The S P F Blog

Travelodge has gotten excited this week at the government’s announcement that it is to spend £10 million of our money to re-generate three venerable old seaside towns; Blacpool, Dover and Torbay.

They don’t make it clear how this money will be split up, or even if it’s a typo because £3.3m won’t go very far in Blackpool or anywhere else, but I do think throwing £10m at three dilapidated old resorts is pretty much feeding strawberries to donkeys.

I live on the coast near Blackpool, and have seen first hand the decline in the town over the last couple of decades or so. To be fair, Blackpool is very good at what it does. What it does is play to a fairly straightforward audience of weekend pissheads and the ‘grey’ pound, markets that are wearisome and, erm, naturally declining respectively.

I do see some parrallels between tired English resorts and the licensed trade in that they both have an element of managed decline. I’m not a fan of local politicians, who is?, but the decision makers in Blackpool have been pretty creative over the years. It’s gone from being a solid, classic, family resort to the squalid shit-tip that we see buried in under a blizzard of blood and vomit every weekend these days without succumbing to the near total social and economic collapse that has hamstrung places like Morecambe.

Similarly, once thriving pubs seem to get passed through several smaller companies who manage them to a smaller and smaller profit but it keeps them alive for a while until they get boarded up and then pulled down or converted into carpet shops. There are some mercurial talents operating in this sector and I admire them.

We are good at managing decline in this country, from Empires to Pubs, and I do believe that it will be a feature of our lives for the foreseeable future.

Marstons and Punch have both made statements this week.

Marston’s have announced that helping tennants through hard times in this financial year will cost them £2m. Punch haven’t told us how much their lessees have had returned to them in assistance, but they have said that their shares are up some 14% as a US hedge fund has taken a 10% stake in their company.

I suspect that Punch are quite good at what they do, make money out of a pub estate, but the contrast with Marston’s could not be more stark. Punch have acquired a reputation as one of the more ruthless pub operators out there, which presumably means their numbers stack up.

Marston’s, on the other hand, have proven to be one of the more enlightened operators who will do everything they can to help their tennants survive tough times, although this business philosophy would appear to have cost them a considerable sum of money.

It may change at some stage, with somebody somewhere deciding that Marston’s need to be more ruthless and less benign as a landlord, but it’s possible that their saving grace is the fact that they are still a brewer as well as a pub owner and it’s in their interests to maintain standards and continuity to ensure throughflow of product.

Punch may be a successful pub estate operator, but Marston’s still manage to run good pubs and that is to be applauded in these testing times.

There are reports in the papers this week about a couple in Norfolk who have been fined a total of £8000 for defying the smoking ban, and the story of the guy in Blackpool doing the same thing is well documented.

I kind of admire this. I’m not a smoker and am personally glad to have the pubs smoke free, but there is something noble about such stoicly futile resistance to change.

We’ve seen it before, think about old ladies being unable or unwilling to pay their council tax, and it only ends in a couple of ways; both of which are not great results for the person fighting what they see as the good fight.

For both these sets of people, the ultimate answer will be prison or bankruptcy; possibly both. That’s a hell of a price to pay for having people light up in your pub rather than just outside.

Regent Inns’ share price took another pummelling last week, down to just over 3p ( yes, three pence ) at one stage before ‘bouncing’ back’ to finish the week at around the 4p mark. I’m kind of staggered by this. It’s not too many years ago when that share price was over 300p, I know things change but that is a dazzling fall.

I have some friends still at Regent, and many more throughout the industry who I met through my work at Regent Inns, and am genuinely sad to see where they have ended up.

They have made the decision to fight for their market share though, and knowing the people I do at Regent I believe that they have a chance of trading their way out of the situation they are in. They are clearly not breaking their banking covenants and there have been significant changes at the top; good luck to them.

The Sunday Telegraph claims that UK beer sales have dropped below the five-billion-litre mark for the first time since 1975, according to figures provided by the British Beer and Pub Association.