Licensing@aol.com
Drinking-up time puzzle
Q I am confused. You wrote last week: "Drinking-up time no longer exists and customers are subject only to any closing times that have been imposed on the premises licence." Yet in the Mandatory Conditions section on my licence it states: "the above restrictions do not prohibit: during the first 20 minutes after the above hours the consumption of alcohol on the premises." So what is my position?
A You appear to have one of the licences with what were called "embedded restrictions", which involved long quotes from the 1964 Licensing Act being included because some people thought that they carried over.
Drinking-up time did not carry over.
To express it as a mandatory condition is also wrong. Drinking-up time is not mentioned at all in the Licensing Act 2003 and it is not a condition that must be included on all licences.
There have been protracted discussions between experienced licensing lawyers and the perpetrators of these wretched embedded conditions, and your letter merely goes to show how wrong-headed it all was. What your licence does not say, of course, is that drinking up even outside the first 20 minutes is also not illegal. That is left for you to work out!
The only condition that can be imposed by virtue of a new licence which has been varied is a time when the public are admitted to the premises. If you opted for a straight conversion, there is no such time. If the licensing committee have imposed one subsequently on variation, then you must stick to it.
Are pubs metric yet?
Q My young son pointed out to me that all the bottles in the bar are in metric quantities and they pour into pint and half-pint glasses without reaching the line. Yet we still serve beer and cider in pints. Has this been changed yet and could we use, say, 50cl in future, as long as we advertised it?
A No, there is nothing new to report, except that your son is right about the strange mixture that one sees in any pub. It is, in fact, illegal to use imperial measure for some drinks, such as the four main spirits - gin, rum, vodka and whisky - and also illegal to use metric measurement for draught quantities of beer and cider.
Certain changes have been made to weights and measures legislation, but these have not included any concession either way on the use of imperial measures in pubs. The Government still insists on our opt out in Europe for our traditional measures, but the European standards of metric measurement are now obligatory in shops and supermarkets and on bottled drinks.
If you do start to use metric quantities for draught products you run the risk of prosecution, because trading standards officers will enforce the current position, as they have done in a couple of high-profile cases recently.
