Hundreds of traditional West Midlands pubs are to be sold off because of the looming smoking ban, it was revealed today.
Banks’s brewer Marston’s, the former Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries, is selling around 280 of its smaller boozers for up to £70 million.
And Punch Taverns is to sell 1,000 of its pubs because of fears of falling trade when smoking in public becomes illegal.
The closures will hit smaller tenanted pubs, often in town and city centres, where there is no room for smoking shelters in gardens.
The pubs face closure unless another company is willing to take them on.
It is understood Wolverhampton-based Marston’s, which has a national estate of around 2,500 pubs, including many in the Black Country, Birmingham and Staffordshire, wants to shed pubs that may become unprofitable once the smoking ban starts. Both it and Punch Taverns, which owns around 9,300 sites, today refused to say which pubs would be hit.
The Marston’s sell-off comes after a pub-buying spree.
In January it spent £19.4m on Sovereign Inn’s 33 pubs in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, and £155m on the 135-strong Eldridge Pope pubs estate in the south of England. The group is spending around £20m on outside smoking areas, such as pub gardens, ready for the ban. This is due to come to England in July.
The pub sale is understood to have been placed in the hands of accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers and an asking price of between £50m and £70m has been put on the 280 pubs.
Meanwhile a third of pubs laid off staff as a result of the smoking ban in Scotland, according to a survey published today by the Scottish Licensed Trade Association.
Exclusive by Simon Penfold
10 Comments
If someone can spend £174.4m in January, and then say in March that the smoking ban will affect trade and cause closures, is telling fairy stories. This move is good old fashioned asset stripping and a way of getting rid of the already non profit making pubs.
Dear all!Asn ex-Black Countryman
form Dudley ,now in Hilversum,the
Netherlands,I can only tell what
havoc the same measure caused here
in Holland!What,s a pint without a
fag & crisps?Bang go small,cosy,
boozers!
Don’t dispair Imbibers ……. Just think how much better your Tipple will taste without the filthy taste of tobacco to spoil it…………..
Well, is this the road to perdition,it is certainly the road to prohibition. All those pubs closing, all those jobs lost, all those livelihoods gone. Was this the secret agenda of the anti smokers all along. Was this why governments have gone along with this rediculous scenerio all the time. They really don’t know much even today about cancer, but drinking is a different ball game all together. Drunk drivers kill, have accidents, get in fights. We know booze rots your liver and can be very addictive. The list of real proof is endless. So all the time the government was promoting smoke free they really wanted to be alcohol free. Their mission hidden behind a smoke screen created by a bunch of poor fools who had no idea they were being used they felt so important.
Who feels like supporting them now.
Diana Reid. Guelph. Ontario Canada
Instead of selling them, they should be fighting for ventilation.
freedom2choose.co.uk is trying to do just that. What about peoples social lives, the smokers and non-smokers alike.
You can’t blame the brewers & pub chains for looking after their interests.They are just confirming what many of us have been predicting will happen for a long while now.
No the blame has to go on this & other countries governments bringing in these unwanted laws.
You know what annoys me is that we get all this propaganda about how succesful bans have been in other countries, whereas this simply is not true.The situation reported in the article is actually the norm where smoking bans are in force & the future for the “local” is looking very bleak indeed.
Why pubs can’t have smoking rooms beats me. This just sounds like an excuse to close the less profitable pubs. Life is about change. Just for the record I support the smoking ban. I agree people should be free to choose if they smoke entirely and I just wish smokers would see that they are not extending that to those that don.t
As is so often the case, society of yesteryear had the answer to this ridiculous question. Smoke rooms, a bar and a lounge. If you didn’t want the pungent wiff of tobacco, you drank in one of the latter.
The Newhampton is a fine example. The well-being of bar staff is protected by the fact that the smoke room bar is simply a small hatch.
Winning votes trumps common sense these days however.
I keep reading about the destruction of communities and MPs wanting to keep small post offices and shops open but what we will soon see is the loss of essential, well regulated, problem free, no cost to Government Social Centres.
Smaller wet-led pubs are often at the heart of the community and society, not the smoker, is due for an immediate and fatal heart attack.
I am a drinking man,all my life I have enjoyed my pint.My Dad worked down the pit 35 years and what he really enjoyed was his pint a fag and a game darts with other miners.
Why on earth can’t a room be provided for these sort of hard workmen to relax in.I hate smoking and enjoy a meal in the pubs ,peaple should not smoke anywhere near diners.