Clause 70 - Other definitions relating to clubs
Licensing Bill [Lords]
4:15 pm
Mr Malcolm Moss (North East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
It seems to me that when a club has its annual general meeting, the three key positions are chairman, secretary and treasurer. Those are the three key people who run the committee, and who are looked up to by all club and committee members as the three most powerful and influential members of the club. Those are senior positions with a lot of responsibility.
Most of the Bill is fairly regulatory in all sorts of ways—it tries to tie things down, and to ensure that the right people are in position to take on roles of responsibility and so forth—so I would have thought that the Government would say that the secretary ought to be an officer of the club. Otherwise the authority of the people purporting to speak on behalf of the club would be undermined.
Why have the Government adopted the phrase,
''whether or not an officer of the club''?
Is that part of existing legislation that has been moved across to this Bill, or have the Government thought differently about things and decided—for a reason that we have not yet heard—that the definition of secretary should have this looser and less responsible connotation.