Licensing Act 2003: Post-Legislative Scrutiny (Licensing Act 2003 Report) — House of Lords, 2017-12-20
Topic: Domestic Commerce
John Davies (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, it was a privilege to serve on the committee. I greatly enjoyed the experience and found it very instructive, and there was a very good and productive relationship among the members of the committee. All of that was made possible, largely, by the extremely sympathetic but also efficient way in which the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, presided over our activities. The subject is not entirely unimportant. A very large number of people are employed by the entertainment industry in this country, if you take pubs, clubs, bars, discos and so forth, and it is an important part of many people’s social lives. We had a lot of evidence, as the noble Baroness has just said, that the strong tendency in the last 10 years has been to move from purchasing alcohol and consuming it in a bar or pub to purchasing it in a supermarket, rather more cheaply, and taking it home—probably to drink it watching a screen and often, I fear rather sadly, alone. The running down of pubs in this country and their replacement by people drinking at home is not necessarily a happy change in our society. However, it is not for us in a free society to tell our fellow citizens how they should conduct their private lives; it is merely our job as legislators to see whether there are any problems which affect the interests of third parties and therefore may need to be dealt with On that point, when anybody talks about licensing, you soon find that although the group does not split—we certainly did not split and there were no extremists on our committee—it develops two different tendencies. On one side, there are always those who see themselves first and foremost not so much as protectors of morals—which would have been the case 100 years ago when licensing was being discussed and was a matter of great political controversy, as your Lordships will recall at that time—but certainly as protectors of health, public order and other things. On the other side are the more libertarian-minded people who feel that the entertainment industry is above all meant to make sure people have a nice time or some happy occasions and that regulations should be imposed reluctantly and with a relatively soft touch if at all possible, although obviously serious abuses have to be dealt with and the public protected from malefactors of different kinds That tendency duly emerged in our committee, as might have been foreseen. One lively discussion led me to recall that wonderful play of Shakespeare’s, which I think is his most amusing although not his greatest, "Twelfth Night", and the dialogue between the puritan, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the bon viveur, Sir Toby Belch. They had a slightly angry discussion on this precise matter, which ends with Sir Toby Belch saying: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" I do not think any members of our committee thought there should be no more cakes and ale, and we came to a good consensus on our main recommendations, which the noble Baroness has outlined. Clearly, I do not need to repeat what she said on airports, as there is absolute agreement about that She mentioned something very important: we came to the clear decision that we should not add to the criteria for obtaining a licence to run a pub. There has been quite a lot of agitation in the country in favour of a public health criterion, but after considerable debate there was complete consensus that that would not be a good idea; it would be taking regulation rather too far The most important recommendation that we came to was that licensing committees should be merged with planning committees. You might think that that was a common-sense proposal; after all, it is pretty ridiculous—we had evidence that this has happened on a number of occasions—for a local authority planning committee to decide that yes, it is a good idea to have a pub in a particular location and give planning consent, while simultaneously the licensing committee says no, it would be a bad idea and it will not give licensing consent. Does the developer have consent to build his pub in those circumstances? No, he does not. Does he perhaps think he has, and does he spend money on that basis when he gets planning consent, assuming that there will not be incoherence within the public authority and that the licensing committee will not say something else? Yes, he could well do. That is an abuse and a bad situation. There is a much greater potential risk of it happening than any actuality but it does happen, and anyway it is simply a bad area of law. Our job, above all, is to make sure that the law is sensible, clear and coherent and has the respect of the public, and none of those causes is well advanced by a mess and muddle of that kind I was very disappointed, therefore, that the Government did not accept that recommendation. My strong impression was that their rejection was on the purely bureaucratic basis, which we all know too well, that it was not invented here. The arguments in the Government’s response are purely bureaucratic, such as that one of those committees—I cannot remember which—is set up on a statutory basis and the other on a non-statutory basis. That was not relevant at all to the functional issues at stake; if anything needed to be amended to put both committees on a statutory basis, that could be done with one line in a statutory instrument, so that was not a convincing answer. The Government did not really address that issue in the way that I hoped they would, and the issue remains very much on the table The experience persuaded me that a retrospective review of legislation is an excellent idea. When you have something like the Licensing Act, which affects an awful lot of people, after a decade or so—more than a decade has gone by in this case—it is a good idea for Parliament to look systematically at what it has done and whether it is right, and to draw conclusions and report to the public. That is something we should continue to do. It is a good use of our time and the various talents and expertise that this House can bring to bear for the Lords to take on that task from time to time. I hope we continue to do it.