A pint-sized problem

Published on Saturday 5 January 2008 21:39

AS THE phone crackled into life, the sound of clinking glasses was clearly audible in the background.

I explained to the manager of the James Watt pub in Greenock that I was a father thinking of coming in for a meal but wanted to bring my kids with me. Would that be a problem? What restrictions are there? "Restrictions? Whaddya mean?" he replied, slightly nonplussed.

"Won't I be chucked out if I want to have a couple of drinks, even soft drinks, after my meal?" I asked, following the news that the JD Wetherspoon pub chain had decided to eject parents after their second post-lunch beer. "Er, no, you can drink as many soft drinks or coffees as you want, or a couple of beers. It's just that we expect families with kids to leave half an hour or so after the meal has finished, before their kids get bored."

In the end I decided not to force my progeny to sample the delights of the James Watt, my local branch of Wetherspoons. In the interests of research, I did, however, pop down there on Friday night to gauge whether it would have been a child-friendly experience.

Packed with folk pouring cut-price, designer lager down their gullets, it quickly became apparent that no parent in their right mind would take even the most delinquent 13-year-old near the place of an evening.

I collared several drinkers and all seemed fairly bemused when asked whether they thought parents should be able to drink while letting their kids wander free in this establishment. "No, of course not," said Claire, a nurse from Port Glasgow, who seemed to have a distinctly unhealthy interest in what looked like a fluorescent pint of Bacardi Breezer. "What sort of parent would sit around blethering when their kids are running around a bar with nothing to do but annoy folk?"

A chat with a tattooed man who preferred to remain nameless was more to the point. "Kids? f****** hate 'em."

Unscientific, perhaps, but my Friday night experience suggested Wetherspoons may be right to suggest that its customers don't want children invading their precious drinking space. Kids eating lunch with their parents may be acceptable, but even then, drinkers tolerate rather than embrace their presence.

And for many parents, the issue isn't one of how much you can drink, but of feeling relaxed and wanted. "If we go out with the kids at lunchtime, one of us might have a beer or glass of wine if the other is driving," says company director Alan Cunningham from Gourock, "but we're never going to get plastered in front of the kids.

"After my meal, I like to enjoy a couple of cups of coffee or a soft drink and would like to think I could sit there as long as I wanted without being moved on."

The Wetherspoon row blew up last week when customer Stephen Gandy complained that his local, in Wallasey on Merseyside, had told him he could only have two alcoholic drinks when he was in for a meal with his family. The firm, which has 700 UK pubs, 38 of them north of the border, was accused of nannying its customers.

In fact, JD Wetherspoon has a track record of being in front of the curve on many of the issues that have affected the licensed trade. Its pubs went smoke-free almost a year before the cigarette ban came into effect in England, and they are almost unique in accepting euros. Before Jamie Oliver hit our screens, Wetherspoon already offered bags of grapes and fruit juice with every child's meal to encourage healthy eating, and banned preservatives, sugar and artificial flavours or colours. So will it prove to be ahead of the game on parental drinks limits too?

"We don't have a moral stance on kids being in pubs, we just don't want them hanging around to the point where they get bored and annoy our other customers," the group's spokesman Eddie Gershon said yesterday. "The only reason we allow kids to come into our pubs is to eat our food: families tend to come at lunchtime when it's quieter, and it's a good way of introducing kids to the pub environment so they become tomorrow's customers."

Of course, Wetherspoons is in business to make money (62m last year), not to act as a social arbiter. But perhaps we should be asking ourselves whether, in a country where binge drinking is so out of control the number of deaths from cirrhosis of the liver has quadrupled among men in the past 50 years, we really want our children to be introduced to pubs at a young age?

Or whether, when the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they had drunk alcohol in the past week is double the figure claimed in 1990, and the number of alcohol-related deaths in Scotland is running at six per day, we really need to fight for the right to lead tomorrow's horses to water?

According to Alcohol Focus Scotland, that's exactly what we do need to do. If we are to break the cycle of destructive binge drinking, it argues, we must take our kids to places where we can show them how to drink responsibly, as is more common in parts of continental Europe.

"This is about responsible parenting," said the charity's chief executive Jack Law, as he explained why he condoned parents giving their child a "very, very" small glass of alcohol in the right context, such as a dinner party. "People obviously enjoy drinking but they need to do it in a responsible fashion and show children how to drink responsibly."

That remains a controversial view. Australian expert Dr John Tambourou, from the Centre for Adolescent Health, whose worldwide study on the prevalence of binge drinking, found that the earlier parents introduced their children to alcohol, the worse the effects, said: "Binge drinking in later life is partly to do with an earlier age of initiation to alcohol. Parents want to introduce alcohol to their children in an attempt to get them to be more moderate drinkers later on, and I think that it's being done for the very best of reasons, but the high rates of binge drinking show it's not having the effect parents desire."

Tambourou stresses the need for parents to introduce their children to alcohol by demonstrating how to drink responsibly rather than allowing kids to actually try alcohol. It is a line of thinking backed by virtually every professional in the field.

Studies in America have shown that despite a legal drinking age of 21, three quarters of children are regularly drinking alcohol by the time they are 17. The message is that, while the younger children are introduced to drink the more likely it is that they will become heavy drinkers later in life, in practice you can't stop teenagers drinking – the numbers swigging Buckfast and Strongbow in our parks proves that – so the main defence remains the inculcation of good habits via parents.

So there we have it: Wetherspoons may be free-market buccaneers pandering to their kiddie-averse regulars while screwing a few quid out of hungry families, but they are also unwittingly showing the way ahead in the fight against alcoholic excess by ensuring that parents with kids drink responsibly under their roof.

That's surely something we should all be able to raise a glass to – though Cunningham wonders if Wetherspoon's two-drink parental policy might be tested by some pretty tough new licensing restrictions due to come into existence in Scotland later this year.

"I think we're going to see a big change with the new laws on happy hours and drink discounting, which come in this year and will mean that even pubs like Wetherspoons, which tend to go for volume, will have to chase the family market. Whether or not they'll stick to this policy will be interesting."