Big sell-off for Banks's
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
