Licensing@aol.com
Does relief need to be qualified?
Q I am taking a fortnight off soon and want to hire a relief manager for the period. My question is: do I need to
contact the local council and does he need to hold a personal licence? My name is on the licence which is posted up.
A Your name is on the licence because you are the Designated Premises Supervisor (DPS) for the premises. When you go away, you will still be the DPS and no change is required on the licence during this period of absence.
Therefore, there is no legal requirement for you to contact the council or the
licensing officer when you go away. What you are doing, effectively, is delegating your responsibility to someone else. If they
commit an offence, they do it in your name and you will be held responsible for it.
There appears to be precious little
difference between delegation to an unlicensed and a licensed person in this example, but it is usual for relief agencies to have workers who do hold personal licences and can, therefore, take licensing decisions in their own right.
However, it is still important to follow
Government recommendations on
delegation and ensure that you give clear, preferably written, instructions before
departure and keep in touch on a
regular basis.
New Year's Eve plans
QWe have inherited a licence which has been varied during the year. There is a suggestion that we do not have proper New Year hours as a result. What should we do this year?
AIf you are worried that your current premises licence does not cover New Year's Eve satisfactorily, then you can always apply for a temporary event notice (TEN) to extend the hours stated on your
existing licence. If there is (as there should be) a reference to New Year's Eve as a
special occasion on the licence itself, then you need have no worries.
Remember, however, that any TEN which takes the hours past midnight will count as two days — one in the old year and one in the new. That is part of the rules, so you will only have 11 notices left for 2007.
A TEN must be applied for at least 10 full working days before the date, so it is best to get your application in within the next week or so.
Pulling pints underage
QI was in a friend's pub the other day and he asked his young son, who is 16, to pull a pint for me and bring it over. Isn't that against the law?
AActually, it is not. Although the young man is underage in the sense of buying and consuming alcohol, he is not covered by the same law when he is working in the bar.
It actually makes no difference whether the beer was a gift or whether you paid for it. The 'sale' was supervised by the person who holds the premises licence and
probably is the DPS as well. So the
exemption now contained in the 2003
Licensing Act will apply.
The Act now prohibits unsupervised sales by minors, but does not prohibit such sales entirely. In your example, the complete sale was supervised by a person qualified to do so. As a result, no law was being broken.
If the young man was in the bar on his own, he would not be allowed to sell alcohol to anyone, because the supervision required by the Act is for each and every sale.
You cannot give a "blanket" authorisation
to a young employee at the beginning of
a session.
