Can the Government help make all ales available beyond the London Olympia?
Later this year the London Olympia will host CAMRA's Great British Beer Festival, the largest indoor beer festival in Europe with over 45,000 people taking part over the weekend. Doubtless many stalls will host local beer from Hook Norton, which has brewed for over 150 years, and still uses the buildings and brewing equipment that it used in the 19th century. Hook Norton brewery employs 38 people, whose families have worked with it for many years, and owns 36 pubs, 12 of which are in North Oxfordshire. The names of Hook Norton's beers evoke much that is appreciated in rural England - Haymaker beer for midsummer, Twelve Days Beer for Christmas, and Old Hooky for all the year round.
Yet when many of you visit the London Olympia it is worth remembering that the country hosting the largest ever beer festival is also the country where small brewers struggle under the highest duty rates on beer in Europe. In the UK, even with the new sliding scale introduced in the 2002 Budget, duty on beer can still staggeringly be £35 per litre higher than France. Duty is even less in Germany and Spain. How can excessively high beer tax be in the interest of UK consumers, UK jobs or rural pubs? It comes of no surprise that we are still witnessing frenzied booze-cruise smuggling from France because whilst the Government is eager to be seen as the consumer's friend, they are overseeing a blatant rip-off.
So even when the Government is introducing legislation to address our antiquated licensing laws, it is doing little to comprehensively reduce beer duty for medium sized brewers like Hook Norton. Our high rate of beer duty is particularly detrimental to local rural pubs. When I recently met with CAMRA members in North Oxfordshire during National Pub Week it was bought to my attention how a recent survey by the organisation has found that over twenty rural pubs are closing a week and that 27% are "never" visited. These are staggering figures. So why are so many pubs, many just down the road, closing every year? CAMRA believes this is the result of sometimes unscrupulous activities by large brewing companies. I expect that because south eastern counties in England, such as Oxfordshire, experience high house prices, this is leading to large brewing companies to get rid of low-earning community pubs and switch to spending significantly more money on fashionable, high-earning, city-centre bars. Large brewers, such as Pubmaster and Punch Taverns, are often failing to invest in rural pubs so that they can then show the planning authorities that they are not viable and should close. Such pubs are sold off if there is a monopoly control by another brewing company in a particular area and closing such pubs saves costs without losing customers. I suspect the situation for many rural pubs is worse than during the "Foot and Mouth" crisis.
None of this is of benefit to local brewers and local employers like Hook Norton. Following my meeting with local members of CAMRA I wrote to the Office of Fair Trading calling for an investigation into the activities of large brewing companies. I firmly believe that if the Government were also to reduce beer duty in the UK it would help rural pubs to compete better in the market place.
To my mind, the Licensing Bill which is currently passing through Parliament offers a further opportunity to ensure that some large brewing companies which are apparently deliberately seeking not to extend rural pub opening hours now do to make these pubs more competitively viable. Clearly CAMRA supports the Licensing Bill almost without any reservations. I agree that pub landlords should choose when their premises are open and believe that, as CAMRA observe, the "problems with binge drinking late at night are a product of restrictive licensing laws. We believe that reform of these laws will actually reduce binge drinking, lead to a more relaxed approach to enjoying alcohol and thereby reduce alcohol related disorder." I hope that the value of the Licensing Bill will be in relation to choice and opportunities it gives small rural pubs at a time of considerable pressure within the industry. It is still imperative to ensure that this is responsible legislation, especially as more rural areas like North Oxfordshire often have local communities that are concerned about responsible drinking that do not lead to acts of anti-social behaviour. Yet it still stands that if the Government is serious about helping small brewers and rural pubs then comprehensively reducing beer duty would definitely bring a boom for rural jobs, rural competitiveness and, hopefully, an even wider availability of the excellent ales that will shortly be drunk at the London Olympia.
