Pub Companies and Licensees

The Beer Orders, together with undertakings given to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) as a result of the Grand Met/Courage deal, obliged the major brewers to release over 11,000 public houses from the tie by November 1992. As Allied-Lyons commented in evidence to the Agriculture Select Committee in 1993, the authorities had given no great thought as to who would buy these pubs.1 There appears to have been an assumption by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) that pub landlords and regional brewers would purchase a large number and, in fact, had been waiting to do so. As it turned out, slightly under half of the pubs were sold or leased to individuals or regional brewers, and rather more went to the new multiple pub operators. It is often said that this marked the beginning of the pubcos, but, in fact, there had already been a number of significant developments in that direction.