Schedule 1 - Provision of regulated entertainment
Licensing Bill [Lords]
10:00 am
Mr Malcolm Moss (North East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
I am grateful for your stricture, Mr. Gale.
In more ways than one, we have achieved our aim of having a thorough debate to ensure that the schedule is tested to destruction—we are getting fairly close to that.
At the heart of the amendment lies the problem of understanding what is involved in ticking the magic box on entertainment licences. I am sure that it will be easy to go through the application form, tick the box and send the form off to the local authority. The Minister would have us believe that, winging back by return of post will come the licence that says, ''You are allowed to have entertainment. It costs you no extra to your alcohol licence.'' Therefore, the case is made that it is easy, it does not cost any money and all the rest of it. What specifically will come back on an entertainment licence? Will it say, ''Your establishment can only be used for X number of people at any event'', so that a maximum is placed on it? Will it say, ''Your establishment must take these safety precautions and you will need a fire certificate from the fire authority to substantiate that''? Will it say, ''Your establishment must have health and safety issues and regulations properly determined''? Those may already be in place but they still have to be substantiated. What happens if one wants a variation? Does a person have to re-apply? Is there a cost for re-applying? What does the variation ask the licensing authority to do? Is it to increase the numbers? Is it to say, ''I'm only putting on small bands or the odd stand-up comedian as my entertainment, or occasionally the Joe Loss orchestra''—all 45 of them, or whatever it is? Will the licence specify what can or cannot be done? It is not going to be that easy.
In all the schedules about entertainment, the Minister has not told us exactly what would go on an entertainment licence application. I hope that he will help us clearly understand what is involved. It patently will not be as easy as he thinks, when most of the people out there—the people involved in entertainment—are still totally against what is proposed in the Bill. It is no good saying that the guidance will deliver and tell local authorities how to interpret it. If the guidance is going to tell them in the way that I have described, it will be incredibly prescriptive. Local authorities will have no leeway, no licence and no freedom to make interpretations on the ground in local areas, in response to what they see as local needs.
If it is not prescriptive, but will allow local authorities to interpret applications flexibly, then there will be postcode licensing in the way that we have postcode health care. In other words, local councils will do what they think is best in their own areas. I am not necessarily against that, but there will be no consistency around the country. There will be inconsistency, and contiguous local authorities may have completely different interpretations of entertainment licences, which I do not think is the Government's intention. However, I have read part of the guidance and I think that it is going down the road of being fairly prescriptive. Not only will it tell local authorities what they can and cannot do, but it will tell them what fees they can charge and no more. I have had representations from local authorities, as have many of my colleagues, saying, ''We can't do this with the fees that have been mentioned, we will be out of pocket''. It is yet another stealth tax on taxpayers—and another stealth tax on council tax payers, because the Government are as usual giving local authorities far more responsibility, all this extra work, and not delivering the grant to pay for it.
It is not just the authorities that are on our side of the fence, every Labour Committee member has problems with local authority finance—