Clause 8 - Exercise and delegation of functions
Licensing Bill [Lords]
3:30 pm
Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight, Conservative)
I shall deal with the amendments in that order, Mr. Gale. Amendment No. 100 would remove from the authority the power to arrange for a committee that is not the licensing committee to discharge the licensing function, because there would be a potential conflict of interest on such a committee. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for North Devon, ever ready to ask the difficult question, says, ''How?'' I would have thought that the answer was quite simple: if a recreation committee is determined to put on a pop festival and the licensing authority delegates to that committee the power to determine whether to grant the licence for that entertainment, there is an immediate conflict of interest for the members of that committee, who are about to commit themselves to the pop festival enterprise—not financially, but as members of the local authority. They may be the executive members of that authority. An authority might delegate the licensing function to the executive of the authority, which had committed itself in principle to putting on a pop festival. Then, the executive could be asked to operate wearing its quasi-judicial hat, and might be asked to determine the licensing application that it had submitted for the running of that pop festival. I would consider that to be a profound conflict of interest.