Clause 146 - Delegation to licensing committee
Gambling Bill
3:15 pm
Mr Malcolm Moss (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; North East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
There will be serious problems in authorities such as Westminster and Camden in terms of the sheer numbers of licence applications that will have to be considered and processed when the 2003 Act comes into force.
Westminster city council has already made many representations, saying that it does not know how it will cope with the flood of applications. We are now loading yet another burden on the same committee by making it responsible for considering gambling establishments—there will be a large number of those, particularly in inner-city areas, as I have described. We are trying to seek some flexibility so that local authorities can play things internally to the best of their ability without our prescribing in the Bill exactly how they are to do it.