Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-44)
COUNCILLOR AUDREY
LEWIS, MR
ANDREW FISHER
AND TONY
KELLY
31 OCTOBER 2005
Q40 Martin Horwood: You did not quite
answer my question about what techniques you think were the most
successful. Councillor Lewis has a little bit in saying that you
communicated your policy to every single possible applicant. Are
there any other techniques that you thought were successful?
Mr Fisher: I think local authorities
will have taken different views. My view is that the important
issue was one which Councillor Lewis has mentioned, the attitude
that the local authority took to the process, the importance which
was attached to delivering this process and recognising very early
on in that process that it was going to generate lots and lots
of work, that there was a major administrative task to be performed
and to put in place the staffing structures and the mechanisms
to enable that to be done satisfactorily. In Bolton, a massive
amount of our information probably did not find its way onto a
website, but we very actively engaged with the local press and
ran a series of articles to try to encourage businesses to submit
their applications, warning them of the consequences of not doing
so, telling them that if they got their applications in early,
they could have a one-to-one meeting with a member of staff who
would actually walk them through the process and they would come
out at the other end with a satisfactorily completed application
form et cetera.
Q41 Martin Horwood: Do you feel that
kind of proactive attitude was encouraged by Government?
Councillor Lewis: Initially, no.
Mr Kelly: It is something we did
to try to make life operationally better for ourselves. We proactively
sent out application packs which included a step-by-step guide
for applicants as to how they should go about filling in the forms,
not just the 21-page form but the other forms which were necessarily
completed alongside that, so they were all referenced and people
were given fairly simplistic instructions on how to fill in the
whole collection of forms.
Mr Fisher: I think that Government
could probably have done more to help that process, but I am not
sure that it should be seen as the responsibility of Government
to encourage that type of good practice. I think they could have
helped by having more timely guidance, having the regulations
published a little bit earlier in order that we could have been
geared up better to discharge that responsibility. Had we had
that, then I do not think that Government could have been criticised
for it. I think it is the responsibility of the local authority
to grasp that task and to deliver it.
Q42 Chair: One of the other bodies
putting in evidence, the Network of Residents' Association, has
suggested that liaison committees should be mandatory. May I ask
your two authorities whether you had liaison committees and whether
you found them useful?
Mr Fisher: Bolton did not.
Councillor Lewis: We have had
a committee with the entertainment industry, quite a broad group,
plus residents, for many years but I do not think it could possibly
have coped with 3,000-plus applications, because it would have
had to be in almost permanent session if it were going to go boring
into any of those at all.
Q43 Anne Main: Numerous points you
have just been discussing keep touching on cost: officers, enforcement
and dealing with it. Would you say this is going to cause you
a budgetary deficit on councils? Do you feel the fees are going
to cover it? Do you feel this is going to mean a rise in the council
tax? Is it over onerous financially for a local council to deliver?
Mr Kelly: We have done certain
projections in Bolton and we are very much in the dark as to what
the enforcement costs are likely to be. We are still liaising
with our fellow enforcement bodies. Without saying too much, it
looks as though we shall be there or thereabouts. We could be
slightly under, slightly over, but whether we recover our overall
costs will depend upon the enforcement costs; it is marginal based
upon the enforcement costs.
Councillor Lewis: The structure
of the entertainment industry in Westminster, where you have a
large number of existing very large venues which already open
late at night, very drink-led, means that enforcement costs are,
by their nature always going to be high. A great deal of work
needs to be put in on those sorts of outlets and we have therefore
seen clubs whom we might have charged in excess of £20,000
going down to a few hundred pounds, without even the accelerator
put on them because they have been defined as nightclubs. We cannot
see, if we are going to do anything like the sort of job we are
required to do, that we will not be millions out of pocket unless
something very miraculous occurs.
Q44 Chair: You would support a variable
fee structure rather than a flat one.
Councillor Lewis: I would support
a very, very, very wide structure. I think the problem has been
that we have tried to get all sorts of different kinds of premises
into a very narrow band. I think particularly capacity and hours
of working should be included in that and there has been no discussion
on them so far.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed; we
have to move onto the next round of witnesses.
| 
