Remember, Remember the 24th of November?

Repoduced with permission from South Hants Camra

by O'Neill

November 24th, 2005 is a date for pub goers to remember for many years to come. It is, in the jargon beloved of civil servants, 'the second appointed day.' Not quite the second coming perhaps but somewhat more accurately prophesied. It is the date on which the 2003 Licensing Act finally comes into full operation, sweeping away several centuries of a ramshackle assembly of old statutes.

Hop Press readers cannot fail to have noticed that the tabloid press, followed recently by the (now, mostly, inaptly named) broadsheets, have been conducting a relentless campaign of increasing shrillness predicting a new era of excess, outdoing anything achieved by the inhabitants of either Sodom or Gomorra! '24-hour boozing' 'Stop this drinking madness' 'Kill this Bill' the headlines cry. Are there any seeds of truth buried in the midden of invective?

The first point to make is that the new Act, all 175 pages of it, is a vast piece of legislation but all of the hysteria is over just a few paragraphs outlining how pub opening hours are to be determined. The centuries of old laws saw this area with a Calvinist view that drink equalled sin and thus, if it could not be eliminated entirely, (the preferable course) it should only be permitted grudgingly. The new Act's roots are set in the more modern concepts of human rights, constraints are now only based on definable ideas of agreed common good. This has been completely (some might even suggest mischievously) misunderstood by the press who have assiduously spread the false notion that every other pub will be open twenty- four hours a day. Nothing of the sort is going to occur. The majority of pub users will hardly notice any change from Wednesday, November 23rd to Friday, November 25th.

To initialise the new law, every pub, club, off-licence and so forth has had to register with their local authority all the details of their premises and how they plan to conduct their businesses, especially (but by no means exclusively) when drinks will be on sale and when the premises will be open. Details of these applications are public property and can be found on the various local authorities' web sites. Studying these as they have been coming in over the summer months leads to some general conclusions, at least for the Southern Hampshire area:

• Most pubs want to extend their evening selling by an hour, from eleven until midnight, although the fact of an application does not mean that they will all implement these hours. However, there is still a significant minority for whom 11 pm is quite enough.
• Although the new laws no longer contain any 'drinking-up time' concept, almost all pubs are allowing for half an hour between the end of drink sales and closing up.
• Morning opening will not change much, ten seems to be the preferred time, although many will, as at present, not avail themselves of this allowance and still remain firmly closed until midday. A very small number have asked for an earlier start for some type of breakfast service.
• A significant number are wanting to serve until one am on Fridays and/or Saturdays but of these many do not intend to use this time every week, qualifications such as 'up to twelve times per year' are common.
• The old religious aspects of Sunday will at last be virtually gone, most applications have lumped Sunday timings in with the other days of the week.

Neither a revolution nor a descent into unmitigated debauchery then! Just a modest change that will have, of itself, little or no impact on the Nation's unquestioned problems with immoderate drinking. These stem from brewers' (now more accurately, pub companies') greed and foolishness in the marketing of drink and the design of pubs respectively. Popular culture, reflected by an uncritical media, does little to help, glorifying so-called celebrities in their behaviour, however unsavoury (perhaps we need a new offence from this government of 'glorification of intemperate behaviour?').

A completely unreported aspect of the build up to November 24th has been the great financial cost to licensees, something to which no red-top editor has given any thoughts - if the law was abandoned now, how would they be compensated? Every establishment in the land has had to apply to retain its licence, with the appropriate fee of course. The fee range (based on rateable value) is from 100 to 635 with up to another 120 if even the slightest change is involved. Any such change also requires a mandatory newspaper advertisement (150-250) and every application has to be accompanied by a professionally drawn set of building plans (several hundred pounds more?). Lastly, of course, most licensees felt that the twenty plus page form should be filled in by their solicitor, for another 100 at least. Thus even a modest, street-corner pub will have spent something between 500 and 1000 moving into this new era.

Any reversal of the law would land the Government with a compensation bill of more than 50 million from this source alone. An even larger sum would be due to the local authorities who have spent large sums of our council tax on setting up their new licensing departments. It is conceivable that reversing this Act could total a boggling cost of a quarter billion pounds! Which probably goes a long way to explaining why this populist Government, usually so attentive to the views of the Mail or Sun editors, are not moving in this instance.

In passing the control of all licensing matters from the magistracy to local authorities one obvious danger was that bureaucracy would proliferate. This seems to be coming true to some extent, as some examples demonstrate: In Southampton, as of the fourth week in October, the register of certificate applications contained 52 pages (and did not include many of the 35% of applications that came in during the last week before the August deadline). But, the register of certificates issued was only 7 pages. For Eastleigh things seem much the same - 36 pages of applications and 6 pages of completed certificates. In Winchester the registers are yet to appear on their web site at all and the Chairman of the Licensing Committee was unable (in early September) to say when they might. When asked in mid-October when certificates might be sent out, a Winchester staff member said "We're going to start designing them next week..." Shortage of staff is one clear reason for delay - when an Eastleigh entry was handed in at reception the comment was "no need to specifically address it, there's only one person dealing with them all."

Another factor slowing the system is the procedure for canvassing comments and objections. Under the old system licensing matters were basically the province of the magistrates and the police with any other parties free to attend the court and speak out as required. Now, as well as being advertised to the public as before, copies of applications have to sent to a host of other bodies (Police, the Fire Service, Social Services, the Planning Department, Trading Standards and the Environmental Health Department) who are expected to comment before the application is determined. If anything other than a null response is received or if any letter of objection from the public arrives then the application has to have a public hearing at a Licensing Subcommittee. Currently most of our Southern Hampshire authorities are holding several of these meetings per week, each dealing with one or two applications. Finishing by November could be a close run thing.

The subcommittees are made up of just three councillors and one or more of the paid officers. The legislation is quite tightly drawn in respect of what matters may and may not be considered, yet there are quite large variations in the decisions being made. In Eastleigh for example, the Arrow, in a very residential area, was allowed to stay open until 1 am with drinking up until 2 am for much of the week, despite a three page submission against this from the police. Yet the Master Builder at West End, in a no more residential situation and only asking to serve until midnight, had its request for an hour of drinking up immediately rejected.

For anyone aggrieved with the results of a panel hearing, either applicant or objector, the next avenue open is to appeal the decision. It is at this stage that the process transfers to the legal sphere, appeals are heard, initially, by the magistrates and could in theory progress up through the system to the highest courts of appeal. At the moment it is too early to say how well this will work although it is thought that the objectors to Winchester's Fulflood Arms are taking the initial step (even though the application was quite modest).

Finally, as a slight indicator of the pitfalls along the road to introducing the legislation it is worth looking through the registers for the applications that have been rejected as 'invalid.' Happily for the applicants there are not too many of these but it seems more than a little unlucky that both Southampton and Eastleigh councils have thrown out their own flagship efforts. Both the Southampton Civic Centre's Guildhall and Eastleigh's old town hall Point Centre are listed as being invalid applications! Southampton's web site is decorously silent on the reasons but Eastleigh exposes all, listing amongst other things, 'application incompletely filled out' and 'fee incorrect.'