By John Young chairman of Young's Brewery, Wandsworth

Because of the new Licensing Act, the country and the licensed trade have been clobbered by huge costs and ongoing bureaucracy from all angles. It was a mockery. Our brewery used to be full of beer, but it was awash with paper in the run-up to 24 November. The cost of the old licence was £30 every three years. The cost of the new licences in our pubs is as high as £2,300 - with an annual administration fee of as much as £350 on top. Young's faced a cost of around £300,000 to obtain licences for all our pubs. And you can add on the lawyers' and consultants' fees, and the valuable time of our area managers, who would rather have been around our pubs than filling in forms in the office. Under the old Act, we served a single-sheet form for a licence to the police, the clerk to the justices and the local authorities, and placed a copy of the notice in the window of the premises and an advert in the local paper. Under the new Act, instead of a one-page notice, we had to serve 41 pages, seven copies and in one case 12, to various authorities - costing £35 in postage - display a notice in the pub window and put an advert in the local paper. Even after doing all this, one pub was warned that insufficient information had been given to enable the council to grant a licence. The old Licensing Act was straightforward and inexpensive. Now, local authorities fix substantial fees, many of which fall upon the backs of small individual businesses. Young's has paid these fees on behalf of our tenants and managers in the first year and dealt with their application forms at our cost. Pity the poor village halls, clubs and restaurants. I give some examples of the horrors we have faced. One local authority employed a photographer to take pictures of the window notices in pubs. In the case of one of our houses, they objected that the notice was the wrong shade of blue - it was too dark and had to be reprinted in a paler shade. We were required to print the telephone number of the authority on the notice, which we did, but they told us we should have used the direct line of the licensing department. We asked what it was and were told that we had to look it up. At another pub, we obtained planning permission and approval for alterations, which were carried out. But then we received a visit from officials, who imposed a limit of 110 customers on the premises at any one time. Fortunately the limit was raised on appeal to 200. Three pubs in one area were told that drinks in their gardens must be served in plastic glasses, with no drinking after 9pm, and that CCTV cameras had to be installed. We were told that the police required itemised bills for all credit-card transactions at one pub and that a pollution report had to be provided at another. One council ordered the closing-down of the staff accommodation at one pub, with staff evicted and relocated in temporary accommodation at one hour's notice until we complied with new safety demands. We were forced to change all the doors in one pub into fire doors before being allowed to open the following day. We were told that another pub must have four, rather than the present two entrance doors, and at yet another pub, we were told the doors opened the wrong way. In my village pub, not a Young's house, we have singers, sometimes Monday, sometimes Wednesday, sometimes Friday, depending on availability. As the licensee didn't know when they were going to perform, he had to fill in the form for every day of the week. The customers were appalled because they thought they were going to have music every day of the week. After filling in the 41-page form in its entirety, one pub was warned by the council that there was insufficient information with which to determine the adequacy or otherwise of the application. One council department in charge of health and safety returned their copy of an application with the comment: 'We're not interested.' Another authority complained that a pub had not completed all pages of the form. In fact the officer responsible had inadvertently turned over two pages at once. What a farce!