Plan ahead for bank holiday extensions
I have been asked to expand a little on the answer I gave to a reader on 30 September (New Year's Eve hours, Morning Advertiser) concerning bank holiday extensions.
For those of you who did not see the piece, I was explaining that because the magistrates grant bank holiday extensions each year on application by licensees, these cannot properly be counted as the "normal" permitted hours under which you operate throughout the year.
Other types of extension, such as a supper hour certificate, extended hours order or special hours certificate and even a general order of exemption run with the premises and do form part of the permitted hours which you can write down on your conversion application form (if you can find out where to put them!).
The same is true of New Year's Eve, but for a different reason: that all-night extension has now been incorporated into the 1964 Licensing Act itself, so all licensees have that "as of right". You should put the continuous period down on your application form, whether you currently use it or not.
By the time you come to make the transition application, it may be that the approved bank holiday extensions have already been announced by the magistrates. This is often done as part of the Brewster Sessions each year. But the important point is that they only announce what they are prepared to entertain they do not actually "grant" those hours simply by making an announcement. Each licensee has to apply to them for their own permission, known as a "special order of exemption". Without it, you have no extensions at all.
The difficulty from a legal perspective is to judge whether or not those "announced" hours form part of the hours which you are entitled to put on Part A of the transition application, or whether you would need to fill in Part B with those extensions which come into play after November (such as Christmas 2005). This is compounded by the current wording of the form, which does not actually ask you to write down your permitted hours but asks you to state "any limitations on hours" which you have! This is another classic piece of confusion which may well be amended when the Department for Culture, Media and Sport reads all the adverse comments they are getting!
It would be much easier for all applicants to write down the permitted hours that they currently operate, and then these would carry forward into the new regime unless the applicant had also applied for a variation in Part B.
At this stage, of course, the bank holiday extensions have not been announced for next year. There is no guarantee that they will be the same as last year, because the magistrates listen to police reports and sometimes change or limit the days or hours depending on the circumstances. So they cannot possibly be classed as "normal" or "regular" hours for the premises concerned.
If you are putting in during transition for a change of hours anyway, this will not be much of a problem. You can specify a later terminal, or even 24/7, in order to cater for every circumstance. What worries me is that I have heard at least two local authorities talk about granting "extensions" when necessary after they take over.
How are they going to do this? The only way it could be achieved is through a temporary event notice, but this must be started by the applicant, not by the council. The local authorities are certainly not in the same position as the magistrates, and cannot "fix" bank holidays in future.
We will need to look at this again nearer the time.
