Gerry's tinkering with licensing laws

Chelsea are riding high at the moment, but, supporters or not, many will remember the days of Claudio Ranieri, also known as the Tinkerman. He could not leave well alone. As it turned out, his changes were less than inspired, and they tended to demoralise even the good players, until he was eventually shown the door.

I am tending to think of Department for Culture Media & Sport minister Gerry Sutcliffe in the same light. For more than five years now we have been consistently told that the new Licensing Act was a thing of wonder, perfectly formed and highly successful. It delivered the best possible outcomes, both for the user and for the administrator. Coupled with this was the opportunity for the public to become more closely involved in the licensing process — not the drinker, of course, whose opinions did not matter, but the objector who didn't like the pub in the first place.

But since last year, all that has changed. "Claudio" Sutcliffe has been tinkering, issuing a consultation here and a consultation there (which are not really consultations at all, of course, just pre-announcements), all designed to "improve" the Act. He has been ably assisted by his "minders" at the Home Office, who are chipping in with extra players and ideas, not least the Universal Condition, five of which are now heading for every pub and club in the land.

It fair makes your head spin!

Gerry's latest idea is to clobber the 24-hour drinking headlines in the popular press (and in the raddled old mind of Today presenter John Humphreys, who still persists in the idea that pubs are running open-all-hours bars throughout the country).

He has suggested that local councils will be able to issue closure orders for whole streets or city centres that are experiencing drink-related disorder, and he has set this little curfew as the hours from 3am to 6am — a time when the vast majority of pubs are well shut up for the night, and even Tesco might be thinking of calling it a day.

Now, I suspect that this is the strategic fall-back position from the lamentable failure of Alcohol Disorder Zones. Remember them? They were going to "cure" city-centre rowdiness by getting pubs to pay for clean-up operations and extra policing at weekends. But they were so complicated and the costing so convoluted that not a single borough has been rash enough to go down that route.

A completely unused law, no good to anyone.

Turf-out at 3am​

Here's another bit of tinkering, though. It will have precious little effect, but it returns the night clubs to the good old days of the 2am brawl, instead this time it will be 3am. Instead of wind-down and chill out, with soft music and soft drinks, it will be turf-out time again, with tanked up punters seeking to take their frustration out on a shop window or somebody else's face.

Curfews run counter to every one of the new policy strategies of phased dispersal, but when you have run out of ideas and the Daily Mail is on your back, what can you do?

All this tends to show that the manager has no really constructive plans for the future direction of licensing and is responding to adverse publicity and a clamour for action.

To take the football analogy one stage further, when you are sliding down the table and even your own side are not pulling together, how can you build a table-topping team?

Meanwhile, the hapless licensee has to keep up with the changes in the law happening on a weekly basis, and still try and turn a profit to pay the rent. But his problems are at the bottom of the pile.