Hosts suffering amid this licencing scandal

As you read this, it will be two weeks after the second appointed day, when the new licensing regime confounded the Daily Mail and friends by passing off without major incident.

But I suspect many of you have still not received your all-important licence. The unlucky ones include those who dutifully put in applications during transition which, you may remember, ended on 6 August.

Four months later, and there are still thousands of unprocessed licence applications still sitting in someone's in-tray. It is nothing short of a scandal.

Quite the worst examples are those licensees whose variations applications have either received no representations or where compromise has been reached inside the two-month period.

You would think that these could have been issued fairly quickly.

Not a bit of it. These appear to have been put to one side and almost forgotten about. Let me give you an example from the London area.

Application for conversion and variation made in late July. Technical problems overcome and three conditions agreed with police in early September and conveyed to licensing authority. Complete silence.

Then, in a letter dated 24 October, the bombshell. No regrets, but the council has failed to deal with the variation, so it is deemed refused.

'You will be able to continue trading under the terms of your converted licence ... but will not be allowed to trade under the varied terms you applied for ...'

No apologies. Go to the magistrates. They will apparently remit the matter back to the council. When will the authority deal with it? Late January at the earliest!

Even worse: in another part of London they have actually remitted their failed variations direct to the magistrates in a bundle. The first the applicant hears about it is a letter from the court, saying they will be dealing with it and will again remit it to the council.

When? January 16.

I am sure licensees and licensing solicitors in many parts of the country have similar stories. Yet there appears to be no redress. You can make a huge fuss, of course, and go to the magistrates in person and ask for costs. But you are unlikely to do this in the short term, unless you're very clever or persistent.

There is great talk of a partnership approach. We are all meant to be rowing in the same direction. Yet there are authorities - and I shall be happy to give the Local Government Association their names - who are simply too lazy or too inefficient to do their job. And the sufferers are innocent hosts.

What can they do about booked Christmas parties and special events? Their block extensions are now useless. What they have to do is put in for a number of temporary event notices (TENs), each one costing £21 and taking quite a time to put together.

And even these are not as effective as the old extensions, when it was all right to have parties on successive nights.

Now, you can't even do that as 24 hours must elapse between two TENs run by the same licensee on the same premises.

So many licensees find themselves in a worse position over the Christmas period than they were in last year.

All they can do is throw themselves at the mercy of police and plead for a little leeway in the run-up to Christmas.

Yet certain councils are quite happy to close premises which have failed for some reason to make a conversion bid. That's when they play it by the rule book, not when they are asked to meet a deadline of their own!

It's a scandal.