Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 79)
TUESDAY 14 OCTOBER 2008
COMMANDER SIMON
O'BRIEN, CHIEF
INSPECTOR ADRIAN
STUDD, MR
SIMON REED
AND MR
GEORGE GALLIMORE
Q60 Helen Southworth: In terms of
the Licensing Act there is a very strong focus on individual premises:
how it is managed, who the licensee is, what operates there. If
you are looking at how people work in a town centre, they go from
place to place. In policing terms, an awful lot of issues and
events happen outside the individual licensed premises. Do you
think the Act needs to take that more into account, to ensure
that the public space between licensed premises is brought into
consideration as well?
Mr Studd: It is quite difficult
for local authorities to plan the town centre, because they have
very few powers available for them to do it. The licence is seen
as a property, and if somebody applies for a licence and they
tick the right boxes, it is difficult for the local authority
to say that they cannot have it. There are the cumulative impact
areas and things like that which are relating to the policies,
but clearly they are regularly challenged and sometimes successfully.
What drives the market is what drives the premises that are going
to be there. I know from my experience that people say to me,
"We would like to give it over to such and such an operation,
but the people who have the high volume vertical drinkers are
willing to pay more for the rent and more for the lease".
Inevitably, if it is market driven, they are the ones who get
it. I think this has been a bit of a problem in the larger town
and city centres. We touched on earlier some of the premises which
have come up, banks and places like that, and really the only
people who are going to pay the premium rates are the people who
can sell a lot of alcohol, and if you are selling a lot of alcohol
you are getting a lot of young people through the door. They are
the people who drink a lot.
Mr Gallimore: I should imagine
that the street drinking ban has been very useful. In the transition
between licensed premises, that does not mean that you take your
glass or your bottle from the last one. Working with door staff
on that has been a good move. It should always be part and parcel
of any planning, of how your town centre works when you are town
planning.
Q61 Helen Southworth: You have led
me on to the next question: If you have a street drinking ban,
what do you think about places which say that if you buy two glasses
of wine you get the rest of the bottle free, but that means you
have to drink it before you go out of the door?
Mr Gallimore: It is difficult
to say, because they are a private enterprise and we know that
they are in it to make money. At the end of the day, they are
a business, but with that they have to be responsible. I do not
know who would decide what is sensible promotion—I suppose
that is for other people in the Licensing Authority. But if you
get them to drink too much too quickly they are going to cause
problems, not necessarily in your establishment but possibly the
next one down the road when they move down there, so excessive
quick drinking should not be encouraged.
Mr O'Brien: On that particular
point, obviously you would look at how many people are going to
share that particular sale. For example, with a bottle of wine
there may be two or three people drinking it. The fundamental
point—and I think it is something that we can more visibly
enforce—is that if someone is walking around with an open
vessel (a) they have probably committed some offence under the
Theft Act or (b) We have the power to stop that person and confiscate
that. That tends to be much more of a black and white position
in which the police can involve themselves. In terms of pricing
structures in a freely available and lawful commodity, it becomes
much more difficult for us to have some enforcement view there.
Q62 Helen Southworth: How much do
you think needs to be about enforcement and how much about better
management in the first place?
Mr O'Brien: Before the Act there
would be problems where people drank far too much and there would
be problems with certain people that did not manage their premises
particularly well. I think the Act has given us some significant
powers, which I think we have used very sensibly and we will continue
to do so. I think, frankly, that enforcement is only one part
of what we need to be doing. I think the whole view about our
consumption of alcohol in this country probably needs a broader
look at. That whole culture change might not come from enforcement,
but could come, as we have seen with smoking and other areas,
through health and education. I think that is an area we need
to be focused on in the future.
Q63 Helen Southworth: Is this something,
in your experience, in which there is currently sufficient involvement
from health agencies in town centres, for example? Or do you think
that is something that needs to be worked on? I have an example
of a meeting with the owners of licensed premises in my constituency.
We began it with a presentation from the consultants at A&E,
who gave graphic demonstrations of injuries that had been caused
to people in our own town on a Friday and Saturday night. The
impact of that was very considerable. People who had not experienced
it and who did not realise what was happening to people when they
were outside the doors were given it very graphically. Do you
think we need to do more of that sort of thing?
Mr O'Brien: Certainly there have
been some very good examples and I think we are working much more
closely with colleagues in health, both in acute trusts and the
primary care sector. In Cardiff, for example, the greater ability
and desire to share certain anonymous data has been very useful.
I think both services can then plan their particular construct
that night. For example, knowing that emergency admissions have
gone up in a particular location is not particularly stunning
news, but at what time and over what premises allows us maybe
to put further police officers into that area earlier or to put
frontline ambulances further into the town centre. I think all
those are bits of the problem solving that we are more used to
dealing with these days. There is always going to be a problem
in terms of our health colleagues and the issue of patient confidentiality,
which we would respect, but in many ways just sharing our overall
knowledge of a particular problem would allow us to respond in
a much more professional and efficient way in the first place.
Q64 Paul Farrelly: I am the Member
of Parliament for Newcastle-upon-Lyme which is a town in the Midlands,
and like every town we have lots of pubs and we have the occasional
problem of badly run pubs, particularly with respect to drug dealing.
The latest antisocial behaviour problem concerns yobbos watching
live Stoke City matches via a satellite signal that is supposed
to go to Norway but comes into my town, and these pubs are co-run
by a conservative councillor locally, which is quite an interesting
problem and not just for the police. By far the major concern
I have had about licensing in recent years was to do with the
licensing of a lap dancing club in our town. There the police
could not object because there were no crime and disorder problems.
In fact, the police say that the people who go in there are generally
far better behaved than the people drinking late at night in pubs.
Of course people locally are looking for the police and licensing
committees to make moral decisions. Has this issue caused you
any problems? Would you like to see a separate licensing regime
allowing some more local democratic involvement for what you might
call adult entertainment?
Mr Studd: It is quite a difficult
one. The Police Service has grappled with it over recent years,
since it was introduced about 10 or 15 years ago. I think you
are right when you say that often people look for a moral decision
on it, which is something that it is very difficult for the police
or local authorities to make. I guess there are only two distinctions.
It is either entertainment, in which case it comes under the Licensing
Act, or it is sexual encounter, in which case it has a separate
licence. A number of local authorities have their own sex encounter
licences, and that brings in a much more rigid campaign. They
obviously get much more substantial fees, anything up to £30,000
a year, which allows them to visit the premises, and to monitor
it and regulate it in that way. If it is just public entertainment—which
is what they say it is—it is ordinary dancing and it falls
within that same unit as a public house. It is very difficult
to know what else can be done in relation to regulating it. It
is true to say that there is no evidence that they cause any crime
and disorder. Very rarely. They tend to be fairly well run and
they tend to have a fairly high staff ratio to customers. The
people who tend to go there tend to be a bit older, so they do
not drink so excessively and cause the crime and disorder problems
outside.
Q65 Mr Farrelly: Would it simplify
things if anything to do with nudity were brought under the sexual
encounter regime?
Mr Studd: What is nudity? Some
lap dancing clubs take the G-string—well, they call it a
G-string: you would be hard pushed to see it but they would say
there is a G-string—and say that therefore they are not
nude and therefore it is entertainment. There is the three foot
rule, but where is the three foot? Is it from the dancer's hair
or their body or their feet? When are they touching and when are
they not touching? With the best will in the world, when you get
into the fine detail of it—as we have tried to do on a couple
of occasions—it is incredibly difficult and you get into
all sorts of arguments when you are trying to review their licence
or revoke their licence around those sorts of issues.
Q66 Mr Farrelly: Does anybody else
have any thoughts?
Mr O'Brien: No, I think Adrian
is the man on the spot in clubs and dancing. He deals with this
all the time.
Q67 Mr Hall: Could we explore the
correlation between the Licensing Act 2003 and the level of crime
in the night economy? Since the passing of the Act has it got
better, got worse, or is it about the same?
Mr O'Brien: Generally it has been
pretty neutral. We have probably seen some rise in disorder, we
have seen some rise in violence at certain hours of the evening,
but there has not been any major spike in crime that we could
directly associate with the differences in times that premises
are staying open until. As the previous witnesses have given you
evidence, there has been a generally neutral view on the recorded
statistics. Clearly we are also very much aware that many issues
of violence may not necessarily be reported either to us or to
our colleagues in the local health authority. But we must work
with what we had before, and the statistics that we had before
and the statistics that we have had afterwards have not necessarily
changed that much.
Q68 Mr Hall: Is it a fair comparison
to say that now we have this Act it should have an effect on law
and order in the night economy? Or is it something we have just
in the general population?
Mr Reed: Could I come back to
your previous question about the recording. Crime recording is
a process and it is how that is interpreted. This Act coincided
with the introduction of the police notices of disorder, so they
were an alternative disposal to deal with some of these disorder
issues. They may be masking some issues. There was an earlier
question regarding the health authorities, and I think a good
barometer is often the accident and emergency departments because
there you see the true level of violence that has occurred—often
violence that we never know about. It is often very difficult
to compare different times, because there have been changes in
legislation and there have probably been changes in the way we
have policed as well.
Mr Studd: I think the most comprehensive
review was the Home Office review which was conducted last year.
That pretty much corresponds with the anecdotal evidence that
I get when I speak to people across the country, which is that
the levels of crime and disorder remain broadly the same but,
across the whole piece, disorder and violent crime has decreased
slightly in the early evening but increased later into the morning.
Between 3.00 am and 6.00 am there has been an increase, and in
relation to violent crime quite a marked increase (albeit it is
only a fairly small percentage of the crime during the day). But,
whilst you can trot out all the statistics and say that it has
not gone up an awful lot, I guess the impact of that really has
been that it has quite a drastic impact on police resourcing and
the way that the police have to be managed, because, instead of
being able to allow officers to go home at 12.00 or one o'clock
in the morning before, when you then were able to bring them on
eight hours later, they are on until three, four or five in the
morning and it makes it more difficult then to bring them on in
the morning. Inevitably that has an impact, with limited resources,
on the visible presence of police officers during the day, so
I think that is quite a significant impact overall.
Q69 Mr Hall: We have nothing from
the Home Office survey. Those conclusions are, broadly, that it
is too soon to tell.
Mr Studd: They did produce the
report last year. It is difficult to tell for a number of reasons,
not least because coinciding with the introduction of the Act
in November 2005 was the first of the alcohol misuse enforcement
campaigns. Since then, there have been a number of those and a
number of underage sales campaigns, and probably in excess of
£5 million poured into those in extra resourcing for the
police, to ensure that the police are out there doing additional
activity around licensing. Inevitably that is going to have skewed
the figures. With all the other work that has gone on, it is quite
difficult to compare like for like. The Home Office study was
probably the most accurate.
Q70 Mr Hall: It is not a fair expectation
to think that we can bring the Licensing Act 2003 on to the statue
book and that should therefore have an effect on law and order
in the night economy? That is not a fair assessment.
Mr Studd: No. As we have discussed,
it is a much broader issue really than just enforcement. The police
have been locking up drunks for a couple of hundred years and
people are still getting drunk. It needs a lot more work than
that. I think there are good things about the Act which do help
and have helped the police, and there are also other areas which
still need work.
Mr Reed: I want to put some more
emphasis on this issue of policing. We are bringing officers on
later, to work later into the early hours. Whereas, previously,
most of the disorder was finished by about two o'clock, now it
is four o'clock plus and onwards sometimes. The impact is that
police officers are being moved from what they would have been
doing the previous day and often the next day to cope.
Q71 Mr Hall: This impacts across
the shift.
Mr Reed: Absolutely. In town centres
and city centres, as weekends have other venues such as football
matches getting on, the resources are really being stretched,
because you cannot always call on other officers who perhaps have
been doing other venues. At times, policing is really stretched—probably
more so in the smaller towns than it is in the bigger cities.
My knowledge of some small market towns is that, on occasions,
they are the Wild West, because they really are stripped of resources.
Q72 Alan Keen: My local authority
is the Cheshire Police Authority. In the northern part of my constituency
we have Holton Borough Council. It has produced a report on an
alcohol strategy which is aimed at dispersing the drinking culture
out of the town centres in the northern part of the constituency
and back into their own communities through a pricing mechanism
which would prohibit the sale of very strong alcohol and increase
the price of alcohol available at retail outlets in the town centres
and increase the drinking age to 21. A lot of that will require
primary legislation if it is to be put in place. Do you have a
take on this? You are closest to it, George. Which part of Manchester
are you from?
Mr Gallimore: Stockport.
Q73 Mr Hall: I assume you are a Manchester
City fan. I thought you might be from Ashton-under-Lyme.
Mr Gallimore: No, I used to work
there. The difficulty for me is how far you go in controlling
people's night time habits themselves, by saying that they have
to be a certain age not to drink and trying to deter you from
the town centre. A lot of town centres have struggled to survive
because of business getting thin anyway. Certain licensed premises
have gone to the wall because they cannot get the business anyway.
Really, I suppose, it is how you control business. I suppose that
is the main thing for me. With policing, the more you spread it
out, the harder it is to cover. If you have a drinks ban on the
street and then a drinks ban in nine town centres instead of one,
who is going to enforce the ban for you? When you cannot enforce
it, it becomes meaningless: then they know you are not going to
get challenged if you are walking with a drink. It is being manageable,
for me. You have to be able to afford it and make it effective.
The worry of having what you said is that every little centre
could have a night time economy, and I do not think we could police
that.
Q74 Mr Hall: What about raising the
drinking age to 21? Is there a police view on that?
Mr Studd: We did a survey on that
recently from the 43 police forces across England and Wales, and
only one came back thinking it would be a good idea.
Q75 Mr Hall: Would that be Cheshire?
Mr Studd: I cannot remember off
the top of my head. A couple thought it might be a good idea to
raise the age for purchase of off-sale to 21. There were only
two or three of those, but, generally, it was felt that the status
quo was probably the best and that it would cause too much difficulty
trying to go through any sort of change of process and it would
not achieve an awful lot. Challenge 21, which no doubt you have
heard about—
Q76 Mr Hall: It is a good scheme.
Mr Studd: Yes, it is a very good
scheme. It is the one which ACPO promote very actively. I know
that some places are doing their own Challenge 25, and I think
that if you go to some places in America it is Challenge 30.
Q77 Mr Hall: Asda do a Challenge
25.
Mr Studd: Yes. From an ACPO point
of view, we would encourage people merely to do the Challenge
21, because it keeps it simple across the country. Everyone can
readily understand it and the signage is the same. An important
part of it is the signage which all the premises agree to put
up. That in itself was quite a challenge, because some of the
larger supermarkets said, "We can't put that up because it
is not corporate. We need to have our corporate colours and we
do not have orange" or "we do not have blue." It
was quite difficult getting them just to agree to put up a sign.
That is one of the reasons we would encourage Challenge 21. Those
sorts of schemes I think are probably as effective as trying to
alter the drinking age.
Q78 Mr Hall: What about a ban on
the sale of strong alcohol?
Mr O'Brien: To come back to your
previous point, I think that, again, we are perhaps legislating
our way into what is a problem of culture. In terms of location,
spreading out the issues from a town centre, that perhaps comes
back to the earlier point of how we can manage the shaping of
that town centre in the first place and how we change the atmosphere
in that particular location. In terms of raising the age or lowering
the age, in many ways, if you can get people to drink responsibly
I think that 18 is an age where people have reached an age to
make some adult decisions. I certainly think that if you have
a proportionate joined-up strategy of a location, then it can
be that maybe you would advise and have some voluntary agreement
about what strength of alcohol you would serve in particular bars
and how you would price that. I am sure that even the big industries
would not necessarily want to put Stella Artois at 5.2% on, they
might just put Heineken on in certain premises. In many ways you
could get some voluntary agreements about that. Certainly my experience
is that if you can get people around a table, as we have discussed
earlier, and have a sensible discussion about what we are all
trying to achieve and if our aims are broadly consensual, then
we can get some more work done that way rather than perhaps in
trying legislate our way through some of these things.
Q79 Helen Southworth: I have had
quite a lot of meetings with licensees in my constituency. One
of the things they have said to me that they are sometimes influenced
by to carry out practices that they would prefer not to because
if they do not they will lose their jobs. Do you think that is
a wider spread issue?
Mr Studd: Do you mean influenced
by their employers?
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