MP raises issue of licensing of one off and annual outdoor events

On Monday Cambridges MP, Julian Huppert, put a question to the ministers from Home Office in the House of Commons

View it here at 29.10mins

The fair initially contacted the Julian Huppert, MP for Cambridge as part of a wider campaign to ensure that the during the reform of the Licencing Act the views of outdoor event organisers are heard and in the hope that the new act will properly cater for annual and one off events.  

At the moment, the licensing act and its processes are geared entirely towards licensing full time venues.  We would like to see reform taking into account the major differences between dedicated buildings operated year round and outdoor events taking place once a year. At the moment, even the cost of a license is based simply on numbers, whether you run 365 events a year, or just for one day. The current act presents huge, and in our view, unnecessary obstacles in the path of event organisers, obstacles which in themselves don't help with the intended purpose of the act. We would like to see a reformed act that recognises the difference between different kinds of event and takes into account the length of time it takes to organise an event such as Strawberry Fair.

The chair of strawberry and other event organisers from the wider events industry are very pleased that the MP has recognised the risks posed to both a vibrant festival industry and to smaller scale local community events, both of which are essential to our society.  We will continue working with the MP to promote this issue to government.

A worrying step in the wrong direction re: licensing

Apologies this is a bit of a brain dump so may not track properly but here goes:


Yesterday Teresa May announced the new proposals to change the licensing act to prevent alcoholism in city centres and to prevent binge drinking.  With it the home office opened up a 6 week public consultation on the proposed changes.


Included in this document are such offerings as:

• Increased licence fees
• Enabling licensing authorities to repeal licences for non-payment of fees
• Removing the rule that objectors must be 'in the vicinity'
• Requiring greater weight to be given to police representations and objections
• Enabling licensing authorities to refuse grants or trigger reviews without the need for representations
• Introducing greater restrictions on Temporary Event Notices
• Extending closure orders from 48 hours to 7 days
• Introducing an additional levy on premises opening late to fund policing
• Banning sales of alcohol below cost price
• Enabling authorities to consider the impact of a licence on public health when exercising their functions.

A change of remit precluded this announcement with the Home Office taking the responsibility for alcohol licensing away from DCMS but leaving the entertainment aspects of licensing with DCMS. 


This split implies that alcohol licenses and entertainments licenses are separate entities, they are not!  At the end of the process a venue or event organiser ends up with a license, this license allows both the sale of alcohol and also the provision of entertainment.  


In commencing this divide it is clear that the sole focus of the Home Office is to effect a change on issues of anti-social behaviour in city centres and they are, quite reasonably as it is not a Home Office remit, ignoring any knock on effects such changes would have on music venues or outdoor events.  


The key responsibility for protecting the interests of culture and entertainment is presumably left with the struggling DCMS.  Many will note from the news that DCMS is being cut back by Jeremy Hunt with up to one in two staff being made redundant.  The question that unerringly sits at the front of my mind at the moment is this,  


"Is a ministry thrown completely into disarray by loosing half its staff and being asked to move location going to be in any way capable of protecting the interests of culture and arts against a well organised and heavily financed ministry preparing to make sweeping changes to a system?" 


Unfortunately then I fear that arts and culture industry is going to have to look after itself here and give DCMS the voice it needs.  I am currently writing my objections to the proposed changes that attempt to encompass both my cultural, procedural, legal and moral concerns about the proposals. When these are finished I shall release them for others to cherry pick and send in personal objections.


As this consultation has been released by the Home office it is therefore failing to acknowledge that such changes can easily have a detrimental effect on the media and culture in the UK. 


Whilst I respect that anti-social behaviour as a result of drinking is a problem in the UK and that ways to minimilise this should be considered.   to hastily throw powers at police and local authorities allowing them to close down venues and revoke licenses at will and take away the need to genuinely consider the situation is clearly not the solution, it is dangerous and it will result in good causes loosing out or being cancelled.


The proposed changes allow a shoot first, ask questions later attitude towards the awarding and revocation of licenses, removing the rights of businesses to present a reasoned case.  It will allow "responsible authorities" to ignore cultural significance in the face of emotive and insubstantial evidence.


There is a desire in the new proposals to "remove bureaucracy" from the process but the interpretation of this seems to be the inclination to remove the right to a fair hearing on the part of the licensee, and give both the police and local authorities the power to issue summary revocations or refusals of licenses without the "need" to hear opposing arguments.


If the government is going to persist on removing the state funding for arts and culture in spite of this being of questionable logic even on purely economic terms and they are demanding that philanthropy becomes the central source of funding then events and venues need to find it easier to get licenses not harder.


  I hope this is vaguely informative, more to follow

MP has responded to my letter

Hello all

Cambridge's MP, Julian Huppert has responded to my letter and has agreed to pursue the issue of the Licensing Act further within parliament.  The link below is the official press release.

http://www.julianhuppert.org.uk/content/mp-calls-change-law-protect-strawberry-fair

Clearly this is excellent news but it is only the beginning, please feel free to use the main thrust of the letter to contact other MPs to add more weight to the proposal to include consultation with the outdoor events industry during a licensing act review with a view to protecting the industry from hostile authorities.

My original letter is here http://strawberrychair.blogspot.com/2010_05_01_archive.html, clearly not everyone will be concerned with SF but there will be an event near you or that you attend that is suffering.

The licensing act is being misused by police forces around the country.  It is very easy for a force or authority to call for a review with only hazy reference to the licensing objectives as sufficient cause to do so.  They are only obliged to provide further information as little as 4 days before the review hearing goes before committee.  Even then they are not required to provide detail and there is no obligation for them to negotiate or work towards achieving a solution that works for everyone, not just the police.  The intention of the licensing act such that there is regulation, within the industry, I have no problem with this, safe well managed events are a must. But the act is also intended to enable events and businesses to flourish, and the licensing objectives are there as markers that event organisers should work very hard to achieve, but if they are not 100% achieved one year then this should NOT mean the ending of an event, merely that the event should adapt.

The radical black and white police interpretation of the act, combined with the fact that; at any stage in the vital final planning stages the review hearing can be called means that annual one off events are at the mercy of the police and other responsible authorities.  Increasingly, well managed and historically safe events are being forced to cancel due to the horrendous increase in work load required from defending their licenses from loose cases against them.

When this is twinned with the polices ability to demand "full cost recovery" for the level of policing that they and only they determine means that the outdoor events and festival industry is currently completely under the fist of the police and is very much at risk of sinking.

The festival and event industry has thrived over the last ten years and has become an essential, vibrant and culturally diverse asset to the UK.  The industry has born a new creative vibe throughout the UK that has deeply contributed in our music and media industry being one of the countries strongest and fastest growing.

Please help us to keep this great and wonderful part of our lives alive. Write to your MP

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

Insight

I figured I would start a blog, to give you guys a bit of an idea what goes on in the life of the chair of strawberry fair. I cant guarantee it will be interesting or especially exciting but you never know.

It is going out to the press this week that Strawberry Fair is going through a major shake up for the 2010 fair. Well we have been looking at this for a couple of months now, first meeting back at the beginning of September (!) to discuss where we felt the fair should go.

In the last couple of years the committee has worked really hard to overcome the problems that a major event can bring. A number of issues that have been tough in the past including camping, disruption to the fairs neighbours and assorted other niggles have all been overcome and the local residents are were more than happy with last years fair.

We felt that we now have an opportunity to look at the fair for the people who come to the fair, the people that we go to all the time and trouble to entertain, the punter.

So we all met and agreed that we wanted to change the culture of the fair, to increase the chance for people to interact, to give all the local community groups a chance to show off what they are all about and to become a hell of a lot more ecologically sound and sustainable.

We obviously dont want to throw everything out and we realise that there is a thriving music scene in the local area so we will still have music but it wont be taking such a central role. The fair is going to be all about smaller entertainment entertaining smaller numbers of people but we are looking to have loads more of it. To do this we need people and groups to get involved.

So far I have been really impressed and pleased with the response we have had and its only just the beginning. I am really excited as to find out just what cambridge can come up with

A lot of the work we have been doing up until now has been putting into place the mechanisms to better allow people and groups to get involved now we feel we are ready to hear what people can come up with, hence the press release going out.

Its exciting times.

Now for a sort of Bridgeypit Bones bit

Hours spent in meetings so far for this years fair = 25

Reports written = 2

Hours outside of meetings = who knows

Stuff I am thinking about today - press strategy, police charging, programming group, how immense the fair is, how much I need sleep.

on 209 radio nice and early tomorrow at 8.15am