We need a “People’s Pub Partnership”—new cooperative business models for pubs, so they can serve community and planet
Photo by Hennie Stander on Unsplash
We’ll always want to talk to a man deeply concerned with the “future of pubs”. Ex-publican and now campaigner J Mark Dodds, has founded the People’s Pub Partnership (PPP), and dreams (from this 2021 Coop blog) of “a radical pub company that’s properly fit for 21st century purpose. Think a blend of Brewdog, the John Lewis Partnership and Co-op Local.”
As the Co-op blog piece continues:
The idea behind the the People’s Pub Partnership (PPP) is for a national multi-stakeholder co-op which will raise a pool of finance through crowdfunding to buy already closed or struggling community pubs.
Each pub’s purchase would be backed by an additional local crowdfunder, as a means for each pub’s community to take ownership of their pub in due course…
Mr Dodds says his own experience in the pub trade saw him take on a struggling London local, the Sun and Doves, in 1995, and turn it into an award-winning pub, but also taught him harsh lessons about working in the tied pub sector, with tenant landlords subject to extractive business practices.
Between 2006 and 2008 he became involved in the campaign to scrap the beer ties that were driving pub tenants to the wall, with supporters including the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and the co-op movement. This led to the 2016 pub code, introduced by the government to regulate the tied sector, but Mr Dodds says this was ineffective –leading him to look for an alternative solution.
…The plan would see a managed pub company established first, probably expanding its scope of operations to leased and tenanted and franchise.
The brief suggests one pub per community catchment, with each individual pub business becoming an investor in an Open Capital partnership (LLP). Surplus would be reinvested in purchasing or investing in more pubs.
The pubs will initially be bought, set up and managed by PPP, allowing it to control and monitor all costs and overheads and income. Mr Dodds says this would stay in place until there is a group of pubs operating smoothly, with inter pub communications and learning being shared.
The national crowdfunder will provide patient capital up front for buying and securing pubs for future generations; the local crowdfunders will feed into PPP’s professional overview of every aspect of each pub’s development through retrofit and refurbishment, sympathetic to each pub’s locality and character.
That was 2021 - what are the plans in late 2023? Mark sent me this blog from Lincoln University, where Mark is now working with academics at Lincoln to develop the above business model further. As the blog begins:
The British pub sector is in crisis, with a business model that is not working. Pubs are closing, being converted and demolished at an alarming rate. The greatest worry is that this trend is accelerating. If the pub, the icon of Englishness, is to be preserved, initiatives must support their recovery and ongoing resilience.
Mark Dodds, former London landlord of award-winning pub the Sun and Doves fondly recalls clients bringing in bags of veggies from their allotment, rallying around to make charity events a success and creating original artwork for its walls. A pub that services its local community attracts this type of commitment, the key principle that spurred him to form the Fair Pint Campaign which led to the Pubs Code coming to play in 2016.
Ross Ellis from Horncastle Ales, a microbrewery in Lincolnshire explains “I had a call from the landlord of a pub we supply in a bit of a flap as he’d run out of ale. He said as you’re coming over to play darts tonight, could you bring over a couple of barrels as well. It’s what you do, you support each other.”
Yet, existing tied pub business models do not recognise the community that is wrapped around the pub and the labour of all the different players who work towards making it successful. For too long, the corporatisation of many pubs has made them into cash cows designed to harvest as much profit as possible turning the pub into a transactional outlet where you eat, drink, leave, repeat.
In direct correspondence with me, Mark put it like this:
We nearly got sensible amounts of grant money for the legal framework/foundations needed to build it on, but it's never got full traction because people can't get their head around why pubs are failing everywhere... They think pubs dying is a sad, tragic, immutable, inevitable part of modern life.
They WANT a great pub to call THEIR local but believe WE don't use pubs the way we used to because of xyz bullshit propaganda pumped out by the pubco hegemony. (Which goes like this: habits changed in the late 20th century due to appreciating wine and coffee houses more than beer; cheap supermarket booze; social media for keeping in touch; and staying in is the new night out, with home entertainment and wide, flat screen TV to satisfy our social need to congregate etc. WTF!).
Nothing to do with a nation of run down tragically shit pubs serving bland premium global brands and Coke and J2O for non drinkers, served badly by publicans who don't know how to run a pub. It's called the #GreatBritishPubcoScam...
It's not rocket science: Sensible people don't go to pubs that are depressing, stinky, sticky floored boozers, even when the pub is OUR local. We just spend years hoping the next hapless people running it 'under new management' will be better than the last lot. who lost their shirt having signed up for a fully repairing and insuring tied lease that's a contract to indentured servitude.
Which is what half of the pub stock in the UK really operates under: modern slavery in plain sight. It's so insidious. Most of the publicans’ lives have been and are being ruined by the hedge fund backed model of disaster capitalism pubco, extracting all profit and value out of their lived experience behind the bars of great, littel britane's pubs…
You get the tone (and the intelligent passion: in 2011, Mark was a victim of these processes). What’s Mark’s current move?
We've also set up Ministry of Pubs CIC for the purposes of moving toward creating something that will look like a National Trust for Pubs, holding the assets in perpetuity for the benefit of future generations.
PPP will be the multi-stakeholder owned cooperative operational, maintenance, upkeep and management vehicle. MoP supervises that vehicle, and holds it to task on all commitments to sustainable business, closed loop supply chain management and fair dealing, for all stakeholders in the future of pubs. No one is left behind: with the planet as the core stakeholder, we all invest to support in perpetuity.
If you want to engage further with Mark’s participatory, commons-oriented, super-community vision of the British/English pub, see his interview with the Futurenauts (embedded below). And to contact him, here’s his LinkedIn page.