimately wishes to buy it at a reasonable asking price, then fair enough, it will probably close for good. The Five Bridges Inn at Bishop’s Frome and the Plough Inn in Canon Pyon, both in Herefordshire, are two such recent examples of closures. However, Herefordshire CAMRA will always support any locals’ campaign where there is evidence that the efforts to sell the business are not what might be reasonably expected by the planning process. This is not about CAMRA orchestrating a campaign, nor is it within our gift to determine a case (that is for the planners to decide), but we are happy to highlight the facts of the case to the planners – a case of making sure the right questions are asked. Think about it for a moment: if someone has bought a building as a pub, is it really unreasonable to expect them to make a genuine effort to sell it on as such? We don’t think it is. If we were to sit back and watch pubs close unnecessarily, it will reduce overall the number of freehold pubs in the UK, and besides robbing communities of their social centre, this will have a further knock-on to the smaller brewers who rely on their freehouse status for business.”
Some are prepared to trade on their peers misfortunes for a few quid more
Running a pub is harder than ever before at the moment, and it isn’t getting any easier. With the supermarkets selling beer for less than the price of bottled water; rocketing fuel and utility bills; the impact of the recent non-smoking legislation, and now the threat of lower drink-drive alcohol limits that EU harmonisation might bring, it is inevitable that more closures will follow. Therefore, it is all the more distasteful when some individuals are happy to try and ‘cash-in’ by citing the genuine misfortune of their fellow licensees in support of a speculative planning application. Since the Live & Let Live case back in 1996, Herefordshire CAMRA has been instrumental in over a dozen pub planning battles – and to date can claim a 100% success rate. However, there is no room for complacency and CAMRA will not sit back and let this situation persist.
Learn more about Herefordshire CAMRA and their pub campaigns at: www.herefordcamra.org.uk
