UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 80-iii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR

 

 

Tuesday 21 December 2004

MR PHILIP DOYLE, MR STEVEN GREEN, PROFESSOR DICK HOBBS,

MR JOHN HUTSON and MS CLARE EAMES

Evidence heard in Public Questions 194 - 281

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Home Affairs Committee

on Tuesday 21 December 2004

Members present

Mr John Denham, in the Chair

Mr James Clappison

Mrs Janet Dean

Mr Damian Green

Mr Gwyn Prosser

Mr Marsha Singh

Mr John Taylor

David Winnick

________________

Memoranda submitted by the Institute of Licensing, Chief Constable of

 

Nottinghamshire, University of Durham and J D Wetherspoon

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Philip Doyle, Licensing Officer, Institute of Licensing, Mr Steven Green, Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire, Professor Dick Hobbs, Department of Law, University of Durham, Mr John Hutson, Chief Executive, J D Wetherspoon and Ms Clare Eames, Director of Legal Services, J D Wetherspoon, examined.

Q194 Chairman: Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much indeed for coming to give evidence to this session, which is the third evidence session we have had as a committee on the various aspects of anti-social behaviour, and today's is focussing on binge drinking. Could I start with a general question to the Chief Constable. There has been a lot of publicity about binge drinking and associated disorder. In your experience, how serious a social problem is this? Is it very much overblown by the press, the media and sometimes the politicians or is there a real problem?

 

Mr Green: I think we see it as a significant problem, Chairman. I think I can give you a soft feel but I can give you some statistics as well, if I may. Certainly in terms of looking at the range of risks that my police divisions are dealing with, then the threat of city centre violence on a Friday/Saturday night is seen as a significant risk. I talk with a city which deals with gun crime, drug-related crime and all the range of different crimes; but we would still say that behind guns and drugs, drink-related violence is probably our next biggest threat, so it does influence operational deployment. If I could put some figures on that: if you look at the Nottingham City Police Division, which covers the whole of the Nottingham City local authority area, one-fifth of all its violent crimes so far this year have taken place within the square mile of the city centre; and the majority of that has taken place between 10 pm and 3am. Whilst I cannot go and look at every crime and say, "Is that alcohol-related, or not", if I look at those figures the suggestion would be that a significant part of the violent crime problem is directly related to city centre violence. I accept that alcohol can touch violent crime in other areas, but I think that particular figure gives a very clear indication of the size and the scope of the problem.

Q195 Chairman: Mr Doyle, you work for a local authority, I understand?

Mr Doyle: I do. I have experience of the effects of crime and disorder related to alcohol, both as a local authority employee but also from a 30-year police career. I left the police service six years ago and worked exclusively in London, and obviously had a great deal to do with alcohol-related violence during my police career. I would say that, in addition to the problems Steven Green has outlined, the problems are threatening the attractiveness of city centres as places to live in, work in and visit. They threaten the tourist industry, to some extent, because tourists do not want to be amongst drunken yobs; residents do not want to wake up in the morning and find vomit, urine and worse on their doorstep. I think it is those kinds of problems which are attached to the violence. Many of the problems actually are not recorded because they are not crimes as such - it is low level disorder, if you like. Just to add one statistic to Mr Green's, we know from the police in Westminster that a half of all violence and disorder caused to the police occur between just four hours of the day - and that is between midnight and 4am, particularly on a Friday and Saturday night.

Q196 Chairman: Mr Hutson, your company operates both in town and city centres and some locations outside those central areas, would you broadly share that description of what is going on in town and city centres where binge drinking is concentrated?

Mr Hutson: About a third of our pubs probably are in the likes of central Nottingham or Westminster and the majority of those clubs close at 11 o'clock in our own case. In a way, when a lot of the incidents are taking place our pubs are not trading at that time. We do not have the first-hand experience that these two gentlemen have. The other thing I would like to add is, we obviously trade through seven days a week, and one of the things our own company tries to do is attract a broad range of customers on each of the days we trade, and also throughout the day as well, so we have less reliance upon the Friday/Saturday night.

Q197 Chairman: In terms of your experience of the disorder problem, are you saying your company, because you shut at 11 o'clock, is not really aware of this problem taking place?

Mr Hutson: I think we are aware of the whole issue of binge drinking and, like any other company at the moment in the licensing industry, are trying to do what we can within our own means to curtail it. From our own point of view we do not have a tremendous amount of incidents, certainly in our own premises, which we could attribute to binge drinking.

Q198 Chairman: I will come back to some of those issues later. Mr Hobbs, I wonder if I could bring you in because I know this is something you have looked at. Some people look at the history of this country and say that we have always been binge drinkers, and the English in particular, going back hundreds of years. Foreign visitors used to talk about how much people drank. Is this just the same old problem we are experiencing now and we have got more sensitive to it, or is this something new?

Professor Hobbs: I think it is something new. We started to research this area in 1998 and I had never heard of a "binge drinker" at that particular point. I think the use of the term can be somewhat problematic. I prefer the term "drunk", and there are a lot of them! The reason there is a lot of them is basically that we have developed a new economy in this country, a night-time economy. We did not manufacture in this country so much any more and city centres were emptying out. I think the responsibility which was placed upon local authorities, in particular, to develop the local economy and attract the investor to create jobs became very, very important during the 1980s and 1990s. One of the few areas where we can develop jobs and where we can create wealth is in the alcohol industry and in the night-time economy - bars, clubs and industries such as fast food. What we now call the problem of binge drinking is really a problem of a particular economy which is concentrated on city centres, and has created problems of violence and disorder. What we call "binge drinking" now is a new problem in that respect; it is an economic issue.

Q199 Chairman: Is this one that comes from the concentration of premises in town and city centres?

Professor Hobbs: Very much so. The concentration is immense. It is something we were quite surprised about when we started to carry out our research. Although pubs, we are told, are closing down daily in rural areas, the concentration of licensing in city centres is immense and that is really where drinking takes place, and particularly drinking which is concentrated at one particularly vulnerable group of the marketplace, which is the under 25s. It is a youth orientated, alcohol-based industry which is concentrated in city centres.

Q200 Chairman: There were big changes in the brewery and pub-owning industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s because of the competition policy. Has that contributed to the problem?

Professor Hobbs: Yes, I think it has. I think we have seen the national chains come up and become more important than the brewers. You see players such as Wetherspoon, Yates etc replicating their practice around the country in city centres. I think the high street chains have become more important.

Q201 Chairman: Professor Hobbs has just mentioned the under 25s, within that group who are the main perpetrators, Chief Constable?

Mr Green: We have done some analysis on the year to date to look at that very thing and, without a doubt, the dominant group in there is where the offender is aged between 18-24 and the victim is aged between 18-24; the dominant offender group and the dominant victim group come from exactly the same age source. In addition to that the dominant social status, if that is the right expression, of those offenders and victims is students and unemployed people. They tend again to be around one-fifth each of the victim and offender groups.

Q202 Chairman: It is mainly students and unemployed people; it is not young people who are in work?

Mr Green: There are young people who are in work and, in fairness, there are some fragilities around our recording practices, so I would not say that is absolute gospel. Where we have recorded someone's employment status, around one-fifth of those people have said they are students, and around one-fifth have said they are unemployed. When you look at those people as a proportion of the population, they would appear to be over-represented in the victim and offender groups. In victim and offender terms, the dominant age is 18-24.

Q203 Chairman: And the gender?

Mr Green: Male. In fairness, Chairman, there is an increasing proportion of females and I think the split is about 60:40, something of that nature. It is not that it is exclusively male, but we still see the dominant group as being male.

Q204 Chairman: A brief answer please because we will go into detail in each area of policy in just a moment. We have had a plethora of initiatives over the last three or four years around this problem - new policing powers, policing methods, the promotion of responsible drinking by the alcohol industry, health promotion messages and licensing changes. Taken altogether, in the light of all those new measures, is the situation getting worse or getting better?

Professor Hobbs: I do not think we know. No proper evaluation has been carried out of those measures. For many years it was impossible to get local authorities, and indeed most police forces, to acknowledge that they had a problem, which is important because the police, in particular, were part of local regeneration partnerships. It was very difficult for them to formally acknowledge in most city centres we researched that they had a problem. For them to say there was a problem, in Nottingham, Newcastle, Sheffield or whatever, may impact upon inward investment, and it may create adverse publicity for that city centre. It was very difficult for them to say anything. In terms of the recent plethora of measures brought to bear on certain aspects of this problem, frankly, I do not think we know because it has not been properly evaluated. I look forward to it being properly evaluated.

Mr Doyle: I think there is a greater awareness of the problem. It is very difficult to put some numbers on the extent of the problem. Speaking to colleagues and other licensing officers both in London and at our conference (which you kindly attended) in Blackpool, it is apparent there is a greater awareness of drink-related violence and disorder, particularly in city centres.

Mr Green: I think it has not got better. I cannot objectively prove it has got worse. There is a Home Office research document from 1999 on the relationship of alcohol and crime, and everything in here - irresponsible drinks promotion, the predominance of young people involved, the risks of premises where there are no tables and chairs - is based on research which was done in the early to mid 1990s; so you would have to say that nothing has changed in that regard. Certainly we did a major initiative in 2001 where we did everything. We did enforcement; we did education; we did proactive work with licensees; and we achieved a reduction in violent crime over the year of about 11%; but then the money ran out, because it was a Home Office funded project, and the following year the violent crime went back up again. Whilst we were able to achieve some benefit it was extremely short-lived, and now the violent crime figures are as high as they were before it was done. I think it is possible to make an impact, but we have not made a long-term impact; and certainly I would not be willing to say that things had got better.

Mr Hutson: I agree with Mr Doyle in principle. I think there has been a big change. In the last year or so there has been a greater awareness of the kind of issue we are talking about today. Although it is only anecdotal, I do believe that the licensed industry, and ourselves included, have made big improvements to their operating procedures to try and deal with a lot of these issues, often in partnership with local schemes with the police or town centre management schemes. Our own view is that in the last 12 months we have made great strides - for example, this year the code of conduct which we try to live by - as have other operators. We think things like that are positive moves and do have a positive effect.

Q205 Mr Prosser: Mr Green, what is your assessment of the effect if the new Licensing Act 2003 on these issues of alcohol-related crime and disorder in towns and city centres?

Mr Green: I think in every sense of the word the jury is still out. There are a huge number of unknowns. If I could perhaps sketch through things I see as some of those great unknowns: I think how robust the actual regulatory regime is, in the face of what will undoubtedly be sustained and well-resourced assaults by legal representatives of different companies, does remain to be seen. The test for me will be, will the local authority have the power to be able to design the kind of town or city centre that it wants to create; or will it be at the mercy of the legal process where decisions have been overturned in the courts, and is unable to achieve what it sets out to achieve? That is a great unknown. We have been trying in Nottingham, working with the local authority, to establish a saturation zone and have done a huge amount of work. Indeed, if you put up the hot spot maps it is extremely impressive to see the concentration of violence in the city centre. Again, whether we can legally establish and sustain that zone, the jury is still out on whether or not it is capable of robustly standing up to challenges in law. I think there are some huge unknowns about how the regime will operate. I think as far as police powers are concerned, the additional powers we have are welcome; indeed, the one which was announced two weeks ago is even more welcome. What we await to see is whether those powers go far enough. There are powers to close premises in 24 hours. Will that go far enough? Certainly we would say that. We would say we do not feel that the industry particularly fears the criminal courts, but it certainly fears for profit. What we would like to ensure is that there are significant deterrents in there to be able to say to companies, "If you don't act responsibly in this town or this city then there will be significant impact on you for your business viability". We wait to see whether that will hold up or not. I guess the controversial issue is the extended drinking hours, or possibly 24-hour drinking. Again, it is hard to relate anything other than we need to see how it works out. I speak from my own local authority areas, I certainly think there is no appetite for 24-hour drinking. What they do know, because they are seeing it already in the existing licensing regime, is that many companies are pushing to extend their hours. Again, how the regime will work, where the hours are granted, is dependent upon the individual operated schedule of the premises and whether people will accept (if we did stagger opening hours), "That place can stay open longer than this place". None of us know how that is going to work and I think we need to watch that very closely in the coming months. In conclusion, my perception is that I do not think Nottinghamshire is going to be any different from anywhere else; and the police in local authorities have put a huge amount of effort into working out how to be compliant with the Act, and they have put the minimum of effort and are now having to put a growing amount of effort into actually using the Act to design their town and city centres. What we need to ensure is that every local authority gets the kind of hurry-up call to say, "If you can't aggressively pull together your vision of what your town centre or city centre is going to look like then somebody else will do it for you". I think that is the real challenge between now and next year.

Q206 Mr Prosser: You are effectively saying that we will have to "suck it and see". With the knowledge we have got now would you have recommended to Government the general thrust of the Licensing Act?

Mr Green: My personal take on it is if what we had in the past had been so good that it was worth defending - I would defend it - but it is not. Let us be quite clear, when you have to have this huge book called Patterson Licensing to try and work out one little element of the law, it is madness quite honestly. I am not defending what we have got now. What concerns me is the fundamental contradictions between different interests in the government, and I think they are not reconciled. The desire to promote prosperous town and city centres is perfectly valid. The need to protect public order is perfectly valid. They are not reconciled. The other one if I may is that there is the desire to promote fair competition between different businesses - I do not know if that has got a place in the selling of a drug called "alcohol". There are huge amounts of policy contradictions which have never really been reconciled, and expecting people like me and colleagues in local authorities to reconcile them on the ground is unfair.

Q207 Mr Prosser: On the issue of licensing hours, some people argue that at least under the present regime the police and authorities can predict when the problems are going to be and can focus their attention and resources on a particular couple of hours. What is your view on that?

Mr Green: If you look at the behaviour of drinkers, those who are committed drinkers as it were, even if you staggered opening hours people will move from premises to premises and will try and stay out as long as they can. This idea that staggering hours makes it easier to police I think has not been proven in practice, certainly not in this country. At the moment, as things stand, as you say we have a fairly concentrated range of hours so I know if I focus my resources on that time and probably an hour afterwards, by three o'clock in the provinces I can start scaling down and get people off to bed, preparing for the following day. The longer the hours then the greater the risk I have to police in the course of the night. I think what we are going to see is a pulling of resources out of day-time policing into night-time policing to cover those risks.

Q208 Mr Prosser: Do any of the witnesses have a view of the number of outlets, pubs and clubs which will apply for longer hours and 24-hour drinking? Has any estimate been made?

Mr Hutson: I do not think there is any industry consensus. Of course, a lot of operators have been waiting for a bit more clarity on the guidelines. From our own point of view, we do not envisage suddenly applying for 24-hour drinking; we do not think there is a demand for it from consumers. Without going through every case, our own general view is that we will apply for slightly extended hours depending on the location. Maybe a little bit longer in a major city centre; and in a suburban centre maybe no longer at all. I do not think there is an innate demand from consumers to want to drink more. I think the innate demand that is there which we have seen in the last ten or 15 years is that people do come out slightly later and do want to extend their night a little bit longer. For the vast majority of people that is the case, I believe, to extend their night a little bit longer but certainly not on a 24-hour basis. There will be demand from companies such as ours to extend hours moderately and in proportion to what they are now in the cities in which they trade; but suddenly going for 24 hours, I do not see it myself.

Mr Doyle: I have spoken to a wide range of operators over the last two months, including the licensing director of Wetherspoon and I was a little surprised that intentions as regards operators in Westminster, which is where I happen to work, were not necessarily that they wanted to extend their hours. I think what they want to do most of all is have greater flexibility in their ability to operate. Some of them are saying they have not made their minds up yet exactly what it is that they want to do. I suppose one of the pleasing things, which I heard from operators including Wetherspoon, was that they want to extend the nature of their offering in their premises if they can to make it more varied, and that would be good, and not simply a drinking mono-culture. There will be some nights of the week when they will want to extend hours. I suppose it is not difficult to assume that this may be the very nights which are difficult at the moment - Friday and Saturday night. I think there is a mixed message.

Q209 Mr Prosser: Under the new arrangements and the new Act there will be a necessity for local authorities to provide their own statement of licensing policy. How useful and practical will they be in allowing councils to prohibit licences in areas where they anticipate anti-social behaviour and criminal activity?

Mr Doyle: Obviously that is welcomed, because the requirement on local authorities is to have a policy and acknowledgement that licensing is an important regulatory function in local authority areas in controlling, particularly, the night-time environment. That is good. What is of concern - and I think there is a certain amount of wait-and see on this, as Steven Green has said - is that the policy does not actually take effect until somebody objects. It is really left to local residents to carefully scrutinise every licence application, or for responsible authorities, such as the police, planning service or environment health, to be properly resourced and have the expertise again to carefully scan every licence application to see whether that is something they think is important to object to regarding one of the four licensing objectives. It is seen as a little curious, I think, by licensing officers because we feel we are the very people who have advised members on that policy and have the experience, background and expertise to put the policy into place and make it effective - such things as having a stress area, an area of saturation which I notice the Cabinet Office Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy identified as one of the most serious problems in city centres. If there is a policy of saturation, it will not be possible for a local authority to bring that into effect unless or until objection is made, and that seems curious to us.

Q210 Mr Prosser: Are you saying the system needs to run and be experienced before you can test and enforce the new measures?

Mr Doyle: You asked earlier, what do we see as good and bad? I have to say, we have great concerns about that particular provision. It is not something we see as a plus. There are good things in the Licensing Act 2003, without a doubt, but we have grave concerns about that.

Q211 Mr Prosser: Are you saying that local authorities should have the powers to make a decision over an over-saturated area?

Mr Doyle: It is the licensing authority. If you take a local council it has a number of functions within it, and one of those is as a licensing authority; another one is the planning authority; and another one is environmental health. A licensing authority will not be able to apply its policy and make recommendations to members unless or until an objection is received, either from somebody living near to this application or from one of the responsible authorities. We see that as a curious anomaly.

Q212 Mr Prosser: There is a danger of conflict, of incompatibility between the planning issues and licensing issues within the same authority?

Mr Doyle: In a sense the planning issues are important but, in another way, the very steep growth in late night drink-led entertainment which Dick Hobbs has referred to, which has brought us to the position we are in now, has not always involved a change of planning use. Its A3 use is food and drink, and so restaurants have been turned into bars. D2 use is music and dancing. They also have been turned into nightclubs and bars. Planning is important but I do not think it is necessarily central to the planning of the night-time environment. I think the Licensing Act in a way acknowledges that licensing is central to that.

Q213 Mr Prosser: Finally, do you think it is possible for the licensing authorities within a particular council to make their decisions in isolation to what might be the council's objective, in that they want to stimulate and invigorate the night-time economy and vitality of their city centre, whereas a licensing authority will be concerned about law and order matters?

Mr Doyle: Quite the opposite. I think licensing policies, the policies I have seen which already exist, are seeking not just to be negative but to be positive in encouraging and developing a more diverse offering during the night-time economy, something which goes beyond simply stand-up drinking. The kind of thing I mean is comedy clubs and places where one can eat, drink and be entertained. There are encouraging signs that the entertainment industry is responding to that.

Professor Hobbs: I think this issue of diversity is absolutely crucial. Speaking to local authority officers and city centre managers over the last two years they see some of the changes in the licensing law as a possible opportunity to introduce diversity. At the moment it is for the under 25s. Most of the officers I speak to are middle aged, usually men, and they are looking for somewhere to drink themselves and they are getting rather disappointed because there is nowhere to go and use themselves as examples. The issue of diversity is crucial. It is going to be very difficult to introduce diversity. It is going to be very difficult to introduce a wine bar, a real ale bar or a comedy club once the licence is awarded and there are going to be some real battles over that. The issue of diversity is crucial. There is also the issue about individual premises. With the changes in licensing law there is a great hope that individual premises must be well run and if they are not we will close them down. Individual licensees - which is the personal licence awarded to those running the premises - will get their licence taken away from them if they serve under-age drinkers or if they run a disorderly house etc. This emphasis on individual premises is a red herring. The problem is in public space. The problem is the numbers who have been drinking in public space. A few years ago we had problems when people were coming out into public space at 11 o'clock and increasingly now it is 1.30 to 2.00, with extensions into three or maybe four o'clock. If we go to 24 hours it is going to get worse and worse, putting more people on the street; there will be no transport; there will be no urinals for young men who have been drinking gallons of beer; there will be no cabs; there will be no buses; so basically no facilities whatsoever. The problem we should be focussing on, I feel strongly, is on public space. If a local authority cannot sustain services for these citizens who happen to have been drinking and are coming out onto the street at night, no matter what time, then this night-time economy should not extend itself any further. The emphasis on individual licences for individuals and for individual premises is something of a red herring, I feel.

Q214 David Winnick: Professor Hobbs and Mr Hutson have given us a sort of nightmare scenario which some of us would share about 24-hour opening. What I do not quite understand from the answer which you gave my colleague Mr Prosser is this: you say your company is opposed, as far as I understand it, to 24-hour opening yet you want the hours extended. This session has been dealing with the problem of excessive drinking and all the acute difficulties which arise. Why on earth should your company want to extend the hours, except for the obvious reason of just more profit?

Mr Hutson: We are not opposed to the notion of 24-hour licensing if by that what is meant is flexibility of operating hours, because the vast majority of our pubs close at 11 pm because we do not have any section 77 permissions and PELs; which means because we do not play music and offer entertainment the law of the land says we have to close at 11 pm.

Q215 David Winnick: What is wrong with that?

Mr Hutson: There is nothing at all wrong with that, except in today's society consumers do not want that. I fully understand there is a lot of concentration on Friday and Saturday nights at the moment, that people seven days a week do not want that. Restaurants throughout the UK operate until midnight by virtue of a slightly different licensing regime from pubs. 25% of our sales derive from food; about 40% of our sales derive from food and non-alcoholic drinks; yet we could be next door to a restaurant, a Pizza Express or a Zizzi, and we have to close an hour before them because of the current licensing regime. In my answer I was really saying with the new licensing regime in those circumstances we would probably say, "We'd like to stay open as long as Pizza Express next door because probably pound for pound we serve as much food as that Pizza Express in our premises". I do not think companies such as ours really want extended hours just to chase yet more profit. I think one of the big things we are looking for is a level playing field whereby we can satisfy the consumers and their needs and end up making about the same profit in the longer term.

Q216 David Winnick: Satisfying the consumer more than profits. Professor Hobbs - you have already given us a pretty good indication about your views on 24-hour opening - do you think there is any justification for extending the hours in which public houses are open?

Professor Hobbs: If we accept that our city centres are going to be market-led then, yes, 24-hour drinking is going to be part of it. It is a part of that market economy, and also 24-hour shopping etc etc. There are no facilities at night. We shut down. We still operate in the 19^th century in terms of the way we operate. Certainly in terms of the way the night-time economy has developed, generally speaking most police forces have the same capacity (despite taking the most recent operation as something of a blip) to deal with problems at night which they had 15 or 20 years ago. What this means is that they are putting up a shift which may consist of 15 police officers to deal with 45,000, 50,000 maybe 75,000 drinkers. At the moment if you go into a police station at four or five in the evening you will find an inspector desperately trying to put together a shift of police officers. He will bring in special constables; he will bring in a coroner's officer; he will bring in people with overtime; he will bring in armed response units maybe from other forces. All of this will be an incredible scramble to put these numbers together. That is dealing with the licensing laws as they are at the moment. That is dealing with the numbers on the street as they are at the moment. You expand this further - will there be any more police officers? No, there will not be. Will there be any more resources put into A&E departments? If anyone wants to know about the real effects they should visit an A&E department at midnight on a Friday night. Will there be any more transport? No. Cabs? No. Nothing will happen other than more people are going to drink more alcohol. I see no justification if young people are being put at risk and if the city centres are being put at risk.

Q217 Mr Clappison: I think you have been clear to us in what you have been saying: you feel that planning has a role to play; the provision of facilities is very important; the provision of facilities such as late night transport to get people home, rather than have them hanging around; public toilets, for example, so people who have drunk a very large quantity of drink have somewhere to go to the toilet rather than urinating in doorways. I think it follows from what you are saying that so far you think that these are things which are unsatisfactory in many town centres?

Professor Hobbs: Yes.

Q218 Mr Clappison: How big a difference do you think they could make if they were properly provided?

Professor Hobbs: Transport is the big one to get people out of the city centre. We are very good at getting people in at seven o'clock in the evening but usually the last bus leaves about quarter past 11 just when people are moving on to the club or to late night licensed premises. Transport is important. Some of the results of Manchester getting the Commonwealth Games and an emphasis being put upon transport at night, both before and after the Commonwealth Games, has had an impact on the situation in Manchester. I think that is an example of good practice. That was carried out basically because a dedicated team of officers was tasked with improving the situation in the city centre beyond the immediate Fire Brigade, police and of incidents, and they liaised with transport authorities etc and they have had some success, so I think that transport is absolutely top of the list.

Q219 Mr Clappison: And town centre managers, how useful do you think they are?

Professor Hobbs: That is mixed. Many of the town centre managers that we have spoken to during our research since 1998 have been basically involved in part of city centre spin, in boosterism. They are very concerned with boosting their particular city centre. I think, however, that dedicated professionals, whether it is city centre managers or dedicated police officers who are involved in the night time economy, whose concern is dealing with the night time economy rather than working a shift system where they are dealing with football hooligans on a Saturday afternoon and on a Saturday night they are dealing with night time economy, I think is problematic. We do not have enough knowledge of this new economy and we do not have enough dedicated professionals working within it.

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 issues, but I do not know. Steven 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 21^st 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.

Q240 David Winnick: Professor Hobbs, you heard the Chief Constable say a moment or so ago what the desk sergeant is likely to say in Nottingham if a police officer brings in someone who is just drunk and nothing further. Does that surprise you in any way?

Professor Hobbs: No, it does not. A police officer must use discretion. One of the great things about our policing system is that the lower down the ranks you go the greater discretion officers have. If police officers in Nottingham or anywhere else were to arrest or apply a fixed penalty notice to everyone who was drunk at midnight you would be opening up special camps to deal with them. If someone is out at midnight and they have been out since seven or eight o'clock at night and they have been drinking alcohol consistently, let us be clear: they will be drunk. Officers therefore have to use their discretion. Behaviour that would be unacceptable at three o'clock in the afternoon in Covent Garden, for instance, will be accepted at three o'clock in the morning out of pure practical reasons that you just cannot deal with everyone who is drunk; it is impossible.

Q241 David Winnick: All the more reason surely not to extend hours even further?

Professor Hobbs: I would agree unless we accept that there is a special form of behaviour at night that we are willing to tolerate. At the moment we have been willing to tolerate that behaviour.

Q242 Mr Green: We have been talking about the night time economy in our cities. Other cities in other countries have always had night time economies because the weather is better and they have always eaten and drunk out of doors, and yet one gets the perception that the same problems do not occur to anything like the same degree. Is that because for some cultural reason people under 25 in this country drink in a uniquely stupid and destructive way or are they sold drink in a different way by the drinks industry in this country?

Professor Hobbs: We started to hear about five years ago about this thing called the cappuccino society or café society and I think that maybe over the last 20 years we have come back from package holidays with expectations about what we are going to eat, what we are going to drink and this has spiralled into how we are going to eat and how we are going to drink. If you try to apply the cappuccino society to Bradford on a cold night in January you are going to have problems. We do not drink that way; we do not eat that way. In certain mainland European societies, yes, they have a way of life and part of that way of life is the use of alcohol which is not problematic with regard to law and order. However, some of the countries that we look up to in terms of the use of alcohol have got problems, particularly with young people on holiday. In Spain, for instance, there is a massive problem. There, however, they are not going into licensed premises; they are going into supermarkets, buying cheap drink and going into public squares and drinking at night and creating disorder, so there is a problem there. The other thing worth noting is that for many countries, when it comes to alcohol and when it comes to licensed premises, there is an acknowledgement that you should not have licensed premises too close together; you should not have this creation of a night strip, as we have heard from Steven Green, that they have got in large portions in Nottingham. For instance, in Paris you cannot have licensed premises within 75 yards of each other; in New York you cannot have new licensed premises within 150 yards of each other, so there is an acknowledgement there that there can be a problem with congestion of licensed premises. To come back to your main point, yes, I think we do drink differently in this country, we do seem to drink more in this country and we do seem to behave in a particularly rowdy way once we are drinking. Once we know that, however, it seems astonishing to me to create what seems to me is a greater problem, but there you go.

Q243 Mr Green: What is the alcohol industry doing to combat binge drinking? What are Wetherspoon doing?

Mr Hutson: This is not necessarily to combat binge drinking, but where we depart slightly from Professor Hobbs is that we have noticed that people desire more than just going out and drinking alcohol. When our company floated in 1992 just 5% of our sales derived from food and now that is 25% and it is growing quite rapidly. We sell hundreds of thousands of cups of cappuccino every single week. As I mentioned before, now about 40% of all our sales are derived from non-alcoholic drinks and that would probably have been nearer 10% just ten or 12 years ago. There is already a desire amongst the British public to want to use pubs, certainly viable pubs I would say, for more than just drinking alcohol. That is the greatest incentive, I think, for the licensed industry to adapt its offer to consumers, because that is what they want in the first place. There are other things that the industry can and should do to be a little bit more proactive. There are things that we are trying to do. I mentioned earlier training. I think training is an integral part of well-run licensed premises with well-trained management staff in particular but also bar staff. I think the fact that food is provided, for example, in our premises from opening right the way through to one hour before closing has a huge positive impact on the nature of those premises. More people will use them to dine and that has a moderating effect on the whole atmosphere of the premises. If you offer a good wine range then you will attract more female customers. Again, on average that has a moderating influence, and so on. There is a range of measures that companies can and should introduce mostly because it is good business practice but also because it will help moderate the atmosphere. We think that if we can provide a convivial atmosphere in well-appointed, well-maintained premises where there is not a fear of trouble or a perception of trouble, that in itself has a positive impact on the town centre in which that pub operates.

Q244 Mr Green: I can see that perhaps internally but obviously, as we have heard, if there are lots of premises within a small space people might start with you and then go on. What instructions do you give to your staff about serving people who look as though they are drunk? Do they have specific instructions not to do so?

Mr Hutson: They do and, frankly, at peak times in busy city centres on a Friday night it is difficult because more often than not it is not the drunk person that comes up to the bar and says, "Can I have a drink please?". It is a friend or colleague. We try and make sure that our management staff are patrolling the floor and observing customers and so on. It is a difficult area at times, I acknowledge that. Overall, certainly for our company and I would like to think for all companies, there is simply no incentive to have town centres that are given over to drunken yobs. That is just not commercially viable. It is not what we want. We want all the same things that the police and the local authorities want: we want well-run, attractive town centres that attract a broad range of consumers and not just under-25s. That is our biggest incentive not to, if you like, serve and fuel under-25s who go on to cause trouble.

Q245 Mr Green: Clearly the drinks industry as a whole has form in this regard, producing products like alcopops which must be one of the most disgraceful products put on the market in the last decade particularly to encourage young teenagers to start drinking alcohol, so inevitably people are fairly cynical about the underlying attitudes of the drinks industry, and a lot of this obviously focuses on promotions, the cheap, fast drinking that people try and encourage. Your Chairman has said that your company has several competitive pricing initiatives to drive sales. Is this not precisely the sort of thing that encourages binge drinking?

Mr Hutson: One of our biggest selling products is a pint of cask ale, Burton bitter, which sells mostly to older customers. Our coffee is half the price of Starbucks', so having attractive prices across the board - food, drink, soft drinks - we think is just a good way of attracting a broad range of consumers and I would like to think that that is completely different from, say, a promotion where there is a banner on the outside of the building, "£10 entry, drinks free all night", or as low as six pounds which I have seen in some city centres, or pubs where a single shot of vodka might be £1.50 but you can buy a triple shot for a pound. That I think is irresponsible. It is the sort of thing that certainly our company has come out and said we think is irresponsible and we will not do it. We are trying very hard to make sure that there is no selling up, for example. A double is twice the price of a single and if you want two bottles it is twice as much as one. That we think is more proactive because there is simply not the incentive for people to trade up and take on more alcohol as a result of the price being cheaper to drink more.

Q246 Mr Green: Chief Constable, do you have experience of this?

Mr Green: Here are some I brought earlier. I talked about the research in 1999 which flagged up then the danger of irresponsible drinking promotions and yet my perception is that little has changed. Over-provision is the big enemy of good practice. I have been involved in liquor licensing since the 1980s and I see this same pattern, that people come for a licence with a case that says, "We have identified a gap in the market. Our business will fill that gap. We are different from everybody else", and the licence is granted on that basis and six months later they are in the pack with everyone because they have to compete and make a living. I will just throw in a few anecdotes of experience. At Freshers' Week in Nottingham in October this year the students at Nottingham Trent University were beset by people handing out flyers, by a truck with banners on the side blaring out loud music. Every day wherever they went it was following them around. The headline on that promotion was, "Get trolleyed for a fiver". I sent one of my inspectors on a good night out in Nottingham on Saturday night and I have just brought you some of the things he came back with, and they all came off the floor, so I apologise. That one is, "All drinks £1 all night; drink the bar dry". That is, "Free Christmas vodka or tequila on entry". I like this one because it says, "Double Smirnoff/Gordons/Bacardi for £1; Tuesday night £1 off Beck's, vodka and pints of Boddingtons; Thursday night is vodka night with Smirnoff and Cranberry, Pepsi or Red Bull for just £1", and at the bottom it says, "Please drink responsibly". Happy hour is still being advertised. I get this on Saturday nights. I think this is Yates's. They have got a card called the "skint card" where you get 25% off all drinks. There is another one called "Pricewatch". I think Mr Hutson is right, that what we are seeing is, rather than the open two-for-one, much more competition around price, and I have got some from a place called Templars where again they have put all their prices in the window and you cannot see but loads of them say "2-for-1". My conclusion from all of that would be that whilst the nature of the promotion might have changed this idea of the open market place driving down the price of drinks, incentivising people to drink more and price being a feature of promotion, has not gone away at all.

Q247 Mr Green: Who has any powers to control any of that?

Mr Green: Not us, I have to say.

Q248 Mr Green: So none of the things has been brought in?

Mr Green: No, because I think there is a fundamental difference between acting within the law, and I think most people act within the law, and acting responsibly. I always say that if I came to you as a Select Committee of Parliament and brought this new drug called alcohol and said, "I am going to sell it", you would say, "Over our dead bodies" when you heard all about what the impact of it was. That goes back to the point I made to one of your colleagues before, that we have not really got clear in policy terms what our position is with regard to the selling of alcohol and the wider principles of how goods and services are sold in this country in open unfettered competition, because this is the product of competition and over-provision. Without some kind of state intervention to restrain this none of us is going to change because that is what an open market place does.

Q249 Mr Green: It is illegal to have set minimum prices and so on because it is anti-competitive and the OFT have made that clear.

Mr Green: Oh, don't I know it!

Q250 Mr Green: Given that that is illegal what would you suggest be done? As you say, it is a legal product and it is an enjoyable product for many people. What markets do is make products more available and cheaper. It is constantly profitability. What sorts of controls would you like to see above and beyond that?

Mr Green: I believe, and forgive me because I would hate to appear to speak for the OFT when I do not fully understand what they do, that the OFT's biggest problem is with the sellers themselves grouping together and agreeing minimum prices, and certainly in the intervention that we had had in Nottingham from the OFT it was not around the fact that there were minimum prices but the fact that the people selling it set those prices. Maybe within the licensing regime we ought to be giving the licensing authority more power to intervene in those areas to be able to prevent the kinds of promotion that I have just shown to you. Because I am a policeman rather than from the local authority I am reluctant to say, "It should work like this", but at the moment what the local authority would say and what the police would say is that it is all very well the OFT saying, "We need state or official intervention", but we have no power to intervene in respect of that at the moment.

Mr Doyle: I think that is absolutely right. The local authority's power to impose conditions on licensees around their pricing policy is non-existent at the moment. I suppose it is a given, is it not, it is the law of economics that the supply of something - anything - will be determined by its price. If people consume very large quantities of alcohol, we know there is a correlation between that and disorderly behaviour in the public realm, particularly late at night. All of those things are a given.

Q251 Chairman: Mr Hutson, the Chief Constable has given us some promotions there. Would you agree that the main selling point of all the promotions that the Chief Constable raised there was that you can get drunk cheaply?

Mr Hutson: That could well be the interpretation of people looking at those promotions. As I said, when it is a case of "Get trolleyed for a fiver" or "two for one", it is ----

Q252 Chairman: Would you condemn those types of promotions?

Mr Hutson: We do. We do not run the "drink more for less" kind of thing. Having said that, our prices are probably lower than average for pubs, but they are still over twice as much as supermarkets. It is not just the price of a drink in a pub that one has to look at if one is looking at the prices of alcohol.

Q253 Chairman: If you go past a Wetherspoon's pub you are likely, are you not, to find a promotion in the window stressing that prices are low? So low alcohol prices is one of your selling points, is it not?

Mr Hutson: We focus on the price of our products as probably more of a retailing technique. We say "We have got these good products here, some of which we think you will not find in other pubs" and then we show the price of those products. Sometimes we show the price of those products in relation to other pubs in the town and it tells a story. Often when you go into an Asda they have a shopping trolley and they say "Look at the price of the same things in Sainsbury, Waitrose and Safeway".

Q254 Chairman: So stressing the low level of your prices is pretty key to your marketing operation?

Mr Hutson: Yes, I would say across the board: food, soft drinks and coffees as well.

Q255 Chairman: On competitive grounds, would you welcome moves to wipe out or restrain competition around the price of a drink?

Mr Hutson: We have always had lower prices than our competitors. We have done market research - I can show it to you if you want to look at it - which clearly demonstrates that we have the broadest cross-range of age groups of most town centre pubs.

Q256 Chairman: Would you welcome something that restrained competition around the price of drink?

Mr Hutson: No, because the point I am making is that I do not think the price of a drink will improve the situation.

Q257 Chairman: It would not improve the situation; it would not promote responsible drinking?

Mr Hutson: I do not think raising the price of a drink in a pub of itself will improve responsible drinking. For example, in the top ten mentioned before, I imagine that most of the units in the top ten have got some of the highest prices in Nottingham for the price of a drink.

Q258 Chairman: Typically, how many units of alcohol, on a Government measure, do your younger customers drink on a Friday or Saturday night?

Mr Hutson: That is a very difficult question, I would have to go away and find that out.

Q259 Chairman: If you, as a company, say that you promote responsible drinking, how can you say that if you do not know how much your younger customers are actually drinking?

Mr Hutson: Anecdotally I would say our customers are probably having four or five drinks, but what they drink we would have to find out. We would like to think that in general we say we are promoting responsible drinking because of how we operate our premises and the fact that we - I know I am repeating myself - create a convivial atmosphere that creates no trouble.

Q260 Chairman: The critical thing is how much alcohol people actually consume.

Mr Hutson: I appreciate that.

Q261 Chairman: As a company you do not know how you derive not all but part of your profits.

Mr Hutson: We can find that out.

Q262 Mrs Dean: Representing Burton on Trent, the capital of ruin with several breweries and pub companies, my constituents rely on the production of alcohol and the distribution for many jobs. They would also tell me in my constituency that they are amongst those who try to be responsible over the sale of alcohol. You have just mentioned those who have offers and one of the things you were saying I think, perhaps Mr Hutson was saying, was there is a difference between offering reasonably priced drinks and offering offers which encourage people to binge drink and have three drinks instead of one. Is there a way of stopping that, leaving aside minimum prices, of actually clamping down on those who do give those irresponsible offers?

Mr Green: I would have thought that it ought to be possible, again if the local authority has the power to put conditions on that, to say one drink has to have one price. You would have thought it would be possible to conceive of that. Certainly, I think that would help. Regardless of that, for as long as there is competition on prices then the natural consequence of competition is that prices go down and in a situation where there is over-provision then there is an even greater pressure for the prices to go down. It would solve part of the problem, in my opinion, but not the whole of the problem.

Mrs Dean: When answering questions earlier about trying to tackle alcohol abuse ---- I have lost the thread.

Chairman: You can come back later. Marsha Singh?

Q263 Mr Singh: Professor Hobbs, you had a fair go at the Licensing Act 2003, but there is no evidence at all to suggest that things will get worse by introducing 24 hour drinking, is there?

Professor Hobbs: There is no evidence that it will improve things either and that is supposed to be the task of an Act.

Q264 Mr Singh: If we focus away from city centre problems to the general drinking public whose style of drinking and whose desire to drink has changed over time, who do not want to finish drinking at 11 o'clock, who might want to drink until 12 o'clock or one o'clock, responsible drinks in their own locals, in their own communities with their own friends, do you not think that the Licensing Act is positive?

Professor Hobbs: You can do that now. We have got in our book the statistics that show the amount of late licences which has been awarded now. It is a myth to think that you have to stop drinking at 11 o'clock, it is not 1975 any more. If you want a drink in a city centre now, you can have a drink in a city centre at twelve, one, one thirty, two o'clock, that is not a problem at all. Currently we do have the legal resources to provide facilities for those who wish to have an alcoholic drink way past the 11 o'clock margin.

Mr Hutson: I just want to say that it is absolutely not the case that anyone can drink. There are a lot of late licences but let us be clear that to obtain a licence in England or Wales to serve alcohol beyond 11pm on ordinary alcoholic premises, you have to provide music and entertainment. Almost by definition, late night premises are given over to loud music, and it has to be loud because it has to encourage people to dance. You might not live in a town centre and if you fancy having a pint of cask ale beyond 11 o'clock, to do that legally is very, very difficult, if not impossible.

Q265 Mr Singh: In fact, what happens is that landlords lock the doors, do they not, up and down the country? They lock the doors for the regulars, risking criminalising themselves and decent ordinary folk who like a drink after 11 o'clock.

Professor Hobbs: I take your point. I would just like to come back to the issue of music and entertainment. I know of many places where the music is not loud where you can get a drink, you can even get cask ale, beyond 11 o'clock. It is not 1975, the resources do exist. I think you have got a point about areas that are outside the city centres, and we are concentrating on city centres at the moment. I think the liberalisation of our licensing laws is quite reasonable, but when they are liberalised in these city centre spaces that we are talking about now, all evidence shows that undoubtedly leads to problems. The sort of people you are talking about will tend not to go into the city centre. Yes, I think you do have a point, there is a market there and maybe the Licensing Act can assist people with that market.

Mr Green: I think you have got a point to an extent, if I may say so. Yes, lock-ins do happen, we all know that, and by and large they do not cause anybody any great problem. I think there is a difference between a selective few having a lock-in and sneaking off in the early hours of the morning and extending the hours of licensed premises in residential areas on a systematic basis. To many people who live in streets or areas where there is a pub in close proximity, they welcome the fact that by and large between 11 and half past, most people go home and they have got peace. We must not under-estimate the fact that, yes, we could provide a more liberal regime for people in those suburban and village pubs but we have to take account of the needs of the residents as well. If they have not got the guarantee that this is all going to end at 11 o'clock, then they have to have some guarantee about when they can get their quality of life back because even the most well ordered and sensible drinker, when they walk out of a pub, does not realise how loud they are. We just need to be careful around the fact that, yes, it would cause less problems but not no problems because there are the needs of residents as well.

Q266 Mr Singh: I accept that point entirely, but if a landlord is irresponsible, now you have the powers to make them responsible.

Mr Green: Quite so and I do take that point.

Professor Hobbs: I think one the issues, which has not been mentioned yet, is the size of the venues. The size of the venues we are talking about that have been opened up are absolutely vast compared with the old kind of suburban or village pub. The venue that I mentioned earlier in my hometown of Durham has 800 people coming out onto the streets at 1:30, and now I think it is 2 o'clock, but it is 800 people that were not on the streets previously and are now going to be on the streets from one venue alone. That is 800 people looking for a cab, pizza, kebab or a urinal and it is that kind of problem. If you are talking about a village pub or a suburban pub that might hold 100 people, and only a fraction of those will want to drink until midnight on a Friday night at the end of their working week, it is not going to create the kinds of problems of disorder or, indeed, demands for services that the city centre pubs are making.

Mr Green: If I may, I think there is almost a different community of licensees in the suburbs and the villages because what you do not tend to see in those areas are the kind of revolving door on the front door as licensees come in and go out in quick succession. Most licensees tend to be longer standing and, perhaps, have a different business relationship with the ultimate owner of the business and some of the people in the towns and the city centres. I sense that there are two completely different communities of the licensing industry: that which sits outside the town or city centre and that which sits inside.

Q267 Mr Singh: This might be an unfair question to you, given how you describe how Wetherspoon's operates, but do you feel we can condone any longer the alcohol industry targeting young people to drink ever more, whether that is by the use of TV, magazines or whatever? Can we condone that any longer?

Mr Hutson: No, I do not think that. If there is a deception, in fact, if, through research or other means, it is concluded that the licensed industry, in general, is targeting underage customers or overtly young customers, then something should be done about that. I feel there is a very general question about the whole industry. As I said previously, a lot of our own efforts have been centred on promoting drinks across a whole spectrum, non-alcoholic and alcoholic, food as well as drink and so on, advertising a broad offer, in effect advertising premises and the hope of a nice evening out with your friends and family, whatever it might be, as opposed to a specific segment of the population for specific products. I think groups, such as the Portman Group, have made tremendous strides in the way that alcoholic products are marketed, promoted and even down to approving labels. For example, we have become an associate member of the Portman Group. I think we are only one of two or three pub companies who have joined in with the Portman Group. For example, in April of this year, one of their recommendations was that cocktails should not be sold with more than four shots of alcohol in them. Cocktails are shared, but because of the possibility that one person might buy that sharing cocktail and consume it themselves, we have reduced our cocktail pitchers from six to four on the advice of Portman. In general, I think the industry agrees and is trying to make positive moves in that regard, so it is not perceived to be an industry wanting to sell alcohol to young or underage customers.

Q268 Mr Singh: Professor Hobbs, do you have any evidence that the industry is targeting young people where they may be even underage?

Professor Hobbs: The example of alcopops has been brought up and there has been numerous battles concerning the moral high ground of alcopops over the last ten years. One of the issues here, when we consider the target market for alcohol, is the growth of the high street chains. Often these high street chains have young managers in them who have incredibly strict and tight targets to hit. If the market is young people anyway and they are the ones who are coming into the city centre on a Friday and Saturday night, increasingly through the rest of week, then that is the market they are after, they are not after the cask ale drinker. Of course, Wetherspoon's have got that market, very much so, and generally speaking, they target it very successfully, the older drinker. Most of the chains are managed by young managers with very, very tight targets to hit and they have to hit those targets any way they can within the law. I think that has been the change, it is not the old established licensee running one venue that has been there a long time, he knows the locals, he knows the troublemakers and he knows the local Bobby on the beat, et cetera et cetera, that has gone, these are corporate chains and they have got targets there.

Q269 Chairman: Mr Hutson, do your managers have targets to hit?

Mr Hutson: I think anyone in retail has targets to hit. Our managers have sales budgets for their pubs.

Q270 Chairman: So Mr Hobb's remarks would apply to your business too? Is that a problem?

Mr Hutson: I have to say, I do not think it is a new phenomenon. The previous company I worked for was Allied Lyons and I joined it in 1987. Managers there had the same sales and profit targets. I think since companies have run pubs, every pub has had a target to achieve, it is not a new phenomenon.

Q271 Mr Singh: Has anybody got any other comments on that?

Mr Green: I was just getting my leaflets out again and they have a specific reference to friendly student nights. To me, just the language "bring a buddy" shows that none of it is targeted at people of my age, it is all about young people.

Q272 Chairman: It is a shame really because you could afford to spend more even in those bars.

Mr Doyle: You might think that but I could not possibly comment. There has been a problem with regard to underage drinking and the police activity around it because the only effective tactic is test purchase and that is the only way to get into underage drinking. The guidance was interpreted by the Police Service as meaning that any test purchase operation involving drinking underage was covered by the Regulation and Investigatory Powers Act and all the bureaucracy that goes with it. The disincentive was getting involved with it, we tended to leave it to the trading standards officers in local authorities who have a limited resource base. Now, there has been a clarification of that interpretation in the last couple of weeks, and the police forces now know that they can go and do test purchase for underage drinking without all the bureaucracy that goes with it. We secured some volunteer air cadets last Saturday night to go and test the market. They went into 18 separate premises in Nottingham City centre, not late at night, between 7:30 and 10 o'clock, so it was not the busiest time, and they got served in ten of those 18 premises. I have to say we found that quite shocking, but that does give you a feel for the level of problems of underage drinking.

Q273 Chairman: How old would they have been?

Mr Green: Fifteen and 16.

Chairman: Well underage.

Q274 Mr Singh: The problem is not only with pubs and bars, is it? While we are talking about test purchases, one of the most notable findings of the recent Summer Alcohol Misuse Enforcement Campaign - a bit of a mouthful - was the number of successful test purchases. They found that 45% of on-licences and 31% of off-licences were serving minors. Do these figures come as a surprise to you or is selling alcohol to minors prevalent?

Mr Green: I think it is prevalent. I was heavily involved in the Summer Campaign and in the latest campaign that has just started. You could say, "Well, you only went to the places where you thought you would get served", and I am sure there was an element of that because test purchase is so expensive to do that you want to make sure you maximize it. Certainly, my sense in Nottingham, which is now reinforced by what we did last Saturday night, is that if we had put more into it, we would have got more results. I think that is what needs to happen now - and the Home Office quite helpfully clarified the legal position for us - and, personally, I would welcome some very active urgings from the Home Office about police forces getting more involved in test purchase now that the chains have been taken off them because I think the more we look for, the more we are going to find.

Q275 Mr Singh: You can close down a bar if there are problems associated with it for 24 hours, can you not?

Mr Green: Not yet, but that is the intention.

Q276 Mr Singh: Will you be able to close down a bar or an off-licence if they have been serving minors?

Mr Green: Sorry, yes. That was the announcement that the Prime Minister made about two weeks ago when he said his intention is to change the law to legislate to do that. What we have got to do now - not to show too much of my hand - is we have got to be more systematic because to go to a bar and test purchase once and prove that one member of staff sold to someone underage is of itself shocking but what we need to start doing is to systematically check because if you do it over and over again you should lose your licence. That is the point I was making, that we need to urge all Chief Constables, it seems to me, (a) to take the problem seriously, because the figures would show that there is a significant problem, and (b) actually to put more effort into proving that these are not just one-offs, that this is a systematic failing on the part of these bars to regulate their premises properly.

Professor Hobbs: We need to highlight the kind of environment that young and underage drinkers are going into to make these purchases. There is a lot of loud music, they are dark, there are flashing lights, often dry ice floating around, there is a huge scrum at the bar, it is difficult to get served and people are shouting out their orders. I feel it is very, very difficult for young, stressed bar staff who have been working for maybe three or four hours to make that snap decision: is that person 16/17 or 18? Speaking as the father of two teenage sons who stand six foot three and six foot four, at times I am not so sure how old they are! These are difficult decisions to be made. That is not to let the alcohol industry off the hook.

Q277 Mr Singh: I accept that, but is it not their responsibility to make the environment such that they can tell, and have a reasonable chance of telling, who is underage?

Professor Hobbs: Yes, I agree. As it stands at the moment, the environment is very, very difficult to make all kinds of judgments as to whether people are underage, whether they have been drinking or not, in fact I would say it is virtually impossible to make those kinds of decisions as things stand at the moment.

Q278 Mr Singh: These new powers to close premises down for 24 hours, do you think these are going to be helpful?

Mr Doyle: I do. I think they are extremely helpful. I think one of the best things about the Licensing Act 2003 is its powers of review. Presently, the powers that local authorities and courts have are either to allow somebody to continue trading or to take their licence away. The Licensing Act 2003 allows a much more flexible approach depending on the problem that is revealed and also allows time to negotiate with the licensee to try to find a solution.

Q279 Mrs Dean: This is to Mr Hutson, and I am sorry to put you on the spot again. Could you tell us in some detail how you make sure that your staff are not selling alcohol to minors? If you find any staff who are doing so, what action do you take?

Mr Hutson: Obviously all of our staff are trained. The people serving at the bar, which is where the criminality can take place, before they are allowed to serve have to go through in-house training, one of which is the licensing laws. It is made clear to our staff that it is their responsibility, it is not their line manager or their supervisor, it is them. If they serve and they do not think they should be serving, then do not serve and refer it. In terms of our training, we are quite clear that it starts there and works its way through to our managers and we show absolutely no support if a manager is found to be wilfully serving underage customers because we have got no interest in breaking the law. The point, and it is a point that has been made by the Summer Campaign mentioned here, is that it is difficult and perhaps the industry has underestimated how difficult the issue is to deal with, particularly at peak times. I do not think it is a new issue. Some of the figures where maybe 45% of all on-licence premises were found to be serving underage, it seems rather high to me and it is not my perception, but I am not going to argue the facts if they are the facts. Clearly it is something that the industry, in conjunction with the local authority and the police together, has to work harder at. One of the things we have done in our company since the beginning of the summer, and we have now rolled it out into every pub, is we have joined this campaign, which is in Westminster, actually, of ID-ing them under 21, so rather than "Are you under 18?" it is "Are you under 21 and if you are we are going to ID you", just to help a little bit. It is an issue that the licensed industry has always had to deal with and, if anything, with the figures that have come out since this summer it is a case of saying that we need to try a little bit harder.

Q280 Mrs Dean: If I can just ask the question I intended to ask before, which is earlier we discussed charging of the industry directly for policing and infrastructure. Bearing in mind that very often it is a number of irresponsible landlords who can cause the problem, is there a way of targeting that cost on to those rather than the part of the industry that behaves itself?

Mr Green: If I can just slightly set some context to that, if I may. What we have found is that ten of our premises out of 350 in Nottingham City account for about 40% of all incidents in the course of a year. They are our top ten list, so we can clearly identify them. I think the only difficulty that we need to be aware of is the first question we need to ask is should they have a licence in the first place rather than should they pay more. On the basis of the figures you can see where the problems are very clearly but the difficulty, and it goes back to the fundamental point Professor Hobbs made right at the beginning, is that not every incident which can or should be linked to a particular establishment takes place in that establishment. There are some fundamental challenges. I described the Marketplace in Nottingham where there must be ten or 12 licensed premises within chucking out distance of that Marketplace and attributing responsibility to one becomes extremely difficult if the problem takes place in the Market Square rather than in the premises itself. Equally, I think we would all agree as right thinking citizens that through the civic leadership of the local authority and the support of the police we need the licensing industry in a city to act as a community in their own right. There needs to be a sense of mutuality of interest there, not just a targeting of the so-called worse premises. I have not thought it through but I think there would be as many perverse incentives in saying just target the people who cause problems as there would be helpful incentives, so I think we need to think that through very carefully. As I say, the stumbling block would be how do you attribute what happens in the street to a particular establishment when actually all establishments in totality create the threat and risk of those problems?

Chairman: Mr Prosser has the last question.

Q281 Mr Prosser: On this issue of selling drinks to underage people, to what extent has schemes like Kent's voluntary identity card system been of value? Would you welcome the introduction of compulsory identity cards?

Mr Green: I am grateful for that question. I am not particularly familiar with the Kent scheme but I think the difficulty is that there is a plethora of identity schemes in existence. Taking aside the national debate, having a single national proof of age scheme would be helpful to us all, because I think everybody in the industry is working to one scheme and we are just dealing with one scheme, so it is much easier to enforce. Whether that is translatable into a national ID card, I am happy to let people of your wisdom decide that. I think a single proof of age scheme, on a voluntary basis even, would be better than what we have got now.

Chairman: On that topical note ----

David Winnick: But rather controversial note.

Chairman: Topical in all ways in this festive season. Can I thank all of our witnesses for a very, very helpful session and a Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you and to all of our viewers on the Internet. Thank you very much indeed.