Illusion of cutting red tape

We seem to be in the midst of yet another welter of adverse reports and comments on the drinks industry, to be joined by not one but two parliamentary inquiries into the working of the new Licensing Act.

Now, the Daily Telegraph has joined in the fun with a leader last week proposing that responsibility for licensing should go back to the magistrates and the police, where it belongs.

In case you get excited by this prospect, the Telegraph also suggests, in its "hanging's too good for them" mode, that a single underage sale should result in the loss of the licence. That'll show 'em!

But isn't all this ballyhoo indicative of the complete bafflement of the Government in dealing with one of society's long-standing ills? They thought, wrongly, that a new Licensing Act plus a Home Office legislative blitz would sort out Britain's booze culture. And it hasn't. Three years down the line and the transfer to local authorities has in reality done absolutely nothing, if you take the evidence of the KPMG report, to change either the customers or the retailers.

What the new Licensing Act has done, regrettably, is to place licensing in the hands of some people with very patchy track records on good administration.

I do not seek to make a blanket condemnation here of all local authorities, but licensing did not come to them as a gift from heaven and some of them have struggled. Others have used it as a political football, with councillors quite wrongly acting as cheerleaders for objectors. In some cases, the independence of the licensing authority itself is open to doubt. In fact, many of the fears expressed by practitioners in the run-up to the new legislation, which were frankly rubbished by the civil servants and ministers at the time, have become reality.

One of my main criticisms is the sheer lack of professionalism brought to the subject by junior and middle management in local government.

Again, the Home Office and Department for Culture, Media & Sport mandarins do not care about this: their aversion to the legal

profession is fairly well known and it was a policy decision to abide by the "rough justice" approach of the town hall and the citizens.

There are, manifestly, no sanctions of any kind against local authorities who get the law or procedure wrong. The only recourse for an aggrieved licensee is an expensive trip to the High Court, which few are willing or able to take.

Drinking culture​

But the administrative shortcomings do not really have much to do with the underlying problems of a drinking culture. I agree with the commentators who say that alcohol disorder zones and smaller wine glasses are just tinkering.

A government that seriously thinks these types of measures are going to address the main problems is short on ideas and, it must be said, resolve. The answer appears

to be to pass even more intrusive legislation, cut limits, fix prices and close more premises while at the same time heralding the new licensing legislation as a success.

It may be too much to hope that the new quango called the Local Better Regulation Office, which gained its official status this month, but has been around since early last year, will have success in making licensing administration better, which is one of its many objectives. To the critics, this is yet another piece of window-dressing on the perennial ambition of all governments to cut red tape.

Yet this Government has been guilty more than most of introducing sheer reams of the stuff and my daily contact with licensees means that I know how much they are engulfed in it — not just on licensing, but on many other aspects of the law.

What it needs is another Alexander the Great, who rejected unpicking the problematic knot and just put his sword through it!