Gerry's picking up the pieces

I was pleased to see Tory MP James Brokenshire picking up on my accusations about "tinkerman" licensing minister Gerry Sutcliffe in the Commons earlier this month, when the 3am curfew was added at the last moment to the Crime and Security Bill.

To be fair, it isn't Gerry's fault. He was probably told about it late in the day, like the rest of us. After all, there is no report, no survey, no data, and no recent horror stories about selling alcohol between 3am and 6am.

There are only a few hundred offences listed in that period in the statistics. Yet suddenly the Home Office wants a sales ban — even though it is highly likely that the alcoholic damage has been done before the curfew sounds anyway, and that these crimes are just the aftermath.

But Gerry is picking up the pieces. The Tories want him to be roped into the Bill Committee so that they can ask him questions on why this is necessary. I confess I join them only in wondering what it is all about, apart from window dressing.

There is no logic in it; it will not, in itself, achieve any change in behaviour or late-night city-centre disturbances. What it may do, as I and others have already commented, is to recreate a universal "chucking-out time" at 3am for late-night venues, so adding to the street problems at that particular time and causing exactly the sort of manpower problems that the police did not want at that time of the night, which is why they supported staggered closing times.

But actually, I wonder if this proposal will go the same way as Alcohol Disorder Zones (ADZs) as far as local authorities are concerned. Their police might also think as I do, and suggest that imposing a strict curfew on a street might add to their problems.

They might prefer to pick off individual premises if they consider they are potential trouble spots — and they now have plenty of powers to do so. What do they need a 3am water-cannon measure for?

Need more flexibility​

Of course, I suppose from the local authority perspective, those who opposed 24-hour licensing in the first place will have got their wish and can universally cut that back to 21 hours, telling their residents that this is another blow for local democracy.

In fact, like universal mandatory conditions, it is nothing of the sort. It is another, probably desperate, throw of the dice to undermine the concept of flexibility that underpinned the thinking over the new licensing laws. What we are left with now is a rag bag of conflicting ideas masquerading as a policy. It doesn't make sense, and I have yet to find anyone, inside or outside Government, who really thinks that it does.

It is very sad, but Gerry and his DCMS pacemakers have really lost the plot. They are under the cosh of the Home Office and health lobby on alcohol licensing, and their fall-back position is now live music, on which they are also floundering because there is no satisfactory compromise position between the amplifiers and the neighbours.

Every time they come up with a wizard scheme to exempt small-scale music, either the House of Lords or their own committee hit back with some amendments that will make it almost impossible to achieve a relaxation without dancing over hot coals.

Have you noticed that all the pro-trade MPs — the Tinker, Healey, Evans, Grogan et al — are all such nice guys? Perhaps we need a bruiser like Charles Clarke to knock a few heads together and put some beef into trade protection. It makes a lot of sense.