Pub division gets own name

Six Continents announced this week that the new name for its pub, bar and restaurant division would be Mitchells & Butlers. The hospitality giant, which itself changed its name from Bass in 2001, has been planning to separate its hotel business from its pub, bar and restaurant division for several months.

The demerger will mean 70 redundancies at Six Continents' Birmingham office, almost all of them non-operational. There will be 20 further jobs lost through "natural wastage".

A spokesman said that the job losses were also a result of cuts in Six Continents' annual capital expenditure on pubs, bars and restaurants - down to £140m for the financial year ending next September, from £227m in 2001/02.

Following the name change, the Mitchells & Butlers division will have more than 2,100 pubs, bars and restaurants, including the All Bar One, Vintage Inns, Toby Carvery and Ember Inns chains.

The Mitchells & Butlers name, which comes from a company that was part of the old Bass empire, will be used from the time of the demerger in April. But it will be a corporate name rather than an operational one, so it won't appear outside the pubs.