Gerry Cott speaks out

Gerry Cott was a founder member, with Bob Geldof, of the Boomtown Rats. He gave up the life of a pop star and almost accidentally fell into a career as an animal behaviourist and animal filming consultant. His clients including 20th Century Fox, Disney, BBC, ITV, CH4 and many international advertising brands. He lives with his wife, Cathy, and their children in a Surrey village.

A comfortable, pleasant life you might think but the idyll was shattered by the noise coming from the local pub which is right next to the Cotts house. It is easy to think of the problem of alcohol-related nuisance being an urban phenomenon and it may be that the majority of trouble is experienced in inner cities but increasingly the by-products of the binge drinking culture are being felt in the countryside.

Gerry Cott had never particularly thought about alcohol policy and its effect on the everyday life of the citizen but, in launching into a campaign to deal with the problem in his own Surrey village, he quickly became wellinformed on the subject and an articulate and tireless critic of the corporate might of the drink industry.

“I’ve lived adjacent to a pub in the past. It was well-run and there was no issue but this particular pub was run as a cheap beer, bottom of the barrel operation. It was cheap and cheerful with lots of promotions. It’s what they call a value outlet allowing huge amounts of alcohol to be consumed on the premises. The manager gets a very attractive bonus if he meets ever increasing targets.

The owners of this pub in my village, Greene King, if a manger was not meeting his target for so many weeks, he was sent a warning letter. Get two of them and you might be out, losing your home. So the standards of what is appropriate and what is not get blurred.”

In conversation with the editor of Alert, Gerry Cott shared his thoughts on the problems alcohol causes in the community: “What we are seeing is corporate bullying and greed at the expense of the nation’s living environment. I thinks that’s a key issue. Many people see a few drunks getting sick and urinating all over the place and they think that’s the beginning and end of it. I see the problem in a different light.”

Cott quickly came to the view that the problem has to be addressed from the top, in the boardrooms of the brewers and drink companies, not from the bottom, where those drunks are. He speculated that in many ways what we are seeing is a legacy of the Thatcher years, which he characterised as the “I’m going to get mine” culture. “So how does binge drinking occur?” asks Cott. “It happens from the top down. It’s a matter of investment and return in the form of profit.

“If you’re in the boardroom you’re looking at the market in purely market terms. You’re looking at your level of turnover and at the opportunities. Those opportunities are there for the taking because there’s a captive audience out there that will go bananas for two for one or happy hours or “as much as you can drink” offers. At first when I became involved I didn’t get it but you have to remember that in the big pub companies the pressure is on the house managers and area managers. If they raise their profits the package they get is very attractive, but if they don’t then it is punitive.”

Cott goes on to point out that the big operators are funded by the big banking and
insurance houses. “All the boys are in there because they are making something like 22 or 23 per cent on their investment. Unbelievable profits!”

Gerry Cott at first met with indifference when he tried to deal with the alcohol-related nuisance near his home. His councillor said, “Well, Greene King are very powerful.” The local policeman comforted Cott with the thought that the situation was much worse in Guildford.

“Over the years I think we wrote about a hundred and fifty letters to David McCall, CBE, the Chairman of Greene King. Not one reply so I started to write to David McCall but copying the letters to the chairman of ACPO [Association of Chief Police Officers], the Home Office, the DCMS, and to the Chief Constable of Surrey. Finally Greene King sent an operations director to my home and I showed him all the stuff I had taken from the street – the broken bottles and the rest – and eventually, very slowly they begin to take action. This is after three years. I was told by a senior manager at Greene King that most people just give up. He was looking me straight in the face when he said this and that’s when I realised that how much I had always disliked bullies. They’re just the same as bullies in the playground but they grow up and become bullies in the boardroom.”

By sticking to his guns and by thorough research, Cott came to understand how corporate alcohol works. He looked at the investors in Greene King, finding that they have been lent £1.2 billion by Lloyds TSB, the most recent tranche being £650 million to buy another 435 pubs.

“Once you get your eye in you begin to understand what’s going on” says Cott. “Greene King have decided that it’s a bit hot in the High Street so they’re expanding in the suburbs.

“Then I wrote to all the major investors [in Greene King] – Legal and General, Scottish Widows, Merrill Lynch. It turns out that all these very respectable financial institutions make great play of their ethical investment policies but, despite that, they are happy to fund a sector of business in the UK that is turning our streets into Armageddon.”

Cott and his wife bought some shares in Greene King which allowed them to attend an extraordinary general meeting to approve the purchase of 435 pubs for that £650 million.

Attending the Greene King’s 2004 AGM, when the chairman uttered those magic “AGM Words” ‘has anybody any questions’ Cott says

“I stand up and ask, ‘Do you have a corporate responsibility policy around the running of your business?’ David McCall CBE looked at me as though I was totally mad. He didn’t understand what I was getting at. He waved his hand at me in a dismissive, squirish way. Well, that’s how it still is in part of the pub industry. The lords of the manor, the big groups, and the serfs, the managers and the local authorities. It’s very feudal.”

Cott came to the view that Big Alcohol, and by Big Alcohol he means the part of the Alcohol business that exercises no social responsibility in its business operations, is not looking at social consequences but at the sales and profit targets year on year.

“They’re looking at return on investments – so bullying here in the boardroom is at its most pervasive
level.”

According to Cott, Big Alcohol is a greater threat than the drug barons. Like others before him, he was quick to spot the connection between the rave culture of the eighties, with the proliferation of drugs such as ecstasy and amphetamines, and the alcohol industry’s promotion of alcopops, designer drinks, and the habit of drinking shots of spirits. This was a calculated tactic to appeal to a generation which was threatening to look at other sources than alcohol for excitement and that was why the drink industry played to the psychoactive element of its new products.

Gerry Cott was led into the field of alcohol policy by the particular difficulties he was facing in his home. In the process he was led to conclusions about the problems posed by the industry to society
in general.

“Tony Blair says binge drinking is the new British Disease”. “Wrong Tony”, says Cott! “Government sponsored corporate greed from Big Alcohol is the new British Disease – Binge drinking is just a symptom of that disease. Think again Tony, before you destroy the country!”