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Sun and Doves pub - owner evicted after by brewery after huge rent rises

4 October 2011

from: Mark Dodds. No Fixed Abode

TO:
Representatives of Scottish & Newcastle Pub Company

Re: Mark Dodds / The Sun and Doves Public House,
Camberwell, London SE5. Outlet 116144

Since 23 September representatives of your company have attempted to deceive police by making false allegations about the circumstances of my leaving the above pub.

Your employees' repeated false statements include telling the police that I have committed criminal damage and have stolen property belonging to your company. I left the building in compliance with the terms of your company's eviction notice and these serious misrepresentations of fact must immediately cease being reported.

Further to this your company's actions are an abuse of limited public resources as there are no legitimate grounds for your employees to be vexatiously wasting police time. Your employees' motives are clearly aimed at intimidating me vicariously by attempting to deceive third parties into harassing me in the place of your company taking civil action to attempt to recover goods it does not own. Immediately inform your employees to cease and desist from making these accusations.

For clarity: If your employees continue to make false allegations and insinuations to the police regarding my supposedly criminal activity I will apply for an injunction against S&NPC.

Furthermore I will publish this correspondence as widely as possible and make a point of informing all pub industry stakeholders, politicians and the press, both trade and national, about your company's actions.

If you consider there to be grounds for your company to make a civil case I will be pleased to correspond directly with an employee who has authority to do so via this email address. Any queries your staff may have about any property they have accused me of stealing I will respond to without delay. In this regard you may consider referring your employees to the detailed inventories and lease agreements proving ownership which, at their request, I gave them in meetings over the past three years.

If you want to correspond about my leaving the pub in general, for example you may like the next lessees to have an insight into the pub's interesting history - I will be pleased to share my knowledge with any future lessee, you may also do so via email to this address as I now am of no fixed abode, having been evicted.

Further to these matters if your company believes I owe it any money please send an up to date, full and final, statement of all accounts outstanding. Please be sure to include all new and invented claims by 15 October for the interest of the Official Receiver in my case who I will be pleased to pass your correspondence on to by return.

Sincerely, I look forward to your confirmation of action

Mark Dodds
 
This is a shit tale. Have you contacted private eye? Pubco's are a favourite of theirs

Best of luck with the rest of your life
 
Private eye - Fair Pint were feeding PE articles for a few months last year - haven't been in touch recently, perhaps that's a good idea thanks for reminding me!
 
More contacting of newspapers I reckon. There's a lot of the general public that aren't aware of how breweries/pubs work. There's plenty of yuppies in the Sun & Doves that must have some contacts.
 
I absolutely regret the closure of the Sun & Doves, and having worked on and off in pubs in the past and known people who've run them, find the behaviour of pubcos reprehensible.

I think it's a shame that Mark didn't mention staff treatment, pay, and conditions in his list of 'things I'd have done differently given the chance' - because the S&D, while not the worst I have known in this respect, did little to improve the lot of bar staff, who had to put up with the same minimum wage, lack of tax records, being sent home half way through a quiet shift, and general insecurity as elsewhere in the industry. I know this from working there. In common with other pubs I've worked in, the owners of the S&D seemed uninterestethere their staff on a personal level - when I worked there, I saw them, but they never introduced themselves to me, or offered and words of welcome.

And I think Mark should realise that no matter how real and awful his grievance, his histrionics do come across as self-pitying and excessive.
 
DJWrongspeed said:
I think Kings should buy it as an outside smoking venue for their staff, it kind of is already :D
Click to expand...

I know, and I hate walking past there smoking. I feel guilty knowing it's full of medical staff and they're tsking tsking as you walk past, until you realise why they're all sitting outside :D
 
stuff_it said:
Oh no, I agree the whole industry has gone nuts. I met a bloke once serving in my ex-local (which had gone bust) who's entire job was to be parachuted into failed pubs by the pubco to avoid leaving them empty and not earning - he said he'd been so many places and how busy he had been that year (two years ago). Can't recall which pubco it was but my understanding was that they had a whole team of people to do this, not bothered about people going under at all - seeming to expect it even.
Click to expand...

The"churn" of static landlords can be ridiculous too. My dad's local (small town, situated on the main through road, with good local and passing trade) is pubco-owned (Punch IIRC) and has had 4 in 6 years. The poor sods come in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, trade for about 6 months and then get hit with rent and price rises. It wouldn't be so bad if there was unitary pricing by each pubco, but apparently what you pay per barrel sometimes varies according to the whim of some suit in an office! :eek: The local community has looked into buying up the freehold, but the pubco wants silly money, to cover their "losses" if they sell off a cash-cow, and a cash-cow it'll be as long as people don't get decent contracts from the pubcos. :(
 
stuff_it said:
Really? Medical staff are notorious smokers.
Click to expand...

I know, but I still feel guilty walking past them

:oops:
ViolentPanda said:
And boozers and other "bad" things.
My favourite bit of medical hypocrisy was my GP telling me to give up coffee while he sucked down an espresso. :)
Click to expand...

I remember when himself was emergency admitted with vascular disease, I left him in A&E whilst I went out for a smoke. A short while later a vascular consultant came out and lit up. When he saw me, he temporarily froze in embarrassment :D
 
slowjoe said:
And I think Mark should realise that no matter how real and awful his grievance, his histrionics do come across as self-pitying and excessive.
Click to expand...

+1

I was having a drink with a couple of mates on Wednesday who, like me, live within a stones throw of the Sun & Doves. Turns out all three of us gave up on the place in the last few years due to a combination of inedible/burnt/uncooked food, shit service and rude staff/management. All of the food complaints elicited 'couldn't give a toss' responses from the staff or whoever it was in charge of the place at the time.

The worst I witnessed was a third friend who took a miserly portioned plate of poorly cooked sausage & mash back to the female boss, suggesting that for the 8 or 9 quid charged an adult portion and a properly cooked dinner is the least which might be expected. He was dismissed out of hand and told in no uncertain hands that she didn't care and wasn't going to do anything about it.

Hopefully we'll get a decent local on a doorstep when it reopens this time.
 
To be honest, with an initial response like that, I wouldn't bother continuing. You seem to have deemed the substantial sympathy and support found here worth engaging with, despite its anonymous nature, so if you can't gracefully take the measured criticism that comes with it - even when it's prefaced with words of kindness - then I think I won't be alone in feeling that you can get stuffed.
 
mark dodds said:
Many thanks to you anonymous undressed cheeses. Will respond more fully in time.
Click to expand...

All of us spoke directly and in person to whoever was in charge of the pub at the time about the various issues and met rudeness and a 'couldn't give a shit' attitude. That was your opportunity to put it right, why would anyone be interested in your response now?

If I was your landlord I imagine I'd have doubled your rent to get rid of you too.
 
I posted initially because a conversation was started here by others speculating about 'my' pub's closure which could benefit from some informed response. Far from seeking sympathy my hope is to inform as many people as possible about what is happening to pubs all over the UK - using the Sun and Doves' as example seems to make sense as it's the direct result of widespread abuse of the beer tie by one pubco whose behaviour is identical to other pubco's whose sole aim is to asset strip the national pub estate without any form of direct investment in the bricks and mortar. Quite a lot of pubs have been closing and it's not all cheap booze from supermarkets, the smoking ban, beer duty and changing consumer habits. A lot of it is because so many tied pubs do not make enough profit to be able to reinvest in the business - because the rent and beer prices imposed by the pubco's are so high.

slowjoe; there have been no intentional histrionics on my part. It has been a tough time for a long time but I don't feel especially hard done by - my experience is similar to that of thousands of other tied tenants. The experience of many years of tenure and two seemingly irrationally aggressive rent reviews led to my learning more about the tied system than many other tied publicans just because I managed to stay in business longer than most because the pub was busier than most I had to endure it for longer. These experiences of the tie's abuse to a pub business led me to being outraged by the lie of being 'partnership' with a tied pubco and drove me to setting up the Fair Pint Campaign with other tied pubco tenants who were financially struggling and similarly disaffected by their experiences of pubco's.

After ten years the length of this involvement with a struggling business certainly led to my finding day to day business at the pub grindingly difficult to be engaged and positive about, I struggled with depression for a long time and was suicidal for a period. Going into work was not easy... I'm NOT seeking sympathy - just recounting what happened. From 2006, because there was no profit, I was unable to draw income directly from the business. That sort of thing doesn't make you feel very good as an employer really but I know many tied pub tenants in the same situation. The Sun and Doves was on the market for three years after the rent review began because the only way I could have paid the back rent bill when the inevitable rise hit was from the proceeds of a sale - but once the rent review went a year past deadline there was little point in selling because all proceeds would have been swallowed by back rent and trade debt and left me bankrupt anyway. By that point all I could do was either hand the keys back, walk away and go bankrupt, or plough on determinedly with arguments for why the rent should NOT increase and hope that Arbitration or High Court would agree with my rational position about the business's ability to pay against the flimsy, groundless, but habitually accepted arguments presented by the pubco. Essentially the pubco won in the end but the arguments used were the basis of the Fair Pint Campaign's position which has since been adopted into recommendations for reform of the pub sector by Select Committee. Not a bad result overall really.

So slowjoe undressed worked for me and was met with indifferent treatment by his employer. My apologies slowjoe. The point you make about the impact of the beer tie on a business's ability to pay its staff is a good one - although I didn't bring it up above I did make this point as part of my written evidence to government Select Committee hearings: the direct impact of my 2000 rent review, where rent increased 68% was that we had to cease table service and go to 'order from the bar' and make several staff redundant. Until that point we paid well over the minimum wage but as fixed costs increased the business's ability to pay ahead of the minimum wage waned as profit became non existent through a combination of higher beer supply prices and a huge simultaneous increase in rent and business rates. That being said I know that many people who worked at The Sun and Doves had a different experience to yours slowjoe but since you bring it up I have no doubt that I was distracted and uninterested, I'm sure for a long time. Sorry. Longer serving staff earned more and general staff retention was always consistently well ahead of industry average. When the pub shut, of eleven people we had three staff who worked seven or more years and several others who'd been there for three.

While ringo has had loads of consistently awful experiences along with all his friends who repeatedly were served shit food by shit people who treated him and his mates 'like shit' - well ringo - shit happens - and there were undoubtedly ups and downs over the years. Sorry the pub was not as perfect as you'd expect. But while you went through all that shit there were many more people who had consistently good experiences who were regular and frequent customers. So thanks ringo for inviting an opportunity to respond to your sensitive and insightful overview. Perhaps you will have the opportunity to become a landlord for someone someday. Given your grasp of the property situation you might like to take some hints from the tied pubco handbook.
 
You worked in the service industry. You provided a shit service. You've responded to criticism with insults and sarcasm. Again.
 
i can imagine your very raw about the whole thing and you really believed in your pub so these rough comments will undeniably hurt but (mostly) they are just honest comments about their experiences.

yeah shit happens but try not to be shitty to the people that felt shat on because frankly that would just be shit
 
My sympathies to Mark, but this thread *is* getting a bit Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
 
I have some sympathy for Mark. Rent hikes have been going on in Brixton covered markets as has been discussed here. Also the use of assets to make a short term profit for directors of companies, to the detriment of the long term development of a business, has been happening in other industries.

What I am not comfortable with is the way that those on the shopfloor always lose out - with reduced pay or hours. Employers often say they would like to pay more but its not there fault they cannot. Probably why the minimum wage was brought in. If it was up to business it would never happen.
 
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