Pubs and Planning Legislation

It is a pleasure to be working with my hon. Friend again, and I am delighted that we have secured this debate. I shall not go into the huge amount of bureaucracy and enormous costs involved in the Government’s very partial solution, but does she share my concern that a lot of right hon. and hon. Members seem not to understand that many of the pubs that are being lost, by being turned into supermarkets and so on without the need for planning permission, are in many cases not only viable but trading profitably at the time? This is predatory purchasing; it is not a change of market. Those pubs are not failing.