Sanctions to improve timing

During the recent committee stage in the House of Lords for the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, one peer (no doubt prompted by a local authority 'minder') put down an amendment to allow councils to postpone the 28-day objection period for licence applications until they had put the material on their website.

The argument was that members of the public would not necessarily be aware of the proposal when the notice went up the day after the application was lodged, so that the clock should only start when the authority got round to refreshing their web pages, probably the following week.

I am glad to say that this proposal did not go forward, but it is an indication that some councils think they are a breed apart when it comes to complying with statutory timescales, whereas they stick rigidly to notice periods when it comes to the applicant.

Most frustrating is, of course, the 10 working-day rule for temporary event notices (TENs), which this reform Bill will at least improve in certain cases. It is as if the Government at the time failed to appreciate that circumstances change and that it was an essential requirement for a short-notice permission, the vast majority of which go off without any trouble at all. After all, we had virtually 24-hour permissions under the old law and I rarely, if ever, heard of a problem then.

But a 'late' application for a TEN will be turned down flat, even though I have yet to receive the acknowledgement of a TEN within the statutory period, and in several cases have never had an acknowledgement at all. Similarly, last week I received a licence variation that had been applied for (and granted) in November 2010. How does it take them more than six months to produce the paperwork?

At last, it would appear, someone is fighting back about the dilatory nature of local council response. I understand one council is to be judicially reviewed for failing to hold a hearing anywhere close to the required statutory period laid down in the Licensing Hearings Regulations, in spite of the fact that during the extended period this licensee is prevented from trading and is losing money hand over fist.

This is not uncommon. There is a culture in local government that returning forms or acknowledgements is something you do "next week, when Fred comes back". A recent permit application was returned three weeks after the "date of grant" with an oblique reference to an annual fee due "30 days after grant" — in other words, next week. No question of giving the full 30 days' notice, then. Just pay up now.

I have lost count of the times I have had to phone up, repeatedly, to find out whether an application has been granted by delegated authority, because no one has bothered to monitor the situation.

The general carelessness is brought about by a complete lack of sanctions against councils that are inefficient or just plain lazy. Please don't tell me about the ombudsman, because, as Denis Healey MP once famously remarked, that is like "being savaged by a dead sheep".

If councils were able to have some form of penalty for lateness, that would be fine. But, of course, this is taxpayers' money we are talking about, so fines would rebound on the local economy. Perhaps we should publish a 'List of Shame', rather like we did during the appalling delays over transition in 2005, 2006 and even 2007! That situation should have warned us that things were not going to get better.

And they didn't.