Why Otley's pubs may be saved from last orders

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/the-northerner/2015/may/10/otleys-pubs-saved-from-last-orders

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For a town of 14,000 people, Otley in West Yorkshire is disproportionately well served by pubs. There’s a bar for every taste. The Bay Horse does roast beef and dripping sandwiches for £1.50. At the Whitakers Arms on Wednesdays, ladies get a bottle of wine for a fiver. The White Swan has live music. The Red Lion has Sky Sports. The beekeepers meet at the Fleece. They love children at the Black Horse hotel. And the landlord at the Junction lets you use the loo even if you’re not buying a drink.

But what the market town’s 19 ale houses all have in common is that in April they were all listed as assets of community value (ACVs) when Otley became the first town in the UK to win a mass ACV listing for its pubs.

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Envisaged as a way of stopping essential rural services such as post offices and shops being turned into holiday homes, ACV status grants increased protection to premises deemed a “community asset”.

In practice that means before any pub can be sold off, the local community is given six months to bid for the property to prevent it being converted into a supermarket or office. Or indeed a bank – a fate to which Otley’s pubs are, curiously, particularly vulnerable. The old Blue Bell is now a branch of NatWest, the Grey Horse is the Yorkshire Bank and the Royal White House hotel is now Barclays.

Otley’s ACV listing is a point of great pride to local Greg Mulholland, the area’s surviving Liberal Democrat MP, who is president of the Otley Pub Club and chair of the parliamentary Save the Pub group. Under current planning law, non-AVC pubs usually have what are known as permitted development rights, meaning they can be converted into Tesco Metros or solicitors’ offices without planning permission from the local authority. No wonder pubs in the UK are closing at a rate of 29 a week.

“If you have somewhere that’s been a pub for 200 years, serving the community, why should a property developer have a right to close it and turn it into a supermarket?” Mulholland asked over a pint in the White Swan last week. “I think the community has a moral ownership of their pubs.”

Propping up the bar at the Bowling Green pub with a pint one sunny morning (“Make sure you put that I’m on nights”), local Robert Burcher explained how pubs an important focal point for the community. “You can just bob in and meet people. My two dogs were rescued from pubs near me. You’ll get someone coming in asking for logs and someone else promises to drop some logs off. The old barter system is still in action.”

Sipping a cider out front, Stephen Pollard, 55, put it simply: “Pubs are very important. If you don’t have pubs, you don’t have people. They should be protected.”

Yet a few doors down at the Rose and Crown, landlady Susan Stephens was sceptical about her pub suddenly being made an ACV. As she saw it, to protect Otley’s pub scene the council would have been better off stopping Wetherspoon taking over the Bowling Green in 2010. “It’s definitely affected business,” she said.

And as for the letter notifying her and her husband, Ian, that their pub was now an ACV, Stephens was not convinced. “I’ve not been called an asset before,” she mused. “A liability, yes … I don’t think it will benefit us. As a pub, I don’t think we will get more business for it.”

But she agreed that pubs were important, calling hello to Steven Sowden, a regular, who had wandered in laden with carrier bags and a copy of the Daily Mail. Coming for a pint was part of his social life, he said. “I like the atmosphere, the friendliness. The banter, talking about what’s happening in the world.”

At a nearby table Brenda and Roger Hicks had come in for their weekly lunch with their friend Jean Drobnjak, 80. The Rose and Crown was “definitely a community asset”, said Roger.

“It’s an outlet for me to get out since my husband died,” said Drobnjak, who recalled the glory days of Otley’s pub scene, when there were at least 38 boozers to stagger between. “One day my husband and I decided to see if we could drink in them all. I seem to remember we got to 25. I had hollow legs in those days,” she laughed.

Related: Fancy a drink at our local? How regulars are saving beloved pubs

Further up the road at the Junction, landlord Tony Grey was far from convinced about the mass ACV listing. “I’m a bit puzzled about this one,” he said, over a cup of tea in the beer garden, under a sign reading “Friends welcome: relatives by appointment.”

“If you run a pub you are running a business,” he said. “We have a lot of pubs in Otley. If you own one of these pubs and find it is losing money and a property developer comes and offers you an amount of money for it, in the normal commercial world, what would you do? You’d sell it, wouldn’t you? Now, Greg Mulholland came in here the other day. He’s a very good and articulate politician. But the bottom line is, you can’t be sentimental about pubs.”

He doubted whether most people would have what it took to be a landlord. “It’s a very hard life being a licensee. I get up some days at 7am to take a beer delivery and don’t go to bed before midnight. You’re quite tied to the place. You have these people saying ‘When I retire, I’m going to get a pub.’ Get a grip. It will be the hardest job you’ve ever had.”