Serial entrepreneur Luke Johnson demanded wholesale change to relations between landlords and tenants in his keynote BCSC speech.
Johnson, who founded Strada and built Pizza Express, warned of ongoing disruption to the UK retail environment and accused landlords of intransigence.
Demanding an end to upwards-only rent reviews, a switch to monthly rents and transparent service charges, Johnson said: “The current landlord-tenant adversarial model is broken. There will be many more insolvencies unless landlords compromise. We need to avoid a spiral of decline.
“If there isn’t wholesale change in some of the golden rules of the property industry, we can only expect relentless difficulties.”
He also warned that landlords were taking too big a slice of tenants’ profits. “When I started in restaurants and retail, you were able to make twice what the landlord was making and that seems to have reversed,” he said.
