Mr. Greg Mulholland:

I cannot tell the committee the percentage of pubs serving food, but it would certainly be the majority. As I have made clear, I am pleased that the pub has a future that is not necessarily in the form of a pub restaurant. It is a little bit similar to how things are in Ireland: when we use the word "pub," this can cover some things that are substantially different. Some of the figures that are bandied about include bars, which we in the pub sector group would not necessarily recognise as being pubs or having that intrinsic community value. Food is important in pubs, but it is great that there are many pubs that are doing well without it, focusing on the beer side of things. They may well have snacks and pork pies and so on but they are not food-led.

There are often grumbles about various elements of red tape and regulation. I am probably not the best person to speak to from that point of view in the sense that I represent a campaigning organisation, not a licensee representative body. I can certainly seek organisations that could give the committee that information. I am not aware of a huge number of complaints about problems serving food in pubs. It is certainly something that companies of all sizes that own pubs encourage their licensees to do. With regard to individual pubs, ultimately, pubs are competing against each other, unless they are the last pub in the village, and even then they still need to attract people. Clearly, they are businesses that need to attract people. The pubs that is getting it right is providing the customer with what he or she wants in terms of the range and quality of beer but also the ambience.

Often, if it is a food-led pub, it is the quality of the food, be it simple Sunday lunch fare or something more fancy. There are some fantastic operators in the United Kingdom, as there are here.

It has been frustrating to see a real problem in the UK with the lease-tied system, which is operated in particular by large companies. This is something Ireland does not have, and it goes back to the issue of competition. I have seen many heartbreaking examples in which people have worked extremely hard, been very good operators and provided what the customers wanted but not got the support from the pub-owning company, and the price of success was to see their rent go up, so that however hard they worked, they could not make the pub sustainable on the terms under which they were being offered it. We legislated in November last as a result of our big campaign and we hope that will start to become a practice of the past. We want to see these great operators doing well and really making an effort to attract customers in so that they choose to go to the pubs rather than, as was stated here, choosing to sit at home and watch a DVD with a four-pack of lager. There is work to be done by operators, by everyone in the trade and, to some extent, by governments, both national and local, to get the message out that well-run responsible pubs are important for tourism, for the economy and for communities and should be supported.