What’s Brewing is highlighting key moments from Members’ Weekend 2026, in St Albans.
Watch CAMRA chairman Ash Corbett-Collins’ (above) speech here:
Read it here:
Good morning Conference,
It feels like more than a year since I gave my speech in Torquay. It’s been a year of great challenges and changes, and that includes this weekend itself.
I need to start by thanking the local team, led by Emily Ryans, for hosting us. They didn’t ask for the job, and they’ve really risen to the challenge.
Where we didn’t have space for a large Members’ Bar or fringe meeting rooms, they’ve knocked it out of the park and put on a city-wide festival of beer and pubs. Not just for us, but for the whole city.
This isn’t a one off.
This is what I want the organisers of our future Members’ Weekends to aspire to.
Yes, we have important business, best-practice sharing and training that we want to complete. We also want to present awards, catch up with old friends, and take part in scrutiny of decisions and development of policy.
But we also don’t exist in a bubble.
Our Members’ Weekend coming to your town should be exciting. Something that’ll advertise us to the wider public, give local pubs and brewers a boost and recruit some new members. That’s what the City of Ale festival does and it’s something to keep doing as Members’ Weekend evolves.
You will also notice that we’ve made some changes to our schedule. Hopefully we’re all aware that it’s Sunday today, when I’d usually speak to you on Saturday. We wrapped up our debate on motions in just one session yesterday. That was the direct result of feedback about how you want our weekend schedule to run.
And expect more changes for next year. We’re looking at other ways to make Members’ Weekend more inclusive, more engaging and more democratic.
If that’s something you have experience of, there’s new volunteer opportunities coming that you should definitely apply for.
We’re also going to see some changes on the National Executive. In a few short hours the formal terms for Nick, Gary and Laura will be over, and we’ll be welcoming three fresh faces to our ranks.
Nick Boley has been on the National Executive for the whole of my tenure, and I’ll miss the stability of his presence and his sage advice from over the years. He’s measured and focussed, exemplary of his background as a scientist, and it’s an important skill for a director of a company.
I’ve known Gary Timmins for as long as I’ve been a CAMRA member. Whether you’ve met him before or this is your first time, he’s always smiling, friendly and cracking a joke or five. While the National Executive is serious business, it’s important to remember the value of the personal relationships and friendships you make along the way. Gary reminds us of that, and I’m sure he’ll keep doing that for years to come.
Laura Emson is a force to be reckoned with. When some people see an issue in CAMRA, they stand on the sidelines and shout. Laura saw something she wanted to change and stood for election, took the portfolio and rose to the challenge. That’s the attitude and approach that we need at all levels of the Campaign.
All three of them have made their mark. I want to thank them for their service, and I’m excited to see what they do next, whether in CAMRA or lending their talents to something completely different.
And now I want to welcome our new board members, elected yesterday.
Being a director is one of the more challenging roles in CAMRA. It’s not a drinking club and it isn’t just a natural progression of volunteering for us.
I think the best advice I can give to our incoming members is not to underestimate the role.
There's a steep learning curve. Steeper than I expected when I joined the board.
It's about making difficult decisions, unpopular decisions sometimes.
Having to work collegiately for the good of the Campaign.
There’s little glory in the role. It’s a legal responsibility and, with it, the duty of care to our current members and the need to hand over the organisation better than you found it to the next generation.
So, Dale, Dennis and Steven, I’m looking forward to getting to know you better and to getting to work.
As your board of directors, we’ve got a pivotal year ahead.
The last year has been tough for all of us.
I know that I speak for the rest of the board, when I say that we have felt the duty to deliver the right outcomes for you, our volunteers.
We faced difficult times and had to make hard, but necessary, decisions, not least a staff restructure that resulted in redundancies for a significant number of people.
We made central efforts to focus our campaigning and make savings.
We asked you, as volunteers and branches, to make pragmatic changes to help us.
We remain hugely appreciative of your efforts, which have made a real difference. Thank you.
We have made changes to correct our course, to set responsible budgets for the year ahead, and as we look forward, we’ve set a new strategic framework for us all.
Yesterday, you heard from me and Tom, our chief executive, about our new strategic framework for the next three years. We’ll also be touching on that as part of the Q&A session directly after this.
The board’s job over the next year is to implement this strategy and make sure that you – our campaigners – are supported to do that too.
I know I said it yesterday, but it’s definitely worth repeating.
We have designed this framework to empower you.
To give you the structures to choose your local campaigns, implement them, and review them.
To keep us on track to achieve our long-established vision and objectives.
To make clear that we’re all responsible for campaigning and that we’re focussing our time and efforts for the best possible impact.
Before this weekend, I looked back on my speech to you last year.
I talked about us being more focused. I talked about zeroing in on the issues where our campaigning will have the most impact and recruit the most people to join us.
I talked about being clear in our message and bold in our language.
Our new strategy drives that.
And first and foremost, it helps you and future members do those things I spoke about last year.
Despite all the challenges we’ve been through in the 12 months since, what I said still rings true.
If we are asking you to volunteer hours of your time to run your branch, put on festivals and celebrate beer and pubs, we’ve failed if you’re not having a good time doing it.
As your National Executive, we’ll focus on keeping our finances in order and we need you to focus on campaigning, having fun, and getting people to join us.
The strategy gives you the power to do this, to focus on building those social interactions with potential members, to activate them and encourage them to become fellow campaigners.
And our national committees and our regions will be taking the fight to governments across the UK.
Threats to pubs and to independent brewers are as evident as ever before, and we’ll be choosing our battles carefully, and then going at them full force with passion, with focus, and with the same tenacity as our founding members did.
It’s been another pivotal and challenging year for pubs and brewers.
I feel like every year the chairman stands up and says this, but it’s true.
That we keep saying it, and that it keeps being the case, shows the utterly amazing resilience of publicans and brewers to keep going, and of you, in this hall and watching at home, to keep campaigning.
But that still doesn’t make it fair.
And that’s all that licensees and independent brewers are asking for – a fair playing field.
It’s not fair to promise permanently lower business rates for pubs and then create a system that needs an emergency relief to cap increases.
It’s not fair to commit to protecting pubs in the planning system and then propose changes that make it harder for people to object to demolition or conversion.
And it’s not fair that global brewers have a stranglehold on the UK beer market that prevents independent brewers from getting their beers into pubs.
But that’s the situation that we find ourselves in. While we’ve known for years that global brewers dominate the market, the planning and business rates proposals were more recent decisions from government that we clearly needed to rally against.
We did it swiftly and it is delivering results.
We are angry, but we are also working methodically.
We have a plan to harness that anger and direct it at decision makers.
That plan means that thousands of us have already emailed our MPs.
That plan means that we’ve placed stories in leading news outlets.
That plan means that MPs are raising the issues with ministers and that plan means we’ve already got a commitment to look again at business rates.
And thanks to that plan, we know the next steps.
We need to secure the U-turn on those planning changes in England.
We need to engage with as many candidates in the Welsh and Scottish parliamentary elections as possible.
We need to make sure the new devolved governments expect a knock on the door and a serious conversation about planning protections.
We’re still a formidable campaigning force recognised by government and decision shapers. Our collective power still sways people and makes a difference.
It can be so easy to look around and find the negatives, the despair, and the things that are bad – whether in CAMRA or the wider beer and pub world.
And don’t get me wrong, there are significant campaigning challenges that we need to rise to.
But we must also remember that we are a campaigning force and, if we work together, we can change things.
And there are many things we do and new things we are trying, that deliver real benefits for consumers and for the trade.
I often hear the question “what is the point of CAMRA”?
The answers to that question are often deeply personal, depending on who you’re asking.
And that’s the great thing about being part of a big campaigning group.
It means we get diversity of thought and passionate debate about how we do things.
It means we’re tenacious and also stubborn.
It also means that we’ve enjoyed longevity beyond many of the brewers and pub companies we’ve supported and fought.
We’re the people that championed the concept of beer festivals, and we’ll keep doing that through the free entry offer and for the first time this year, our own TV advert.
We’re the people that took the fight to supermarkets and developers and got planning safeguards for pubs in England.
And we’re the people that call out the globals when we see them damaging our brewing heritage and misleading consumers.
And we’ll work together to achieve that.
Taking our headline campaigns and translating them locally and taking the best ideas from branches and pushing them out on a national scale.
Just like our Cornwall branch did this year when Molson Coors closed Sharps.
And just like how Derby branch did, working with Baggy Shanker MP to secure a debate on protecting cask beer in the House of Commons.
All grassroots campaigning, working in tune with the national, delivering real results.
I recently read Christopher Hutt’s Death of the English Pub. It was written in 1972, which should hopefully come as no surprise that it was well before my time.
At first, I was disheartened about talk of pubs being closed, cask lines being ripped out, local and regional brewers being bought and folded into the corporate machine by growing national brewers. It all felt very familiar.
But then I realised that, actually, a lot of what threatened to pass had been averted. There are more independent brewers today than there were in the 1970s.
Hardworking and knowledgeable publicans weren’t entirely replaced by corporate managers.
Cask beer did not go extinct. It showed what can be achieved when we recognise a problem and fight against it.
And it made me think about CAMRA, what we’re about, and what we’ve achieved in the years since.
And we’ve gone on to achieve a lot more. For cask beer, for pubs and for beer drinkers.
If the question is “what is the point of CAMRA?" then for me, the answer has to be how we stopped the Doomsday scenario in the 1970s, and how we will stop the threats to independent beer and pubs in 2026.
So, that’s what we designed the new strategy to do.
And it’s now up to all of us to rise to that challenge.
We’ve got the people power, we’ve got endless enthusiasm and experience at our disposal, and now we’ve got the framework to get us focussed.
And the next bit is on us – all of us – to achieve those goals.
It means championing our regional festivals and showcasing CAMRA to our next generation of members.
It means our national committees leading our top-level campaigns.
It means everyone going back to their branch renewed, motivated and ready to recruit more members.
It means the same CAMRA – tenacious, stubborn and determined – taking the fight to the global brewers in the next year and beyond.
It means every one of us, in this hall or online, playing our part.
Thank you.
