Fair deal for your local campaign launched at Jolly Anglers #rdguk

The Fair Deal for Your Local, a national campaign to ensure that the government gives local pubs a fair deal, launched Thursday 2^nd May.

The Fair Deal for Your Local campaign has been launched by 10 leading organisations who are CAMRA, the Federation of Small Businesses, Forum of Private Business, the Guild of Master Victualler, Fair Pint, Licensees Supporting Licensees, Licensees Unite, Justice for Licensees, Pubs Advisory Service, and Greg Mulholland MP, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Save the Pub Group.

The campaign was launched at the Jolly Anglers; this venue was chosen as it shows the positive future that reform would lead to, compared with the reality of life under the pubco tied model. The Jolly Anglers was shut down, boarded up and for sale. It was bought and reopened as a pub by the same landlord who is free to buy beer from local breweries instead of being forced to pay huge pubco prices. The Jolly Anglers is now a successful community business.

Green Party parliamentary candidate for Reading East, Rob White said: “Being involved with the campaign to reopen the Jolly Anglers, this is an issue close to my heart. Too many pubs have closed or are facing closure as a result of the large companies’ practices, and it is time the government stepped in to prevent this systematic abuse.”

The campaign is calling for the government to give local pubs a fair deal – through much needed reform of the tied model operated by large pub owning companies. The fundamental problem is that some of the large pub owning companies are taking far more than is fair or sustainable from pub profits therefore making it difficult for many licensees to make a living and causing pub closures.

The government has committed to introducing a statutory code of practice for the large companies that will enshrine in the law the long accepted but largely ignored principle that the tied licensee should not be worse off than a free-of-tie licensee.

The fair Deal for Your Local campaign believes that the only way to ensure fairness is to include in the new code an option for the tied landlords of large companies to pay rent only to the pub owning company.

The consultation ends on the 14^th June 2013 and the people across the country are being urged to have their say and back a fair deal for local pubs.

People are being asked to show their support for a Fair Deal for Your Local by signing up online at www.fairdealforyourlocal.com by taking part in the government’s consultation, and by lobbying their MP to support a fair deal for Britain’s pubs.