I chaired this meeting today as the chair, Mary Clarkson was unavailable.  I’d had lunch with her on Monday to talk through the issues so I felt well briefed.  The agenda today consisted of three main items:

The review of the City Council’s statement of licensing policy.  This policy has to be regularly reviewed and there were no major changes.  The most significant is that it now allows members of the City Council to have representations heard as an interested party for any licensable premises in the City – they not longer have to be resident locally to it.

The second item was the Committee’s response to the Home Office Consultation entitled Rebalancing the Licensing Act.  A balanced and proportionate response had been prepared by our licensing team leader and the committee was happy to re-endorse it (as it had had to be sent last month after approval by me as vice chair and Mary as chair).  An interesting proposal is to give local authorities discretion to set license fee levels.  I think this might be useful firstly as a levy for very late opening so that the Police can be better resourced to cope with the consequences of later opening, and secondly as a levy on off-licences to fund test purchasing to make sure sales are not being made to those under the age of 18.

The third item was the update on licensing activities by The Council.  I was impressed at the can-do, proactive approach taken by our licensing team that had produced so much better control of licensable activities without stifling well-run operations.  We talked about the Tesco (St Aldates) appeal that had been allowed by magistrates and there was a feeling that the appeal had been allowed because the original panel had refused the application on grounds of crime and disorder even though there had been no objection from the Police.  We talked about a couple of other cases and about the need for panels to make proportionate decisions that actually address real problems for which there is evidence rather than second-guessing what might or might not happen.  We also talked about the special saturation policies in place for the City Centre and East Oxford and discussed how applicable they are to off-licenses selling alcohol outside of the troublesome times that the SSP is in place to address.

Finally, I couldn’t resist linking to this image from a story in the Daily Mail from March 2008.  Thankfully things are not like that in Oxford, largely thanks to the excellent work of our licensing team headed by Julian Alison and its partnership working with Thames ValleyPolice, Nightsafe and other organisations.

We completed the meeting in a little under an hour.