Written evidence to be reported to the House

Part of Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 5:15 pm on 16 October 2007.

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Jan Berry: Yes. There are occasions where, in not closing a premises down, you are also committing the same offence, to a certain extent, because you are allowing it to continue. But, again, I do not think that this is a power that would be used lightly. Apart from anything else, if you are going to close premises down, depending on the size of those premises you need a fair number of resources actually to achieve the closing down.

This is something that happens at 2 am, where a rave or a drugs den is identified. You would rarely decide there and then that you must close it down. In many situations you would have the time to prepare and get the resources to do that. In that preparation, part of the assessment of whether it needs to be done would be whether you are just going to move the problem to another place. That would need to be taken into account, but it would need to be policed, because closing a place down does not take away the problem from the people who might be living in the vicinity of the place that you are intending to close down.