The NHS has been top of the political agenda at both the Labour and Conservative party conferences. Labour has promised to set aside resources to pay for more doctors and nurses; and the Conservatives to ring-fence NHS funding for the next parliament, if re-elected. In the financial year 2014-2015 the NHS is budgeted to spend £114.7bn. For bemused middle-class tax payers, who support the NHS and rely on it, and who pay the lion’s share of this cost, but wonder whether this is a bottomless pit into which their money is poured with precious little oversight, I have some bad news.

 

It was reported in the Daily Telegraph (03/09/14) that the national health watchdog, NICE, (the National Institute of Clinical Excellence) has plans to tackle alcohol misuse by the mass medication of middle-class drinkers who are “mild alcoholics” with a drug called nalmefene which purportedly suppresses the desire to drink alcohol. So what is a “mild alcoholic”? Apparently, if you are a woman who drinks two large glasses of wine a night, or a man drinking three pints of session beer a night, you are classed by the Lifestyle Police as demonstrating a mild dependence on alcohol.

 

The plan is for GPs to routinely ask patients about their alcohol consumption, regardless of the reason why the patient has attended the surgery. In order to qualify for treatment with nalmefene, also known by its trade name, Selincro, a male drinker would need to be consuming 7.5 units of alcohol a day, which is the equivalent of three pints of beer with an ABV of 4.4%; a female drinker would qualify for treatment if she drank five units a day, which is the equivalent of 375 ml of wine with an ABV of 12.5%. The “patient” (who isn’t ill with an alcohol-related condition) would then be given two weeks to cut down their drinking, and, if they fail to do so, would be offered the drug. Some 750,000 people are estimated to be drinking at this level. The cost of dispensing this drug is estimated at £288m a year. The tablets cost £3 each, which equates to dispensing 76 million tablets a year. But potentially, the cost could increase to £819m a year, if more members of the worried well are frightened into believing they have a problem. And this is for people who are not ill as a result of their drinking and have no symptoms of alcohol misuse!

 

Jackie Ballard, the new chief executive of Alcohol Concern said this: “It is important that there are a variety of treatments available to support people who want help with their alcohol dependency. The introduction of nalmefene will be a useful addition to the clinician’s toolbox, when used in conjunction with other treatment methods to tackle the harmful consequences of alcohol misuse.” Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? Lundbeck, the Danish company that owns nalmefene/Selincro, has previously contributed to the cost of Alcohol Concern’s research, and this year has sponsored its annual conference. Quid pro quo, as they say.

 

So, what do we know about nalmefene/Selincro? According to Biotie Therapies, the Finnish company which developed the drug: “Alcohol dependence is a brain disease with a high probability of following a progressive course” (which, roughly translated, means “get worse”). Biotie Therapies states that “Selincro is a small opioid receptor modulator that inhibits the reward pathway in the brain that reinforces the desire for alcohol and other addictive substances.” Lundbeck has paid Biotie Therapies €12m for the manufacturing and development rights to Selincro, and a further upfront payment of €54m as a sales milestone payment. So, for an upfront investment of €6m, it will recoup between £250m and just short of £1bn a year. What a fantastic return on investment!

 

The implications of offering this treatment is that NHS doctors are now invited to agree that drinking three pints of beer or two large glasses of wine a night is symptomatic of a “brain disease” which thereby justifies medication. Regular drinkers may be surprised to hear this! The way nalmefene/Selincro works relies on the drinker taking a tablet every time they feel the impulse to drink alcohol, and this wonder drug will then suppress their brain’s ability to generate a dopamine hit and thus dampen down the desire to have more than one drink. But if you feel the desire to drink why would you then decide to take a tablet that suppresses this desire? Only because you have been worried by your doctor into thinking that your desire for a beer or a glass of wine is symptomatic of a brain disease. What a shocking waste of money.

Who is the second largest managed operator in the sector? It’s Greene King, surely, with just over 1,000 managed pubs? But every table you see on the size and scale of the managed sector tends to overlook one obvious player – although for perhaps understandable reasons. Recently, our overlooked company added 44 sites when it was called in by Deloitte to run the Rileys Sports Bar business in administration. A year earlier, its estate was swollen by the addition of the 176-strong Bramwell Pub Company for a while, when it took over management of the company on behalf of Zolfo Cooper when it entered administration.

 

LT Pub Management (a legacy name that fails to reflect the breadth of its work) has emerged over the past half-decade under the leadership of Billy Buchanan as a company that is hard to pigeon-hole. It has evolved into a kind of sector all-rounder, a sweeper in footballing parlance, offering the kind of skills and services that plugs gaps for banks, administrators and asset owners in the broader sense, often operating upwards of a thousand different types of asset within the sector.

 

Its work on behalf of administrators and banks is part of the company’s portfolio of skills, involving the flexibility and scale to take over large numbers of sites at relatively short notice, securing premises within hours of administration, stabilising performance and ensuring the protection of valuable assets to ensure maximum sale price can be achieved for creditors.

 

But the company is also unusual in working across different types of assets, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, as well as pubs, often on long-term contracts. Its little-known long-term contract to provide out-sourced management and back office services for the 71-strong Little Chef estate and 41 co-located Burger Kings was, arguably, instrumental in allowing the estate’s private equity owner, RCapital, to achieve the relatively handsome price of £15m from its sale to the Kuwait-based Kout Group, more money than many thought it was possible to achieve from the sale.

 

LT reported on its 2013 trading year in June, and its figures, based largely on charging management fees to run assets, indicated the strength of demand for its services. Turnover increased 5.3% to £25.58m in the year to 29 December 2013, from £24.29m the year before. Operating profit before depreciation and amortisation rose 28% to £565,000 from £440,000 in the previous year. Pre-tax profit climbed to £407,000 from £263,000 in 2012.

 

The company is based on the outskirts of Attleborough, a village in Norfolk, with a head office staff of around 60. The very rural location, with lower rents and rates, seems like a piece of competitive advantage in terms of being able to offer best-price out-sourced back office management support. It is an under-explored area in sector terms.

 

I remember sector veteran Ted Kennedy arguing a decade ago that many small and medium-sized companies could save money by out-sourcing large tracts of expensive in-house support. The Walkabout operator Intertain is one sector company that has chosen to take this sensible route and entrust back-office and IT support to LT, after LT undertook a procurement review on Intertain’s behalf, using its buying scale to benchmark and secure best-value buying terms. “Our scale means we achieve extremely good buying terms,” Buchanan said in June.

 

The company also expanded into Ireland in 2013 and now operates a number of assets on behalf of a variety of owners. It reported in June that it was widening the sectors in which it operates, as the back office, accounting and IT services provided by LT are applicable to other business types.

 

But the leisure sector seems ripe for LT to take a broader role in the coming years. As fresh investors arrive, there is obvious demand for a management solution that provides expertise but avoids the cost involved in running a head office and recruiting a new management team. You can imagine other businesses increasingly looking for out-sourced and lower-cost management solutions and support in what is the most competitive period in the sector ever. 

Street food used to be about the home-spun and the home-made. It made a virtue of its amateurishness. Not any more. It’s hot. It’s WHITE hot. And it’s attracting big money. Since the 2014 British Street Food Awards in September, three traders (that we know of) have been approached for talks with big finance about franchising. And one of the major supermarkets has approached a trader about getting the first street food brand onto the supermarket shelves. The home-spun and the home-made are now big business.

Street food offers big business access to a different demographic. The children of the revolution are young, urban style setters from Generation Y, and they are all about tapas and tasting menus – they find the whole starter-main course-dessert thing rather old fashioned. They like the idea that the trappings of a dining room are negotiable. Which is why they are all about pop-up restaurants, supper clubs and street food.

 

And that is why British Land, the largest listed retail landlord in the UK, with locations that attract more than 300 million visits each year, wanted in. The company doesn’t have enough food and beverage on its sites, and it saw how street food could offer a solution. It is the latest leg in the street food revolution, and this time we are bringing quality street food to retail parks. It makes sense: it’s young, it’s cool, and, served out of customised vans, trucks and trailers, it’s exciting. And it’s not just for the cool kids any more. 

 

In a bold new venture, British Land asked British Street Food to recruit the very best traders for its Eats From The Street roadshow. Starting on 4-5 October and running every weekend until Christmas, we are putting traders in retail parks in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Chester and Stockton-on-Tees – and feeding a whole new crowd. We are bringing the bunting, the fairy lights and the festoons. We’re even bringing a converted double-decker bus for a bit of a sit-down if the weather turns nippy. It will be fun – if the average punter is prepared to pay more than for a Greggs sausage roll.

Retail parks do not have a reputation for food: coffee maybe, and a doughnut shop with sandwiches. But in an effort to provide their customers with more of “an experience”, and increase the time they spend on site, it makes sense to try and change that. And at Glasgow, Edinburgh, Teesside and Chester, they’ve got the space. If this pilot scheme works, British Land will be able to feed its customers in an exciting and flexible way, and roll it out round the UK. Win win.

Then there is the drive to put street food indoors. It began with Trinity Kitchen in Leeds, which just celebrated its first birthday. Trinity Kitchen has done more than provide shelter for traders in the winter. It has started to create new stars of its own. Rola Wala, for instance, set the standard against which all other street food traders in Trinity Kitchen still measure themselves. And it has a product – Indian street food with a bold, fresh twist — that is truly different. 

 

So when a permanent position came up in Trinity Kitchen, it decided to move from London to Leeds to make it happen. This month, the Rola Wala restaurant opens. It is the first in a new wave of street food traders going into bricks and mortar, and comes a few months before three traders open up franchises in Euston Station, London, with a handful of others looking at crowd-funding to finance their moves onto the high street.

 

The Guardian has suggested this is the beginning of the end. On the contrary, we see it as the end of the beginning. Why should street food traders not be allowed to make money out of their businesses, their ideas? Why should they have to stay working on the streets, in just the one van, because it suits someone else’s world-view? Rola Wala won’t give up the streets, and Rola Wala the restaurant will be a massive success. The heart of the new operation will be a Robata Mega Flame Grill – they could never cook on something like that outdoors. Plus Rola Wala has put together a new menu, including the vegan channa dal felafel, which is part of a range of new rolls set to ignite Leeds. One informs the other. The two approaches to food-service are not mutually exclusive.