The House of Lords Licensing Act 2003 Committee will hear from the off-trade and licensing bodies tomorrow Tuesday 6 September.
The Licensing Act 2003 set out to provide greater freedom to the hospitality and leisure industry, as well as giving consumers more choice. At the same time the new legislation was intended to grant authorities the appropriate powers to deal with misuse of these freedoms.
Representatives from licensing bodies, such as the Institute of Licensing, and the British Institute of Innkeeping, as well as the off-trade, such as the Association of Convenience Stores, will be asked questions. These could include:
- How bad is the issue of excessive drinking?
- Is the availability of super-strength alcohol a concern?
- Should a minimum unit price be introduced?
- How is the increase of home delivery and pre-loading having an impact?
- Does the Licensing Act need to be updated or improved?
- Do organisations fully understand the Act?
At 10:40am the Committee will hear from Daniel Davies, National Chairman, Institute of Licensing; John Miley, Chair, National Association of Licensing and Enforcement Officers, Marie-Claire Frankie, Licensing Solicitor, National Association of Licensing and Enforcement Officers and Michael Kheng, British Institute of Innkeeping.
Then at 11:30am the Committee will hear from the off-trade, taking evidence from James Lowman, Chief Executive, Association of Convenience Stores; Miles Beale, Chief Executive, Wine and Spirit Trade Association (WSTA); Gill Sherratt, Licensing Consultant for off-licence chains.
Audio from the evidence session will be broadcast live, and then archived, on the internet at www.parliamentlive.tv. The entire public meeting can also be listened to at any time after the event and it is now possible to clip parts of evidence sessions and share them on social media and third party websites.
You can keep up to date with evidence sessions on the Committee’s website and on Twitter by following #HLlicensing
UK Alcohol consumption is tracking down and has been for around 10 years.
UK Wine consumption will not hit 2008 levels again according to most (statistical) commentators
The session and agenda does however raise a few questions itself. If excessive drinking is an issue then what is the measure of ‘how bad’? It rather leaves the question open to any interested subject campaigners (anti-alcohol lobby for example) to set the agenda rather than necessarily introduce a rounded judgement.
And so the poor questions go on – super strength alcohol – what on earth does that mean? Most wine at 11-15% alcohol is super strength by the measure of that poorly phrased question. Of course in the industry we might know that the phrase usually refers to beer. But it leaves it open to a very broad interpretation, fudge, bias and innuendo.
Should minimum pricing be introduced – so this is a set-up is it? And bearing in mind that one major campaigning supermarket described minimum pricing as duty plus vat – in other words meaningless.
In the round, if these are the questions then it is a very poorly constructed enquiry, which is open to lobbying groups from whichever side playing it how they want. Is this really what we want from the second house of parliament that is meant to challenge the government? Does it represent ‘in-depth consideration of public policy’ as it reports this function is about on its website?
We will all see soon.