“We’re pleased to welcome Stonegate Pub Partners as a sponsor for the Great British Pub Awards 2026” read a post on the event’s Facebook page. Within minutes it had backfired.
“Must be 1st April again,” said one commenter. “This is like Pontius Pilate being appointed child welfare ambassador,” said another. Other comments about the UK’s largest pub company were significantly less polite.
Days earlier, Stonegate had been named as the subject of an investigation by the industry regulator, the Pubs Code Adjudicator (PCA) over alleged mistreatment of the tenants who run more than 3,000 of its venues.
Melissa Phillips’s father, known locally as “Phil”, was one of them. After taking over a more or less derelict venue in Basingstoke, Hampshire, he renamed it Laarsen’s, an anagram of his beloved Arsenal FC, and turned it into a highly successful football pub that the company cited to trainee publicans as a success story.
But after he began suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s, he lost his ability to keep on top of the business. “He would pay bills twice or not at all and would sometimes fall asleep during meetings with the area sales manager,” said Melissa.
Stonegate knew of his condition from 2022, she claims, yet the process of allowing him to exit the tenancy agreement dragged on until 2024, weighing him down with added stress and financial burdens.
“The whole process ruined him,” said Melissa. “They robbed us of the last two good years we had with him.”
As part of the agreement that eventually allowed Phil to exit the tenancy, Stonegate agreed to fund some repairs but said he owed £89,500 in “dilapidations” – costs relating to building damage – as well as trade debt and rent.
Melissa said much of this debt was amassed during a period in which Stonegate knew her father no longer had the capacity to make financial decisions.
Earlier this year, a survey of pub tenants by the PCA found that Stonegate, which also owns the Slug & Lettuce, Be At One and Walkabout chains, was considered by tenants to be by far the worst large company to lease a pub from.
It scored a satisfaction rating of 39%. The next worst was Punch Pubs, with a rating of 55%, while Admiral Taverns and Greene King scored 72% and 71%, respectively.
The criticism comes as the company wrestles with a £3.8bn debt pile, mostly racked up when it bought Enterprise Inns for £3bn just before the pandemic in 2019, taking on thousands of tenanted pubs in the process.
Stonegate is domiciled in the Cayman Islands and ultimately owned by TDR Capital, a private equity firm that is also the majority owner of Asda. The pub group has lost £650m in the past three years but in June it reported its strongest first-half profits ever, saying adjusted earnings were up from £17m to £201m in the 28 weeks to 12 April.
However, the company has struggled to shake off complaints about its behaviour in “tied” tenancies, complex agreements under which businesses such as Stonegate lease the premises to a publican.
Under these deals the publican is meant to receive benefits such as a lower rent and support with repairs and upkeep in exchange for buying certain products – most notably beer – exclusively from the pub company. In theory everyone wins.
In practice, tenant publicans and their loved ones say they have been left severely out of pocket and mentally exhausted by their interactions with Stonegate.
The Guardian has spoken to more than 10 pub landlords who claim to have suffered poor treatment by the company. Some were unable to tell their full story, saying they had signed non-disclosure agreements with the company. Others simply wanted to avoid further stress.
The tenant of the Black Horse Inn, Chester Le Street, and the Nine Pins, Gateshead, said he and his wife were “relentlessly pursued” by Stonegate after he had to close the two pubs when she was diagnosed with cancer.
Stonegate is understood to believe it had little choice after attempts to recover a £77,000 debt were unsuccessful.
But the former tenant said the company had “ruined” the couple, who requested not to be named, including instructing bailiffs to visit their home, which he said risked disrupting his wife’s care.
In a letter to Stonegate’s debt recovery team, seen by the Guardian, he wrote: “There are absolutely zero assets available for seizure, making physical enforcement completely futile while remaining highly dangerous to my wife’s health.”
Stonegate told the Guardian the terms of its agreements with tenants meant that “our interests are directly aligned”.
“The reality is that we are investing record amounts in our properties, tenant applications are at record highs, and publican tenures are at record lengths.”
However, some tenants spoke of being saddled with huge repair bills by the terms of their contracts, or of the company dragging its feet when it was contractually supposed to perform the work.
Richard Martin, former tenant of the Museum Street Tavern in York, said Stonegate’s failure to carry out repairs to the pub’s dwelling in time for the wet winter period exposed his twin daughters to black mould for several months before the problem was eventually fixed.
Rachael Maskell, the Labour and Co-operative MP for York Central, who has intervened on behalf of Stonegate tenants before, wants to see total reform of the tied tenancy system, rather than individual investigations such as the one that the PCA is now carrying out into Stonegate.
“It’s a feudal relationship at best,” she said. “It entraps you into a financial loss situation, where you cannot make the best of your business but you’re tied to a failed business model.”
Stonegate said it was “cooperating fully and constructively with the PCA.
“Should the investigation identify any areas where we need to make operational improvements, we will act to implement them immediately. Isolated case studies do not represent the success of our broader estate.”
