Policing and Crime Bill
4:00 pm
Chris White: A lot of this relates to the difference between dealing with a single premises and dealing with a collection of premises. The difficulties with dealing with single premises is that local authorities do not have the power to initiate a review—it has to be done by the police. I think I understand the reasons, but it is a problem for us and local residents find it difficult to understand. We would first urge that councils themselves, using information not least from local councillors, should be able to initiate a review of a particular premises. That would make a huge difference with problem premises.
Where you are dealing with collections of premises, there is not a great difference between having nationally imposed conditions and locally permitted conditions. However, nationally imposed conditions will naturally be ham-fisted and will not necessarily take local circumstances into account. Local conditions imposed by councils could have certain advantages, if an area had more than two premises with similar difficulties. Often, that will not be the case. There will be a pub with vertical drinking, and next door will be the nice restaurant where that sort of thing does not take place. Then, there will be the other pub where older people go because they do not want to go to the younger pub. In those circumstances, local conditions are not going to be very useful. Nevertheless, we welcome additional flexibility—the more powers we have to exercise locally, the better. We remain nervous about any national approach to licensing conditions, whether that is a national imposition or a national position.