Roy Beers: The Scottish Licensing Act should keep lawyers in work for the foreseeable future

As professional loophole-spotters they could be seen as people with a major concern in identifying any ambiguities or problematic turns of phrase which could spell negative implications for their clients.

But perhaps the most surprising thing at the Big Licensing Conference in Glasgow - organised by highly influential legal journal Scottish Licensing Law and Practice - was the sort of "spirit of the Blitz" which seemed to prevail.

A couple of years ago during the transition to the new Act there was doom and gloom aplenty, with much angst centred on whether thousands of licences could ever be switched from the old system to the new.

This time around, it was a bit different. The mood was jovial - it was an unusually sunny day, which helped - even if the speeches were laden with bitter sarcasm at the "dog's dinner" the political class is reckoned to have made of the should-have-been bright new dawn of Scottish drinks rules.

It wasn't just the lawyers, but also trade organisations, board conveners and officials, who are all now said to take it as a given that the system has become a desperate mess - one likely (they said) to become still more gummed up with the launch, eventually, of the new Alcohol (etc) Bill.

It is this Bill which contains the headline-grabbing min pricing proposal, which was "moved" from a different piece of legislation, the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Bill - part of which aims to tidy up some of the loose ends of existing legislation.

One random example of a tidy-up - apparently in some areas it can take six weeks to get an occasional licence; in a "new, improved" version this system could be radically improved. A reprise of the appeals procedure has also been welcomed.

But lawyer John Loudon said flatly that much of the present shambles was predicted and could have been avoided if those who drafted and enacted the new rules over about a decade had done a little more listening.

Some of the problems thrown up are so abstruse they almost defy description in normal English, but they cause real enough headaches for licensees battling to survive the system.

Lawyer Archie Maciver said the "absolute nonsense" of the licence transfer regulations had him "reaching for the paracetamol on a daily basis."

The basic argument is that politicians added too many bells and whistles to the original framework, creating a jungle of unintended consequences.

They all wanted to have a shot at "improving" the system, is a common view, and the subsequent legislation - instead of being the model of seamless logic envisaged by the late Sheriff Principal Gordon Nicholson QC - is typically seen as a series of ill-fitting fudges and compromises.

These create problems which then need to be sorted by adding still more legislation - all of it set to run behind schedule while the politicians bicker.

Councillor Douglas Campbell, convener of South Ayrshire licensing board, said: "The new Act stipulated a range of irresponsible promotions but then (Scottish) Parliament, in its wisdom, deemed that off-sales should be exempt from the key provisions that prevented upselling.

"The Act's support for continuing buy one get one free offers and three bottles of wine for less than the price of two means the majority of alcohol consumed in Scotland can be sold by means of irresponsible promotions.

"Added to which is the fact that the new law has tipped the balance even further towards off-sales consumption because on-sales licences throughout Scotland can no longer compete through promotions."

He is, in fact, firmly on the side of pubs. He says the Act has simply given further impetus to the drive towards home drinking, which he blames for much of the ill health the legislation was supposed to address.

All this is just a flavour of the generally unpublicised background context to the latest legislative trauma, the Alcohol (etc) Bill, with its lurking "social responsibility" menace. Who pays, how much; and who decides? To quote stargazer Sir Patrick Moore: "We just don't know."

John Loudon said: "My attempt to get the committee to look at widening the levy to the individuals actually responsible for any hassle, got nowhere."

Patrick Browne, chief executive of the Scottish Beer and Pub Association, produced stats which he said proved that drink consumption was actually falling, and said that Scottish Government stats on drink regularly failed to carry the "health warning" placed by the researchers who'd produced them.

His implication seemed clear. False ideas are repeated as news headlines and rapidly become policy imperatives.

Minimum pricing may be the flagship issue, currently stymied in political deadlock but still very much on the agenda - thanks, in part, to wall-to-wall support from the health lobby at all levels.

But it's just one hot potato in an increasingly politicised debate in which, it's persistently argued, the "new ideas" continually put forward take no account of the trouble we're already in.

There is a bright side to all this, however, as John Loudon notes: "We should be grateful to government for providing a ready supply of work for lawyers for the foreseeable future and beyond."