Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220-239)
21 DECEMBER 2004
MR PHILIP
DOYLE, MR
STEPHEN GREEN,
PROFESSOR DICK
HOBBS, MR
JOHN HUTSON
AND MS
CLARE EAMES
Q220 Mr Clappison: On the subject of
planning, again, how far would you say the planning authorities
are aware of their duties under section 17 of the Crime and Disorder
Act to reduce crime and disorder?
Professor Hobbs: I am surprised
that section 17 is not used more. When we started to carry out
our research many local police managers were talking about this
issue, but I do not know. Stephen Green knows more about this
than myself, but it appears not to have been used to its full
potential, and I am surprised at that.
Q221 Mr Clappison: Perhaps I could ask
Mr Green if he could give us his views on this.
Mr Green: I would echo what Professor
Hobbs has said. I think there has been some frustration from a
police point of view and, forgive me, because it might have changed
but when section 17 first came in where planning was concerned,
the local authority were bound by it but any planning inspector
who heard an appeal thereafter was not. I am not sure whether
that situation has changed or not but it certainly was the situation.
In using section 17 in planning terms, there was a significant
inhibition there. I think there is a real test now. One of the
reasons why I was content to see licensing move across to local
authorities was because of my hope that section 17 would come
into play far more in licensing decisions, because obviously the
magistrates are not covered by section 17, so I think there is
potential for section 17 to assist in this. I do echo what Professor
Hobbs has said, that the evidence to date is that it has not been
exploited to the extent that I suspect it was envisaged it would
be exploited when it was put in the Crime and Disorder Act in
1997.
Q222 Mr Clappison: Can I ask you about
one other thing arising out of the statistic we have been given,
and I know that Nottingham is a city where there has been a tradition
of drinking over the years, as in other cities?
Mr Green: It is not the only city.
Q223 Mr Clappison: I do remember Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning where the character played by Albert
Finney may perhaps have been binge drinking although of course
we were not aware of it. I was struck by a statistic which we
have been given that in Nottingham the licence capacity in 1997
was 61,000 and by 2004 that had risen to 108,000.
Mr Green: That is correct.
Q224 Mr Clappison: That is an enormous
increase over just seven years, is it not? Nottingham only has
a population of about 250,000-300,000, has it not?
Mr Green: It has, but Greater
Nottingham has probably got a population of twice that. You have
got Nottingham city which sits within a wider conurbation of other
districts.
Q225 Mr Clappison: How many people are
out drinking on Friday and Saturday nights in Nottingham?
Mr Green: I would expect that
last Friday night there would have been between 80,000 and 100,000
people in Nottingham city centre and about 40 police officers
maximum policing them. It is an extremely busy place. There are
an awful lot of people out there and when the pubs and clubs turn
out an awful lot of people are criss-crossing the city trying
to get their transport, go to the one public toilet that exists
in the city centre, get a pizza or whatever it is that they are
trying to do.
Q226 Mr Clappison: It sounds as though
you agree with Professor Hobbs' point that transport is important.
Mr Green: I think that is crucial.
It is all about planning in its wider sense, it seems to me. We
can do what we want in policy terms but we have to plan for it.
What worries me is that we seem to have taken a policy decision
which says, "We want a more liberal regime in terms of licensing
and the business side of it but what we have not done is guarantee
that the infrastructure will be put in place for that to happen.
Professor Hobbs' point about infrastructure on transport, on toilets,
on police officers, on medical workers, on ambulances, on all
those things is very important. Routinely I find that on a Saturday
night my police officers are ferrying people to casualty because
they have run out of ambulances. That is as it is now and so if
we do not plan the infrastructure but allow a liberalisation of
hours then all we are doing is further outgrowing what is already
an overstretched infrastructure.
Q227 Chairman: I want to ask Mr Doyle
about the Crime and Disorder Act and the Licensing Act. If your
members in Westminster said, "We want to apply section 17
very firmly to all our licensing decisions", would you be
confident as a professional officer in advising them that they
could do that or would you, as so often seems to happen with these
things, say, "No, we think the Licensing Act does not really
allow us to apply that as strongly as you would like"?
Mr Doyle: No. I think I could
quite confidently say that the members are advised that section
17 is an important consideration for them.
Q228 Chairman: If that happens are you
confident that if a decision that your licensing authority takes
is appealed to the courts, the courts would uphold the decision
taken on the basis of section 17?
Mr Doyle: Thank you. I was just
going to go on to say that the policy in the authority I work
in at Westminster has a saturation element to it in certain parts,
such as Soho and Covent Garden. Very often what will happen is
that the members will apply their policy not to grant any further
late night drink-led entertainment in that particular area. They
will not be able to do that routinely because all that has been
taken away by the Licensing Act 2003 unless there is an objection.
What will happen often is that that decision will be appealed
and will go to the courts and the evidence to the court will include
the fact that Westminster's policy approach is driven in part
by section 17, but the courts are not bound by that, of course.
Chairman: That may be something the committee
will take an interest in.
Q229 David Winnick: Chief Constable,
how far do you feel that pubs and clubs should contribute to policing
where there are undoubtedly alcohol-related disorders?
Mr Green: I would link that to
the answer that I gave to Mr Clappison because again I fully understand
the point that Mr Hutson was making about trying to respond to
what consumers want but I do make the point that Professor Hobbs
made, that if the infrastructure is insufficient to cope with
that, then somebody somewhere has to pay. It seems to me that
the obvious people to pay are the industry because the benefits
to them are likely to be so great. From my point of view I would
welcome a situation where, as part of building a regime in a local
town or city centre, a contribution could be required from a licensed
premise on that basis which could be directly seen to go into
providing a stronger infrastructure to deal with the kinds of
problems that have been described.
Q230 David Winnick: Mr Hutson, I take
it your company is only too willing to contribute?
Mr Hutson: It is a very complex
area. Of course, we already do contribute in many ways in a general
sense.
Q231 David Winnick: What do you mean
by "in a general sense", that we are all taxpayers?
Mr Hutson: We are all taxpayers
and also ratepayers.
Q232 David Winnick: Coming to the specific
point, we all know we are taxpayers and ratepayers and council
tax payers, but can we come to the actual point?
Mr Hutson: The notion that if
the licence industry is giving rise to a greater need of police
resources and therefore there should be more resources put to
the police, I do not think I, acting on behalf of Wetherspoon
or just out of common sense would object. Of course there should
be more police resources put to dealing with licensing issues.
The question of whether specifically the licence industry should
just pay more I generally think is a complex issue. For most premises
in city centres now, in order to work beyond 11 pm, one of the
conditions placed on a licence is to employ door staff, and nearly
all premises in city centres now do employ door staff. If it was
put to me, "You may need fewer door staff if there are more
police. Would you prefer to switch your resources from door staff
to police?", I would say, "Yes, thank you; no problem".
I think it is an area where there is certainly a need for more
debate but I do not think there is a clear-cut answer. My final
point is that the notion that the licensee should pay more or
less assumes that the licensed premises in the city centre are
all the same. Wetherspoon spends millions of pounds on training.
We have six trained managers per pub on average. We have far fewer
incidents of violence and disorder arising from our premises than
other premises. We would argue that you cannot just apply one
simple tariff to every licensed premise when it is quite obvious
that certain licensed premises are run to a much higher standard
than others and maybe a lot more care and attention should be
paid to those premises that are not basically running a good ship.
Q233 David Winnick: I take that to be
a "no" answer. As regards less violence and disorder
from your premises, how do you know? Do not misunderstand me.
The purpose of your company is to maximise drinking. I am not
suggesting that if someone is very intoxicated they are going
to be encouraged to drink further, but in the main your company
would not be very happy if people minimised their drinking and
everybody had one pint instead of whatever. Once they come out
of your premises how do you know that they are not involved in
alcohol-related disorders?
Mr Hutson: Of course, we do not
go to the extent of following people home and things like that.
What I can say is that, probably uniquely of any pub company in
the last ten years, the vast majority of Wetherspoon's pubs were
not licensed premises before, so we have been before magistrates'
courts up and down the land to obtain new licences and very often
the police have taken it upon themselves to inquire of other police
officers around the country, "What has been the impact of
a Wetherspoon in your town? Have you any issues with that particular
pub?". Obviously, if they pick somebody up later in the evening
and say, "Where have you been this evening?", they can
find some link. We are not perfect, we do have issues and we try
to deal with them proactively. We believe that well-run premises
do not give rise to as much disorder and problems for the police
force as badly run premises, which has been tested by the fact
that about 99% of all of our licence applications ever have been
granted; even in Nottingham recently we had two late-night premises,
for both of which the hours were extended without any objection
or comment from the police or anyone else in the local authority.
In a way, that is my answer by virtue of the fact that no-one
has come along and said, "In town A or town B you do give
these problems and that is why in town C you are not having a
licence".
Mr Green: I think there is a fundamental
point in the question you raise, and it is this. If you look what
we know about policing, in our 21st century up-to-date knowledge,
what we know is this. Policing works best when we are in problem-solving
mode, attacking the root causes of problems rather than out on
the street coping with the consequences. I think that the whole
essence of what I am trying to say to you this morning is that
we need to position policing in this debate in a place where all
of the incentives in the regime are towards everyone operating
in that problem-solving mode rather than just the police. My plea
for a contribution from the industry would very much be around
creating positive incentives for the industry to work together
in that mode. What distinguishes alcohol-related violence to me
from, say, drug-fuelled crime or drug-related gun crime is that
selling alcohol is a legal business. We have decided that it is
socially acceptable for it to happen. We ought to say that there
is no reason why it cannot happen without all of these problems
being created and we should put in place the incentives whereby,
because we design our town and city centres properly because there
is the infrastructure and because the industry is responsible,
policing is what it should be: the backstop at the end if something
on a rare occasion breaks down rather than the thin blue line
trying to hold it all together on Friday and Saturday night. My
plea to you would be that if it were possible to push for a contribution,
link it directly to the town's or city's success in eradicating
the problems that it has. I would just pick up a point made between
Mr Hutson and Professor Hobbs. We operate a top-ten system. There
are 350-odd licences in the square mile of Nottingham city centre.
We keep an eye on who the top ten are for causing those problems.
I have to say Wetherspoon are not in it. We are able to focus
on premises, but exactly the point that Professor Hobbs made:
a significant number of our incidents do not happen in premises;
they happen in public spaces If you know or have ever seen the
Market Square in Nottingham, which is literally surrounded by
licensed premises, if there is a fight in the Market Square how
do you know whether those people drank at Wetherspoon or Yates's
or The Goose on the Square? There is a whole range of them. They
cannot just say, "We never make any calls to the police;
therefore we are not involved in this". Every premise in
that location contributes to the challenge of maintaining order
and good behaviour on the streets and therefore ought to contribute
to the infrastructure that suppresses those problems.
Q234 David Winnick: Do you agree with
that, Professor Hobbs?
Professor Hobbs: I am a big fan
of "the polluter pays". I think it makes sense. However,
we have already heard from Wetherspoon about some of the problems.
It comes down to what the polluter will be paying for. There have
been experiments with regard to the night time economy and operators
paying for, for instance, police overtime to police their particular
part of the night strip. This leads to disputes. If police officers
are aware, for instance, that there is a fight 100 yards away
from the strip that they are being employed to police on behalf
of licensed premises, of course, they are obliged to attend that
disorder, they are obliged to assist their colleagues. That means
they are stepping outside the contract that has been made with
those particular operators on that particular strip. This is quite
a serious problem. There is a study that has been carried out
by academics at Leeds University funded by the Rowntree Trust
which tries to look at this issue of what is basically a part-time
privatisation of public policing. It is problematic and it will
be disputed. We are heading for another gold rush for the lawyers,
I feel, although I am in favour of it. The other aspect of what
the polluter might pay for is to reinforce the infrastructure
of the night. A case in point would be in my home city of Durham
where I work. There we had a very popular cinema which, after
a huge dispute, was eventually turned into an 800-capacity bar—and
we have not talked about capacity here because it is licensed
premises and it is important—and part of the deal that was
struck in court when the licence was awarded was that we would
lose our cinema but we would gain an electronic urinal which would
pop up at certain times in the high street right outside Burger
King, by the way, which is another aspect of entertaining in the
night time economy. It is really what the polluter will pay for,
I think, and to be aware that if the polluter does contribute
they will feel that they have a stake in what that money will
be spent on and there will be an enormous amount of disputes there.
Q235 David Winnick: Chief Constable,
the evidence which has come to us shows that there has now been
a sharp decline in prosecution for drunkenness. You have enough
responsibilities as far as Nottingham is concerned, but from your
experience as Chief Constable and your previous positions in the
police force, is there any reason why there has been a desire
to stop prosecutions or certainly lower the number you are prosecuting
for drunkenness, because it is certainly not because the people
involved are fewer in number?
Mr Green: I think there is a whole
range of reasons and none of them is about the problem declining.
I probably will miss some out but I am looking back over the last
ten years. If someone is fighting in the street and under the
influence of drink a police officer has a range of different offences
that they could arrest that person and ultimately charge them
for. Certainly part of it reflects as it were the growing popularity
of using Public Order Act offences, so you do not have to arrest
for drunk and disorderly; you could arrest under section 4 or
5 of the Public Order Act, which are about causing harassment,
alarm and distress or using threatening behaviour and things like
that. One of the positive incentives to do that was that there
was a time, not now, when you could get someone's fingerprints
for arresting for a Public Order Act offence but not for a drunk
and disorderly offence. There is a whole range of incentives in
there. The other issue equally is that when you look at the statistics
around deaths in custody and the link between people who die in
custody and drunkenness, there is an education of police officers
in that sometimes people who are so drunk that they need to be
arrested are medical problems and they ought to go into hospital
rather than crime problems and ought to come into the police custody
area. I think police officers are much more discerning now about
where they ultimately send someone. That would particularly feed
through into what used to be called simple drunkenness, being
drunk in the street, rather than any disorderly behaviour being
exhibited. I think it reflects a change in behaviour pattern in
police officers rather than a change in the problem that we see
on the ground. Police officers have found it easier and more useful
in terms of court outcomes, say, fingerprinting and photographing,
etc, to use Public Order Act offences rather than drunkenness
offences.
Q236 David Winnick: Would it be going
too far to say that where a person is clearly intoxicated, that
he or she is not driving but intoxicated on the street, not necessarily
involved any violence, the police will have enough jobs on his
hands and therefore would, say, turn a blind eye?
Mr Green: I do not think they
would turn a blind eye. That is not my experience. When I was
a constable 25 years ago that would have been a good probationer's
arrest, would it not, because it is getting you used to arresting
people. If a probationer constable turned up at Nottingham Bridewell
with a simple drunk now the custody sergeant would not be pleased.
What we tend to see now is that they are a medical problem rather
than a criminal justice system problem. They will get nothing
at court in sentence terms and what they really need is medical
help rather than the criminal justice system.
Q237 David Winnick: "Turning a blind
eye" is not a phrase you particularly like but basically
that is what it amounts to?
Mr Green: I think you would be
more likely to call an ambulance than put him in the back of a
police car.
Q238 Chairman: The government have made
clear that they would like more people to be prosecuted and they
have introduced fixed penalty notices so more people are being
punished for this type of behaviour. Have fixed penalty notices
fundamentally changed that because the idea now is that you ought
to be able to levy a fine on somebody very simply even though
you are then going to send them off to hospital or wherever else?
Mr Green: What is not happening,
or certainly not in Nottingham anyway, is that we are not giving
fixed penalty tickets out to drunks in the street and leaving
them with it. If someone needs the criminal justice system to
intervene then a person under the influence of drink needs to
be arrested. Our expectation would be that the first gateway to
pass through is, is it right to arrest this person because of
what they are doing? Having been arrested, the bonus is there
to the police officer then that, rather than have to prepare a
court file for a relatively minor offence in the grand scheme
of things, there is one piece of paper to fill in called the fixed
penalty ticket and then you go out and get the next one. That
is the main impact that it has made.
Q239 Chairman: Is it changing things
on the ground?
Mr Green: I think so. From Nottingham's
point of view anyway, we are in the first six months and what
we are seeing is a progressive increase in the number of these
tickets for drunkenness and public order offences being issued.
What I cannot report to you because I think it is too early to
say is, what outcomes is that delivering on the ground? Our soft
perception would be that it is not yet delivering the kinds of
outcome that we want to see but I think police officers like fixed
penalty notices. They make their job much easier and in pure productivity
terms it should make them more productive because they have not
got the couple of hours' work to do in preparing a court file.
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