Licensing Act 2003

My hon. Friend is right. The idea is that if a local community and a set of licensees fail to deal with concerns about alcohol over time, there will be a charge on them. We see that as a red card, to encourage them to act before that becomes necessary. The power is available to deal with the worst problems. Implementing a new piece of legislation is always challenging, and it is not surprising that in a situation where there are about 190,000 licensees and where we are collapsing six regimes into one and dealing with a sector that was previously regulated by up to 50 pieces of legislation, there will be some sectors and individual licensees that suffer anomalies. We will examine those if they occur. We have worked closely with representatives of all the organisations that were cited by the right hon. Lady and other hon. Members, and we will continue to do so. The right hon. Lady cited the issue of applications. She carried out a helpful survey in May to see how many licensees had applied. At that stage the rate was too slow. She found that the figure was 3.5 per cent. We therefore decided to increase our awareness-raising efforts and put in place a national campaign. We placed adverts in 28 regional and trade publications. We have done several regional tours and 50 interviews. The right hon. Lady was kind enough to mention some of them. We are particularly grateful for the help that we received from brewers—for example, Cobra, which helped us to reach the 8,000 Indian restaurants that they supply with beer. We are also grateful to the cash and carry network, 95 per cent. of which has participated in our initiative and helped us to distribute over 200,000 leaflets to make sure that we can reach people who do not read the trade press and who do not necessarily join trade membership organisations. We can make sure that they are reached as well and that they know they need to apply. We do not want to minimise the work that remains to be done, but applications have started to pick up. They were at 3.5 per cent. in mid-May, 10 per cent. by mid-June, 25 per cent. last week and they are now up to 33 per cent., so steady progress is being made. We recognise that there is much further to go, but there is other encouraging news, such as the fact that the British Beer and Pub Association reported this week that about 60 per cent. of pubs have now applied. If that rate of increase in applications continues, a very significant number of those that need a licence to trade will have applied by the first deadline of 6 August. If licensees miss that deadline, they have not entirely missed their chance to apply. They will be able to apply as if they were a new licensee. That will potentially be a more difficult process because there would rightly be an opportunity for the local community to make representations. The key message that we should send out today is that they need to apply by 6 August and if they miss that deadline, they need to apply by 24 November.