Drink Talking: Audrey Lewis

The new licensing applications have proved to be too complicated says Audrey Lewis, cabinet member for community protection at Westminster City Council.

Midday on February 7 came around and I rang my greatly expanded licensing team at Westminster City Hall to see how many licensees had flooded us with applications for extended opening hours.

"None" was the surprising answer and as I am writing this on March 1 we have received only two complete applications for conversion, none for a variation, and certainly none for 24-hour opening. Another five have been sent in completely wrong and we have had to contact the licensees concerned to arrange whatever we could to help them complete it.

The licensees and lawyers we had talked to had insisted that they would be sending in their applications on the first possible day, so this apparent lack of interest is not what we had staffed up and planned for.

The Friday before, we had worked frantically into the evening to download the still-incomplete application forms from the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) website, and dispatched 600 packs for the first planned phase of licensees.

We tried to make practical sense of the very recently received regulations on how to apply, the fees, the multiplicity of addresses where they had to be sent, and both the premises and personal application forms.

I have come to believe that the reason for the lack of applications is down to the sheer complication of the new system. Few licensees seemed to realise that if they were not to get their premises plans redrawn to meet the detailed requirements of the DCMS, they had to write in to get permission from their local authority. Few were ready with the multiplicity of certified licenses that the DCMS was demanding.

A wonderful example of the shambles in the Culture department came via an email we received on February 22. It transpired that there were errors in the fees regulations, so the government had to quickly lay new regulations before Parliament to alter them.

The impact of this may appear to be minimal, but how can it be that merely 15 days into the life of a radical new flagship policy that has been years in the planning, we are already seeing alterations?

Now we are having to prepare to send out a fourth mailing to our 3,600 licensees.

And they thought we were making obscene profits out of licensing?