Government has lost the agenda, says MP

The Labour MP who led the Westminster inquiry into the pub companies believes that the government has lost the agenda over licensing.

Martin O'Neill, MP for Ochill and chairman of the Trade & Industry Select Committee, said Tony Blair had made a mistake in handing licensing over to the Department for Culture Media & Sport in 2001.

The delays and current uncertainty over the new regime were the result, he suggested.

"I think licensing reform might have been handled a wee bit better - the government's lost the agenda and it has to get a grip on it," Mr O'Neill told The Publican.

"Why should the department responsible for castles and museums be responsible for the hospitality industry? It has no industrial expertise whatsoever and it shows.

"People have been talking about cutting down the role of the Department for Trade & Industry but in my view the role of the DTI should be expanding. Licensing should be dealt with by an enterprise department, not by something which is interested in preserving things."

However, in a wide-ranging interview with The Publican, to be published next week, Mr O'Neill said he thought the Daily Mail campaign against so-called "24-hour drinking" was unlikely to delay the Act further.

"Nothing ever surprises me about the moral preoccupations of the Daily Mail. The experience of Scotland is that binge-drinking is more about happy hours and the access to very cheap drink than it is about access to drink itself," said Mr O'Neill, who is to step down from Westminster at the General Election after 25 years as an MP. "People only have so much of their income that they are prepared to devote to drink.

"This idea that publicans and the drinking classes are going to conspire to increase the workload of the police dramatically is wrong."