What?  Really?  Well of course not, I’m just training to be a headline writer for the national press.  The truth – at the moment, depending on your choice of source – is nearer 7 or so.  Now that is a lot, and I have seen a figure of 14-18 or so quoted.  And of course being in print means it must be true.  But is it the whole truth?

Look into the history of any area and you’ll see pubs close – and open – throughout the ages.  Indeed for a while you couldn’t get a new licence for alcohol sales, so you had to transfer one – which meant for every new pub, another had to close.  This saw to a number of the smaller rural ones so that growing towns could have new pubs to meet new demand.  These days, pubs are shut for other reasons.  During the 70’s & 80’s for example, as breweries were bought out or merged, it was common to have, say, 3 pubs in the same village/town owned by by just one brewer, and that brewer’s accountants thought “why have 3 pubs, with 3 sets of costs, when we can sell two as houses at a profit, and send all the drinkers to the remaining pub”.  So two would shut, and the third would then wonder why their trade hadn’t tripled.  Since the 90’s though most pubs have been owned by Pub Companies – who are basically banks, investment chaps and property developers.  Trading their pubs, sorry, property assets as a pub has been a way of getting some extra income whilst they use the value of their estates to raise more money, occasionally selling off a pub for housing.  And of course pubs have for a while been worth a lot of money as housing – just think how many executive rabbit hutches you could fit on the garden and car park of your local.  So the viability of a pub has become based on the short term income of redevelopment against the longer term value as a trading business.  And stuff any community value, because that doesn’t add shareholder value.

So with that in mind, in the current climate it becomes easy to see that keeping shareholders happy on real estate values is not easy, and so money has to be made elsewhere.  And that is only done on beer prices (because your tenants have to buy your beer range, at extra high prices), and on the rent of the pub itself.  Now whilst some sectors of this industry are doing well (cask ale, from smaller brewers in particular), not everything is rosy.  So your Pubco, seeing drink income come down, starts worrying about their shareholders (well, the tenants aren’t important, are they…).  So to maintain revenue, up goes both the rent and the beer prices beyond belief.  Tenant landlord struggles, decide he is better off elsewhere (like the dole queue for example), and clears off.  The banks see this, and decide the industry is a mess.  So no money loaned to pubs (or so it is said…).  As a result, pubs shut at an increasing rate, hence the headlines and statistics in all the trade journals.

But.  Some of those pubs weren’t doing well before things got bad for Hedge Managers.  Why?  Bad landlords (just because you can buy or rent a pub, it doesn’t make you a good landlord), dodgy locals (we all know pubs we would choose to avoid because of some of the customers), not offering what the locals want (a gastro pub on a housing estate?  A village local focusing only on large screen football?), or even just being the same as every other pub in terms of beer and food offered.  Maybe the carpet is bad, or maybe the place just smells.  Think about it – how many pubs do you avoid because of something you don’t like about it.  And to be honest, how many of those reasons date back to a bad experience back in 1986?

Round here, I could name a lot of pubs that have shut in the last 2 years.  And yet, I can name more that have opened, because (I am certain), none of those closed pubs are lost to housing - yet.  Maybe one or two are Indian restaurants (but they could become pubs again one day), and a couple are for sale – but still as pubs.  The others have re-opened under new owners, or indeed new tenants – sometimes with no period of closure, but they are still counted as closure on paper I am told.  And some have re-opened after several years of closure, hence I can name more that have opened than closed.  Of course they are some I am not aware of, and there are plenty of others at risk.  But for every pub that is struggling, there are others doing rather well, in what would seem to be a bad location – ie no houses nearby, bugger all public transport, and, get this, nowhere for smokists to avoid the rain. 

Indeed, some in the industry have suggested to me that if you include figures for High Street premises (ie cafe-bars etc), then the true figure is that the number of licensed premises in actually increasing - but when did you last see a cafe-bar with handpulls, nice garden and an open fire?

So my point is?  well, don’t believe everything you read.  But more importantly, go down the pub.  Any pub.  Even that one that had a strange smell in 1993.  You never know, it might now be the best place in the world.  One thing’s for sure – if you don’t the headlines may yet be more accurate, and then we’ll all be very sorry…