Large-deal mergers and acquisitions activity was certainly a feature of 2010 and 2011 with notable deals such as Stonegate Pub Company’s purchase of the 333-strong wet-led Mitchells & Butler estate and Heineken’s deal to acquire the 918 RBS pub freeholds it had previously managed. But 2012 will go down as the year renewed caution crept into the pub deals marketplace.

A number of the larger companies decided that organic growth was the most reliable expansion route. It speaks volumes about the current landscape that the second largest trade deal of 2012 was Wear Inns acquisition of nine TCG managed pubs. There are other trade buyers in the marketplace for deals – Stonegate Pub Company has made no secret of the fact that it looks at every package to come on the market. But trade buyers have either become very picky – or nervous about buying any kind of package.

Mitchells & Butlers has made it clear that it now favours site-by-site expansion. Its site-by-site expansion into retail and leisure parks now requires the personal sign-off of the chairman Bob Ivell on each piece of property after one or two less than brilliant sites were opened.

Greene King, arguably the most active trade buyer of the last three years with three separate acquisitions, has not been active in the market since the middle of 2011. Its target of 1,100 managed pubs may yet receive assistance from a package purchase, but for now expansion comes through new builds, single-site plums and, unusually, transfers from tenanted to managed. Super-regional rival Marston’s, too, believes it now obtains best value-for-money (and return on cash) by building pubs from scratch. Spirit will perhaps one day become active in growing through package acquisition but for now its focus is on driving performance at its managed estate whilst galvanising its under-performing leased division.

JD Wetherspoon is still expanding, despite the bearish talk of chairman Tim Martin – the scheduled 25 openings planned this year is still more than the pre-crash years of 2005 (13 openings) and 2006 (nine openings) combined. Yet, it is saying something about overall activity when Wetherspoon’s acquisition of three Orchid pubs last month counts as the largest deal among the six biggest managed pub companies.

Quality managed assets that have been on the market have tended not to sell, not least because bidders have a much more conservative view on value and multiples – the non-sale of Inventive Leisure, still part-owned by Alchemy Partners, is a case in-point. The most active class of trade buyers has been the regional family brewers. Most of these have done deals with Enterprise to buy outstanding sites on their patch as the tenanted behemoth has looked to reduce debt – Fuller’s did the trade deal of the year by expanding its south coast and Hampshire reach by buying 16 pubs for £25.4m.

Meanwhile, Henley-based Brakspear ended six whole years of self-enforced abstinence by buying no fewer than seven pubs this year.

Private equity firms have, however, been very visible this year, with a focus on investing in smaller, dynamic growth stories.

LGV Capital seems to love the hospitality sector, with stakes in Amber Taverns, Liberation Group and most recently Novus, taking a stake alongside Hutton Collins. Piper Private Equity has invested in two sub-30 site companies in the past 18 months - cocktail specialist Be At One and time-proven café bar operator Loungers. There is also currently no shortage of private equity firms keen to buy Terence Conran’s 51 per cent stake in D&D Restaurants. Rutland Partners decided that Pizza Hut was a brand that could be revived, buoyed, no doubt, by the sales recovery that has been underway since the middle of 2011.

Meanwhile, one-man private equity investor Richard Caring may well off-load his stake in Cote Restaurants but the smart money would be on another private equity firm to take Cote to its next stage of development.

It is significant that those trade buyers currently in the market for smaller package deals are also backed by private equity – the aforementioned Wear Inns and, of course, Novus looks like an obvious bidder for Drake and Morgan as Imbiba Partnership looks to exit its investment. However, both Fuller’s and Young’s have bolder acquisition strategies than prevailed in the pre-crash years. The latter, for example, overcame its aversion to leasehold sites with its purchase of star performer Geronimo Inns two years ago – and you wouldn’t bet against them showing interest in Drake and Morgan’s mega-sites.

All in all, though, 2012 proves one thing – caution remains the watchword in this becalmed post-Lehman era. 

In terms of the development of UK alcohol policy, 2012 may well go down as a seminal year. Four main events stand out for me: the government’s Alcohol Responsibility Deal; the passage into law of minimum unit pricing (MUP) in Scotland; the launch of the UK government’s Alcohol Strategy and the implementation of the licensing measures in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011.

The Alcohol Responsibility Deal involves the industry agreeing, amongst other measures, to take one billion units of alcohol out of the market over a period. This was an attempt by the industry to kick the ball that’s in front of it – to go some way to meet the concerns of the government and the health lobby over alcohol-related harms. The Secretary of State for Health at the time, Andrew Lansley, was known to be sceptical about heaping yet more restrictive legislation on the industry, and speculation that his departure from the health portfolio was down, at least in part, to his opposition to MUP, has been rife.

But the notion that it is possible for the alcohol industry to work in partnership with health lobby advocacy groups, such as the Alcohol Health Alliance and Alcohol Concern, was then dealt a fatal blow. All of these groups, which had engaged in talks between the government and the industry on the measures to be included in the Responsibility Deal, abruptly decided they couldn’t support it and pulled out literally the day before the government was due to announce it. Moral campaigners are not interested in a search for compromise or partnership working; for them, those on the other side of the debate are not simply wrong, but immoral.

The passage into law of MUP in Scotland then paved the way for a similar measure to be included in the UK government’s Alcohol Strategy, proposed in March and being consulted on now. Undeterred by a complete lack of any evidence base to support the proposal’s main contentions, and relying instead on the Sheffield Report - a model whose credibility has diminished as rapidly as the proposition that “we’re all in this together” and, well you get my drift! I have recently read (and have a copy of) the detailed legal opinion sent by the European Commission to the UK and Scottish governments, in which they ask the UK to desist from introducing MUP. I look forward to seeing how the cogent arguments contained in this opinion are answered.

But the Alcohol Strategy also contains proposals to ban multi-buy discounting in the off-trade, whereby retailers couldn’t undercut the price of, for example, a single bottle of beer, by discounting the price if they sold it in a package of six. In Scotland the supermarkets got around this by withdrawing single bottles from sale whenever they decided to offer a discounted six-pack! Other measures include enabling licensing authorities to consider a ‘health objective’ when deciding whether to introduce a cumulative impact zone and ‘sobriety bracelets’ for alcohol offenders.

And finally, the measures contained in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 kicked-in in April and October respectively. We shall have to wait and see what impact EMROs and the Late Night Levy will have on the licensing scene.

The point about these measures is that they are all health-lobby, medical temperance-driven and not one of them is intended to help the pub or to even to acknowledge the positives of social drinking, or the fact that one in eight of all new jobs are created by our sector.

Which brings me to the title of this piece: “The death of appeasement.” Our trade bodies do an excellent job of lobbying on behalf of the constituent parts of the sector; but, in the face of the onslaught of medical temperance-inspired regulation, that lobbying is essentially reactive. As such, it can only, at best, ameliorate these measures by gaining relatively minor concessions. Attempts to appease the health lobby by responsibility deals, advertising codes and the Drinkaware website simply don’t generate a quid pro quo. They are perceived as signs of defensiveness and weakness.

I remain more convinced than ever that we need to promote a different vision of alcohol use in our society; that we need to communicate that vision to the public, in particular the drinking public. We need to engage in a contest of meanings with our critics that opposes their attempts to de-normalise moderate, social drinking and put it on a par with illegal drug use. A new campaigning organisation that would draw together researchers, brand owners, operators and key journalistic contacts; that would develop a comprehensive PR strategy designed to counter the serial problem-inflation and misuse of statistics of the health lobby, whilst at the same time promoting a positive vision of moderate, social drinking is surely an idea whose time has come.

It was reported earlier this week that a new initiative is underway to create 15,000 work placement positions in pubs across the country. Many will be forgiven for thinking ‘not another scheme dreamt up behind closed doors’ but on this occasion it couldn’t be further from the truth. As operators, we all know the challenges of finding career focused individuals to join our teams. We also see the stream of negative PR directed our way as an industry and, some say, subsequently the negative opinion that is formed with the powers that be. As a group of individuals from differing roles in the trade we believe that this initiative may be just the tonic that is needed.

We all know the positive benefits the pub sector brings to employment, community and charity. The problem, as an industry, is that we are so fragmented that positive stories on an industry-wide level are hard to quantify. Let’s take, for example, the recent campaign for apprenticeships in The Evening Standard. Barclays Bank managed to get three pages of positive media exposure by opening positions for ten apprentices within the organisation, yet our own industry, that has for years provided thousands of apprenticeship positions, doesn’t get the slightest of mentions.

The work placement initiative has been put together by an all-inclusive group of operators, training providers, trade bodies, associated PR companies, People 1st and the Hospitality Guild. It’s intention is to challenge the perception of working in our industry, and at the same time bring about a change in view from the wider public and the authorities. It is a quantifiable way of portraying the benefits of the pub trade across the UK. As has already been published, the initiative will give individuals essential basic training through a pre-employment workshop run by training providers centrally funded and logistically organised by People 1st and The Hospitality Guild. The scheme will give potential pub stars of tomorrow an insight into what a great industry we are to work in and, in addition, provides them with the first qualifications to begin a worthwhile career.

This isn’t simply a ‘dreamed up in a room initiative’ either. It is something my business has tried and tested at our site in central London for the last six months. We worked closely with The New Horizon Youth Development Centre in the same neighbourhood. Our managers at the site ran a pre-employment workshop alongside a number of online courses (Food Safety Level Two and Health & Safety Level Two for example) and followed it with a structured placement. To date, the site has completed four placements and has found full time work for two of the individuals with one further individual pending. The course gave them an insight into an industry they hadn’t considered as a career before. We ourselves have employed one person full time in a training position to become a manager whilst the second individual went on to join Beds & Bars working part time behind the bar and also completing hours in their head office doing design work.

The point I’m getting across is the initiative is tried and tested, operator-led and fully funded. It’s designed to be easy on our time in terms of logistics with a tremendous amount of support behind the website. All we need now is more operators. Many of you have given your pledges and words of support but to make this happen we need many more. The benefits are there to be seen and if as an industry we deliver these kind of numbers and create full time positions to follow up the placements we will be taken seriously and give our trade bodies a strong story to go forward with to gain further support from the wider community. The UK Hospitality website is already forging ahead as part of the wider service industry and we have the real chance to be part of it, becoming a more widely accepted industry with clear career options that individuals will flock to. This is just the beginning of the support we can get and have control of as operators. But we need to steer it with results and take a positive opportunity when it comes our way.

I used to work for a large corporation and I took money intended to be used as a deposit on a house and bought a pub with like-minded people doing the same. I now own a business to be proud of. Not many industries can give individuals the opportunity ours can and we have a chance to shout about it and recruit some great and much-needed talent.