Pub Companies

Mark Lazarowicz Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ian Murray]

My hon. Friend is right to raise that because it is indeed the case. My hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield mentioned that too, when he said that the ties can be on wet sales, dry sales and gaming machines, and they can mean compulsory courses, compulsory training, compulsory licensing and using highly inflated contracts through the pub companies for, for example, statutory checks like electrical checks.

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

My constituency has a large number of excellent pubs of distinction, and my hon. Friend may well have visited some of them from time to time. They are also major sources of employment in the area. How would the proposals in the motion assist employment in that very important sector in my constituency and others across the country?

[Ian Murray]

There is a simple formula on employment in the licensed trade: the more successful a premises is, the more people it is likely to employ. The entrepreneurial nature of people in these small businesses running licensed premises means that they tend to want to get more licensed premises and expand what they are doing, so this is very good for employment. I declare an interest again, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I have visited some of the hostelries in my hon. Friend’s constituency, some of which are rather nice, and I encourage others to do likewise.

I was talking about the double whammy of Government decisions and the tied contracts pushing up prices to the consumer, which perpetuates the demise of licensed premises. We must also consider the ever-increasing energy bills, the spiralling rates and the costs of other non-alcoholic supplies such as food, which are rising much faster than tenants are able to pass on to their customers. More has to be done to deal with all those other relationships, and I hope the Government will back Labour’s policy on both energy and business rates to enable us to bring some of those other pressures down.