Licensing Act 2003

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), who put his case in his usual measured way. I feel I now know everything there is to know about Swineshead, and am all the better for it. I can boast more villages in my constituency than he can. I have 88, many with pubs and village halls, and I am doing my bit to publicise the licensing laws by going around as many of them as I can. I look forward immensely to 24 November. It will be a great day in our history when we finally sweep away the licensing laws, dating from Lloyd George and the first world war. At last, we will be able to go out and have a drink after going to the theatre or cinema and will not have to pay large amounts to go into a club environment. At last, when I am wandering around some of the 88 villages in my constituency and happen on a pub near to closing time that has its curtains drawn and is staying open after 11 o’clock, I will not have to leave as the Member of Parliament because it will be legal for well-run premises to stay open that late. As chairman of the all-party group on beer, it is almost worth throwing a party to celebrate that day when it comes. I noticed two different approaches from the Opposition parties. The Liberal Democrats took a fundamental approach. Unlike some of my colleagues, I like Liberal Democrats. [Hon. Members: ““Oh!””] I do. Progressives are few and far between in North Yorkshire. It was once a completely blue county and we had many alliances. It is a cause of particular disappointment to me that the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) has gone back to the original Lloyd George position. The logic of his argument is that there should be no flexibility in opening hours. What would that do for binge drinking? People who go out under our current restrictive licensing laws are younger people. Our towns and city centres would remain dominated by them and they would have the same incentives to drink far too much far too quickly. According to an incomplete survey by the all-party beer group, more than 2,000 licensed premises have applied for extended hours. They do not want 24-hour opening, but an extra hour or two on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday. Those premises have had no objections and the applications have gone through on the nod. The only controversial application that I have been involved in was for the Charles pub in Heslington village. It is a student pub with a long record of complaints of noise and nuisance, and the application was rejected. I worry about the change in the Liberal Democrats’ position. The hon. Gentleman said—I am sorry he is not in the Chamber to hear my little critique—that it is a pity that only a fifth of local councils have adopted the saturation clauses. Many rural districts do not have the problems of saturation of licensed premises that might be found in urban areas. It is not surprising that only a few of them have taken up that option. I advise the hon. Gentleman to be careful in his choice of quotes. He called in aid the Institute of Alcohol Studies as part of his criticism. One of its main funding bodies is the UK Temperance Alliance, which approaches the debate in a certain way. On village halls and sports clubs, the Minister has not done at all badly in recent weeks in grasping the issues quickly. Perhaps village hall and sports club secretaries are made of sterner stuff in Selby than they are in Surrey, but I have had only one letter on the subject. I do not mean to decry the seriousness of the subject. The one sports group that wrote to me is having to pay a £300 fee. On the other hand, it is getting £17,000 in rate relief from the Government. It is a large sports club. I worry more about the smaller sports clubs and some of the smaller village halls. Some interesting ideas have been put to the Minister, such as basing rateable value on the size of the bar and extending somewhat the number of temporary event notices. However, until Sir Les Elton undertakes his study and takes his evidence, it will be difficult to judge the impact of raising the number of temporary event notices from 12 to 15. What difference would that make to village halls? How many village halls would that help? By bringing forward the initial study and the initial review by 12 months so that we have the report by November, I think that my hon. Friend the Minister is responding to criticisms that are real but can be exaggerated. In the week that we won the Olympics, I hope that some of the London councils will now adopt a less churlish approach to the Act. The leader of Westminster city council has been quoted in a positive way. I am glad that he is beginning to recognise the potential for the development of London’s entertainment sector in a safe way but also in an innovative way, now that councils have a say in licensing. We do not need a great structure of bureaucracy to implement the provisions in the Act in Westminster or in any of the London authorities, as health and safety and environment provisions are already very much in place. The fire authority is also in place, so those provisions do not need to be replicated. We need, however, to get a night life in London that is fit for the Olympic games. One of the first meetings that I went to about licensing laws was held by an organisation called London First. It said that we would never get a great sporting event unless we had a safe and varied night life of which we could be proud. We have six or seven years to get that right. The hon. Member for Bath has missed most of my critique, but as someone who went to Singapore and argued the case strongly for Britain, can he imagine having the Olympic games in London in 2012 without having some form of flexible opening hours? Will all the many visitors to London and all the many athletes, unlike in Athens last summer, have to go home at 11 pm? What a laughing stock we would be if that were the case.