Thursday 20 May 2010

Letter to MP questioning the coalition agreement regarding licensing

Feel free to do your own variant...




Dear Julian

Good afternoon, I hope you are settling in well to the parliamentary way of life.  I am writing to you today to express my concern at the suggestion in the coalition agreement that further powers will be given to the police and the local authority to close premises that are causing "problems".

The precise paragraph is under the title of Crime and Policing and is as follows.

"We will overhaul the licensing act to give local authorities and the police much stronger powers to remove licences from or refuse to grant licences to, any premises that causing problems."

Whilst I firmly believe that the licensing act is overdue a review and amendment, I fear, however, that a move in this direction is authoritarian and takes away the power from elected councils.  The system currently has a license review procedure which can at any time be triggered by a responsible authority (of which both the police and the local authority are one) and can then result in the revoking of the license.  On top of that Local authorities can place a closure order on a venue if there is a serious risk to public health.  Experience within Cambridge shows that this system is effective and is also a strong incentive for under performing premises to improve in order to avoid licence review procedure which involves courts and inevitably costs a great deal.  The closure of the Locomotive, the prevention of the Tescos Mill road licence and also numerous examples of pubs taking very seriously the threat of license review are fine examples of the effectiveness of the current system.  The current review element of the licence works and further powers do not need to be given to the police.

In specific reference to one off annual events, it is rapidly being found at a national level that the police and local authorities already have too much power and can, without much explanation or reasoning, call for a license review. This, when applied close to the date of an event taking place derails the final stages of planning and ultimately prevents it from taking place.  In particular Strawberry Fair, Glade festival and Big Green Gathering are examples of this.  When pressed it has become clear that the police or local authority had no serious objection but merely a lack of understanding or acceptance. This interference so late is so detrimental to planning.  My personal view is that a licensing act review would need to take into account the fact that an event that takes place once a year involves a huge amount of preparation. It is therefore considerably less flexible and less able to cope with last minute changes unlike a venue or public house which has its turnover and activity spread over the year.  A new look licensing act needs to include a section specific to outdoor events and be flexible enough to acknowledge that these events all have their own individual problems and needs that are very poorly catered for under the current licensing act.  This would protect them from attack from potentially less than impartial responsible authorities.

I fear that increasing the unaccountable power to local authorities and the police to close down premises, combined with reduced expectation to provide grounds for doing so will inevitably result in unfairness and abuse of the system. It will result in the closure of premises based on the personal dislikes of an officer or department, even potentially, based on their personal prejudices.  I do not feel it is right to trust unelected officials to decide whether a premise is allowed to trade based on their private assessment of "problems". This direction seems entirely illiberal and of deep concern. 

I am not by nature a person who only offers criticism and nothing in terms of solutions and I would be happy to discuss this issue further.  My immediate questions to you are the following.

Obviously I would love to hear your personal views on the matter but also;

Do the Liberal democrats have a parliamentary spokesman for licensing and if so who is it?

Would you be interested in taking this to the parliamentary party for further discussion?

Is there any further information you might have available to that discusses the agreement statement in more detail?

Many thanks for your time and I look forward to hearing your response.

Kind Regards

Justin Argent
Chair, Strawberry Fair

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