Pubs Minister encourages campaigners to save their local pubs

Yesterday the Department for Communities & Local Government (DCLG), which amongst other things has responsibility for community pubs, held a seminar in London for community groups who are interested in trying to save their local pubs for their communities - http://sites.google.com/site/thepubinthevillage/3.7.13ListYourLocalMeeting.pdf. As this issue is something that is very dear to The Pub In The Village's heart we went along to see what we could learn.

As there is quite a lot that we can report about this seminar we will post reports of it in bite size chunks over forthcoming days. We will however start by giving a flavour of  what happened yesterday below.

Don Foster MP (below), the Minister for Community Pubs, looking very dapper in his black dinner suit, welcomed us all to the seminar & he proudly pointed out that the Department was fully supportive of campaigns to save their local pubs.

Don Foster, Minister for Community Pubs

The Minister also said that the Department had enabled legislation to be passed that assisted campaigns, such as allowing pubs to be listed by local authorities as assets of community value. Additionally, Don Foster underlined the fact that the Department had made money avaialble as grants & loans for campaigns to access to support their successful purchase of their local pubs.
Tessa Blunden, from the campaign that saved The Ivy House pub in south London for its local community also spoke http://www.ivyhousenunhead.com/.



Tessa Blunden, Ivy House pub, Nunhead, south London

 Tessa spoke passionately about the camapign that had been successfully run within the community in Nunhead, south London, to purchase the pub for the local community. They have done this through bidding for grants which covered the purchase price of over £800,000, as well as issuing shares to raise the additional capital investment that will now allow the pub to soon start trading.

We also heard a great success story from Lance Doughty about the Fleece Inn at Hillesey, in the Cotswolds http://www.thefleeceinnhillesley.com/ where a community campaign led to the pub being saved for its community. Additionally, Stephen Harrod, from the Bull Inn at Great Milton in Oxford spoke about the successful campaign to save the pub for that local community.

The seminar also gave the opportunity for representatives from various organisations that work with campaigns wanting to save their pubs to speak with campaigners. These organisations included -

• Locality http://mycommunityrights.org.uk/.
• CAMRA http://camra.org.uk/
• Community Shares http://communityshares.org.uk/
• The Pub Is The Hub http://pubisthehub.org.uk/



Campaigners discussing their local options

Further detail about the seminar will be included in later postings.