Business and Planning Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-13
Topic: Mixed Topics
Richard Balfe (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I also intend to speak to Amendments 3 and 11 in my name This Bill demonstrates exactly why we need to get back to work as a House of Lords. Some 70 Members will speak in different parts of this Committee stage and there is a large number of amendments to what is a highly contentious Bill. This weekend, the Government said that we should go back to work; perhaps we should start by setting an example and getting the House of Lords back to work Before I get to the meat of this, I note that Labour is not supporting any Divisions so we will probably have a Division-free day. However, many items in the Bill deserve considerably closer scrutiny. I hope that, before it comes back next week, there will be considerable concessions from the Government; otherwise, I fear that there will be Divisions. Looking at recent history, the Government are not on a great winning streak there By way of background, Amendment 1 seeks to provide that premises in an exclusion zone cannot benefit from the provisions of the Bill. Exclusion cumulative impact zones, as they are called, were introduced in the Blair/Brown years after the Government introduced in the early part of this century a number of changes to the licensing laws, which they felt would help to bring about a café economy. Well, they did not; they brought about absolute chaos My wife spent four years on Forest Heath District Council, a rural council up here in East Anglia. For most of that time, she and her Labour and Liberal fellow councillors were involved in trying to get a cumulative impact zone imposed on a town called Newmarket, where we were living at the time. The fact of the matter is that the licensing laws were relaxed to such an extent that they caused enormous problems They still do. In the town of Cambridge, where I have lived for a good number of years, there is a cumulative impact zone on Mill Road. We have plenty of experience of the problems that excessive alcohol licences can lead to. There are more than 50 licensed premises in the Mill Road area. We have gone to considerable effort to get alcohol licences either in place or extended. Only a couple of weeks ago, we had an application from Brothers Supermarket. It wanted a licence to sell alcohol from 8 am to 11.30 pm. The person representing it knew all the legal arguments—indeed, they were a good advocate—but it was next door to another premises called Nip-In, where you could nip in at any point and buy alcohol. The problem was that, when this application went forward, it had 76 objections to it and not a single person sent in a representation in its favour because it was widely recognised not that there was anything wrong with Brothers Supermarket but that the area was totally swamped by alcohol licensing This Bill seeks to make that even easier, which is why I have tabled this amendment. Where there is a cumulative impact zone, it is clearly already in place and it demonstrates that there are severe problems with alcohol. You do not get a zone declared unless the police are on your side and there is fairly unanimous support from the council. That was the case here. Not only did no one support it; the police were against it and representatives of all three political parties sent in statements opposing this particular licence. After a three-hour hearing, it was rejected This Bill seeks to get things decided within seven days. How on earth is that to be done if multiple applications have to be dealt with? It is quite likely that there will be. I seem to remember that the Blair/Jowell Bill was also enacted in August and local authorities were caught off their guard I know that the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and several other noble Lords are vice-presidents of the Local Government Association. I am not and I have not had anything to do with local government since I left the Greater London Council in 1977, so to put it mildly, I am a bit out of date. What I would like to hear in this debate is an explanation of how the LGA proposes to handle this vis-à-vis its councils. The cumulative impact zone is just one of the problems, but there are others, all of which are highlighted here. A second one that I draw attention to in my Amendment 11 is to ask whether the police will be consulted because, at the moment, the Bill does not say that they should be. That is why the amendment seeks to add after "local persons" the words "including the local police force" Surely the police have a vested interest in whether or not order can be maintained, and they should be consulted In Amendment 3 I refer to locked-down premises. In our area, and I dare say in the rest of the country, we have had two very different experiences of the period of lockdown. I have already mentioned the licensed premises close to our house, but there are some premises, one called 5 Blends Coffee House and the other Tom’s Cakes, which were locked down for the whole period. Obviously, they need to get back into business again but some of the other ones do not, and, as will become clear in the debate, there are problems with pavements as well as other issues. The 5 Blends Coffee House has room for tables outside because it is on a corner, but Tom’s Cakes, because of the street furniture, has no room, although it does have a garden at the back, which presumably can be used without permission. Further up the road is a health food shop called Arjuna Wholefoods, which has a licence and enough room outside to set up tables. I do not think that the owners will do so, but if they did wish to set up those tables and serve glasses of wine to their customers, that would only add to the problems in the area What I am asking the Minister and the Government to do is to agree to take a much closer look at this and, particularly where there are cumulative impact zones, to say, "Right, a problem with alcohol has already been identified in the area and that should be enough for it not to be exacerbated by making it even easier to extend licensing facilities and thus make it easier to buy alcohol." I also do not think that it is unreasonable to ask that the police should be consulted, and when we consider locked-down premises, is there any reason why the Sainsbury’s shop in Mill Road should not be allowed to open an off licence on the pavement, given that it has a licence to sell alcohol? I do not think that it would wish to open an alcohol vending service, but what if it did? The shop has been open throughout the lockdown and, if anything, its trade has gone up because more people have been tending to shop locally. There is a need to distinguish between a firm that sells alcohol which has been open for the whole time and one that has not. With those words, I beg to move.