An extract taken from the Weekend Telegraph Saturday 21st March 1998

Breweries can make money by turning pubs into houses - but the regulars won't like it.     Sarah Lonsdale reports


Freeholders Will and Dotty Lester encountered widespread dissent when in January they applied for a change of use for their pub, The King's in Reach Cambridgeshire. "I'm baffled really" said Mr. Lester who, although featuring in the Good Beer Guide, is struggling against drink driving laws and modern "family friendly" establishments. "I would say that 98% of our trade comes from outside the village. And half the village hasn't set foot in here in the five and a half years we have lived here." Like many villages whose traditional farming community is dying, newcomers move in, attracted by the rural idyll of a picturesque village with its country pub. But they end up rarely using the local, preferring to socialise, in the towns where they work and using the village as a dormitory. "Then they get upset when the pub can't survive," Mr. Lester said. Villagers in Reach are clubbing together to try to buy the King's
The trouble for publicans such as the Lesters is that they. would much prefer to sell their establishments as private houses. Nottingham based property agent Paul Davey, who is selling pubs, explained: "In many cases rural village pubs are scarcely producing enough income to break even. This means their value as a business, based on turnover, would be marked very low. if' however, they were sold as private houses, the owners would undoubtedly get more for the property because it would be valued on a residential basis."

The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and the Rural Development Commission argue that publicans can diversify to survive (open a shop or post office, for example). 'Nearly 30 per sent of rural parishes don't have a public house. The pub can play a vital part in village life," a spokesman for the Rural Development Commission said. Breweries with a high proportion of rural pubs disagree. Greg Jephcott, managing director of Essex brewers Ridleys, with half of its 66 tenanted houses in rural locations, said that if a pub was well supported by its local community there would be no need to close it. "We have had to sell four of our rural pubs in the last two years," he said. "When the new drink-driving laws are introduced, even more pubs will become unprofitable. We're also being killed off by the drinking-at-home trend fed by cheap imports of beer from France."Paul Davey believes that hundreds of rural pubs will be closed and de-licensed in the next few years. With pressure for housing in. rural communities at an all-time high, converting pubs into homes is perhaps the only logical outcome.