Local magistrates looked after licensing in England for over 600 years. The system worked well, was cheap to administer and there was just a simple form to fill in every 3 years. Then, a year or so ago, the Blair administration transferred licencing to local Councils and at a stroke turned the system into a bureaucratic growth-industry and phoney job-creation scheme. At time of writing, some councils have still to issue the new Premises Licence certificates, which are a year overdue, as they are snowed under with mountains of newly-created paperwork.
A typical private members’ club used to pay £5 a year to the Court for a licence. The new fee is £200 – a forty fold increase in taxation. One thing is certain – not a single licensee in the country was consulted on the switch to Council control.
Licencees and key staff are now obliged to go on politically-correct tick-box certification courses, which are an insult to their intelligence. I found the course I had to attend was like going back to Prep School. Under the new regime there must be a Designated Premises Supervisor in addition to the Premises Licence holder on licensed premises, when in the past it was taken for granted that a licencee was capable of delegating duties, but that he/she was responsible for problems.
At the end of the day, running a pub is common sense, period, we don’t need to go to BII training schools to learn how to run a simple business.
Under the old system, if a licencee was out of order he had to answer to the Licencing Magistrates in Court. If a licensee had a query, he could speak to the Clerk to the Licencing Justices, who was a qualified solicitor, but the new heads of Licencing at the Councils need no legal qualification. When there was an application for a change of licensee, the Police were consulted in Court. The system had stood the test of time and was respected by licencees. Who the hell has any respect for their local Council ?
Licensing should have been left with the magistrates. The Councils already issued the expensive Public Entertainments Licences, so they were in control of premises with noisy entertainment and collecting loads of taxation fees for their coffers. (PELs have been scrapped and are now incorporated into the new Premises Licences.)
I used to pay £10 a year for my pub licence. The form took a couple of minutes to fill in. When the Council took over, it took me a full morning to complete the necessary paperwork and I now pay an annual fee, based on my Business Rates level, which is currently £295 (for a small one-room bar).
The initial fee to apply for the first Council licence was a further £195.
Every licenced premises in the country had to submit a scale plan of their drinking area – an expensive exercise in itself. There must be hundreds of thousands of architects plans gathering dust in Council offices.
I can see no benefit whatsoever in the new licencing system. Licencees did not want it, Councils did not want the extra work, but the Blair administration seems incapable of leaving anything alone. The old system wasn’t broke and did not need fixing.
Mr. Blair would have been seen in better light if he had done something useful like scrapping the unelected Second Chamber or pulling out of Iraq and issuing a humble apology for having broken International Law on a grand scale.
In late January 2007 the local Councils declared that they are losing money on Licensing and that they would like to jack their fees up considerably !
Licencees are presumably financing the mink-lined pensions of Council workers, yet our own private pensions were trashed by Gordon Brown soon after he came into office when he abolished the tax relief on dividends earned by the private pension companies.
Hugh Price
Tynemouth Lodge Hotel