New code is a painful prospect for pubs

The last and only time I saw a dentist's chair, I was lying in it, jaw agog, enduring root canal treatment. This, I can tell you, is as painful as the Government's mandatory code on the sale of alcohol threatens to be for licensees who don't keep an orderly house.

The Sword of Damocles of huge and completely disproportionate fines for even relatively minor breaches of the law is guaranteed to spoil any licensee's day if they get it wrong on Challenge 21, don't offer water when asked, make available smaller measures of drinks or wrongly promote their outlet.

A £20,000 fine, six months in choky and pub closure are all designed to concentrate the mind.

Someone once said that the best safety device that could be fitted to cars wouldn't be seatbelts but a very sharp spike poking out from the steering wheel at one's chest. If that didn't make you drive carefully, nothing would.

The latest code and the Government's determination to demonise the pub trade is the equivalent of the spike. Of course, well-run pubs should have nothing to fear, although with some police forces and local authorities out to make a point that's not a great source of comfort.

The code says nothing about personal responsibility. Until being "off your head" through drink is as unacceptable as drink driving now is, the burden of social control seems to be inevitably falling on pubs.

The Daily Mail influence is pretty overt in the code — all-you-can-drink-for-a-tenner promotions and the proverbial as opposed to literal "dentist's chair" are the stuff of urban legend nowadays.

The mixed messages from Government about minimum pricing of alcohol, the failure to tackle irresponsible promotions in the off-trade, with its twin problems of pre-loading and proxy purchasing, are all contributing to the sense that it's the pub trade alone being made to carry the can.

A couple of years ago I met Vernon Coaker MP when he was Minister for Drugs and Crime Reduction. We were reviewing the introduction of the Licensing Act.

I asked him how police forces were dealing with underage drinkers who were caught trying to inveigle licensees into serving them underage, bearing in mind the substantial penalties introduced if they did so.

His answer was that they didn't want to criminalise kids, even though the powers existed to serve an £80 fixed penalty notice on them. New code, old rules? If so, this playing field just tilted further.