Can a sustainability approach save the Great British Pub..?

In the couple of years or so that I have lived in my adopted home town in West Yorkshire, there have been several closures of much missed community facilities in the form of local pubs.  They tend to be those backstreet, suburban and village hostelries and not the cheap drink emporia frequented by today’s young people, and this is a trend which is being repeated across the country.  The excellent campaigning organisation CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale) reports that 39 pubs are closing every week and this is leading to a loss of social as well as economic value in many of our towns and villages.

So what, you might say?  Isn’t that just the way that the market economy operates?  Well, yes it is – but that doesn’t mean it’s a desirable outcome. Often, the closed pubs are left a good while without any redevelopment and become local eyesores.  In addition, there is considerable loss to local economies - a recent report by the Institute of Public Policy Research[1] indicates that local pubs inject an average of £80,000 a year into their immediate local economy which reduces after closure because pubs employ more people than supermarkets on selling beer and at a higher value.  The effect of cheap alcohol sold through the major retail chains has undoubtedly been devastating on the local pub.  True, this isn’t the only reason pubs are in decline – wine drinking trends have played their part too as well as other social changes, but in many places the effect of Big Retailer has been to sound the death knell for the local.

Local pub closures are bad for the economy and bad for sustainability too.  After all, the whole point of a local pub was that you should be able to walk there – no car journeys required, and of course the benefit of less exposure to drink driving and all the risks associated with that thankfully diminishing anti-social habit.  The loss of locals, especially free houses, makes it harder for small, local breweries to sell to the pub trade as so many of the other pubs are tied into big chain deals and a form of homogenisation of the supply of beer brands.  Local micro-breweries tend to have a greener outlook and need to be nurtured as part of the growing ‘local food’ movement.

Is there anything that can be done to stem this tide of decline in the local pub as a feature of the community?   Good efforts have been made by CAMRA and other bodies to place this issue on the agenda, both in Parliament through the mechanisms in the Sustainable Communities Act and through campaigns against closures, sometimes successful where local communities have teamed together to run their own local, sometimes as a co-operative or a social enterprise.  This provides some hope in some places but leaves so many still empty and forlorn.

Perhaps we can apply some more imagination to the restoration of the local pub to community life.  Maybe a very localised network of ‘re-use and refill’  centres could be added to the adjacent businesses such as small shops and post offices that some are adding to their pubs in order to diversify sufficiently to survive in their communities and not rely solely on beer sales.  Now, you might well expect me to respond heartily to a message that says ‘drink real ale to boost sustainability’ but not everyone will respond the same way, and so pubs need to think laterally about what else they can do.  But, anything that draws a community closer together and shares resources has to be positive in the present gloom, so adding mini charity shops, farmers’ markets and re-use centres to the local may not be so far-fetched after all.

It would add a whole new meaning to ‘nipping out for a pint’ if you were refilling your detergents at the same time...

This article was my Sideways View piece for Resource magazine, May/June 2010