Dear Jonathan,

10th Anniversary of the House of Commons vote in favour of a Market Rent Only option: Ten Lost Years

We are writing to you because this month sees the 10th Anniversary of the important vote in the House of Commons in favour of a Market Rent Only (free-of-tie with open market rent) option for tenants or the large pub companies. You yourself voted for this – and it has not been delivered.

Ten years on, the sad reality is that the Pubs Code legislation (and the Pubs Code Adjudicator) has demonstrably failed. Tenants continue to face abusive and unfair treatment; tied product prices remain grossly excessive and exploitative; rents remain excessive; there is no genuine Market Rent Only (MRO) option as envisaged by Parliament; and those tenants who do manage against the odds to actually go free-of-tie are punished, discriminated against and routinely evicted, making a mockery of the then Government’s promise that those tenants who do seek to or manage to go free-of-tie will not face detrimental treatment.

The Pubs Code has been a failure – and a deliberate one, on the part of the Conservative Government that reluctantly introduced it.