I rise to support new clause 2. It was interesting to listen to the hon. Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths) and, for about two and a half seconds, I felt sorry for the pub companies. Are they really the great bastions of competition? No, of course they are not. They have lost the confidence of not only the landlords who are their tenants, but this House of Commons and the general public. That is why I congratulate the Government, particularly the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) and her boss, the Business Secretary, on coming up with the pubs code of conduct and the adjudicator. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) and his predecessors, the various Chairs of the Select Committee, all of whom agreed that change was absolutely necessary. On each of the three occasions we have debated this issue in this House of Commons there has been no vote against the basis of the debate: to ensure that there was change with regard to pub companies and how they treat their tenants.
On the new clause, the market rent only option was central to all those debates and to the reports of the Select Committees, because it highlighted the fact that the pub companies take far too much profit for themselves and leave very little for the tenants who run their pubs. The pub companies charge excessive rents and their beer prices are inflated and, as a result, their landlords are often impoverished. Is that competition? It is a cartel and a monopoly; it is nothing to do with competition—it is all about greed. The key principle outlined by the Select Committee reports and others is that the tied licensee should be no worse off than the licensee who is free of tie. That is central to today’s debate and to the decision this House of Commons must take within the next hour.
There are those who argue that new clause 2 would bring doom and disaster upon the industry, with thousands of people losing their jobs and hundreds upon hundreds of pubs closing. That is all scaremongering; it is all tactics to try to ensure that Government Members and some other Members who feel strongly about these issues should vote in a certain way within the hour. The hon. Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) spoke eloquently, as always, referring to the fact that new clause 2 would mean that the market rent only option would be introduced gradually; it would not suddenly fall upon the pub companies, but would happen in a piecemeal way, bit by bit and with sense.
Secondly, the new clause would not affect small family brewers. As we have all heard, it applies only to companies owning more than 500 public houses. Yet time and again in this debate people have been bringing up the idea that somehow or other companies such as Brains from south Wales, which is active in my constituency, will suddenly disappear from the face of the earth because of new clause 2, which does not affect them.