Licence to kill hope of reform
We mustn't waste this once-in-a-lifetime chance to update our confusing, archaic licensing laws, argues Stephen Moss.
Having spent several hours studying the Government's draft instructions on the future Alcohol & Entertainment Bill, we find the proposals to be hugely disappointing in that they have fundamentally failed to adopt the modern and radical approach to reform that had been foreshadowed in the White Paper.
This would be a huge missed opportunity that, if implemented as proposed, would do little or nothing to encourage flexibility in licensing hours and is highly unlikely to bring in the modern, European-style eating and drinking patterns that the UK needs to adopt if we are to enhance our competitiveness as a tourist destination.
Equally seriously, it proposes a regime for the new Personal and Premises Licences that is unnecessarily bureaucratic and, if anything, produces more regulation rather than less.
In particular, the new Personal Licence would not be as portable as had been intended, because the transfer system would involve a far more complex procedure than the simple "notification of a change in licensee" that had been so warmly welcomed by all concerned.
Perhaps most worrying of all is that local authorities, as the new licensing bodies, will be asked to produce a local licensing policy that is almost bound to re-create just the same lack of uniformity in approach that is at the heart of the current system's failings.
It will be critical that national guidelines insist that such local policies are tightly constrained to ensure that there is a positive duty to grant the consent requested, and that conditions are only imposed to the extent necessary to achieve the three objectives of the new regime - to protect the public from crime and disorder, to assure public safety, and to minimise nuisance and disturbance to the public.
And though we could list many other shortcomings, we are very concerned indeed that there is no guarantee that existing hours enjoyed by restaurants and pubs under current licences will be safeguarded when these establishments apply for the new-style Premises Licence during the transitional period.
In this connection, it is especially disturbing that in the future a simple application for some minor variation in hours, like extending hours on a few special evenings each year, could lead to a cutback in general trading hours.
In short, this does not look remotely like the exciting, new, flexible and less burdensome licensing system we had been promised, but a mandate for local authorities to bring in a more complex, less predictable and more restrictive system than we currently enjoy.
Stephen Moss is vice-president of the Restaurant Association
