Clause 7 - Theft, loss etc. of certificate or summary
Licensing Bill [Lords]
6:00 pm
Mr Malcolm Moss (North East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
These amendments will be quick to deal with. I cannot quite understand why clause 77(3)(b) gives as a condition that where a certificate or summary has been lost, the club must report that loss to the police. I can understand the need to report the theft of such a document, but if it is lost, what is the point of that? Will it waste police time? How many forms will the sergeant on the desk or the constable visiting the club have to fill in? In the end, what does it prove? How will it move us further towards establishing whether the club has a genuine certificate and who is responsible for its not being available?
I have tabled the amendment to tease from the Minister why he considers it absolutely necessary for a loss to be reported to the police. The fact that a document is lost might not emerge for years, and that document might have passed through the hands of any number of secretaries. If so, pinning the blame will be almost impossible. It would be a complete irrelevance for that loss to be reported to the police after a period of years. They would not do anything about it; people report all sorts of losses—and thefts—to the police and get absolutely nowhere. I cannot see the justification for this piece of bureaucracy. It will simply tie up police time unnecessarily.