Legislative Reform (Minor Variations to Premises Licences and Club Premises Certificates) Order 2009

My Lords, I should perhaps give some history. The noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, has alluded to the great battles that we had over the Licensing Act 2003. I declare an interest as chairman of Best Bar None, which looks at improving the safety of pubs and nightclubs in the night-time economy. I have a great understanding of this issue and have talked to many publicans about it. Therefore, although the Minister’s words sounded very positive, I meet them with a slightly hollow laugh because we have been arguing over this for a long time. The noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, who has moved from his place quite dramatically in the last couple of seconds, said that the Liberal Democrats retreated from their position. He knows that we have fought this for a very long time. Before the Licensing Act we both took part in a stunt to prove how important live music was. We played in the Red Lion pub. When the noble Lord wanted to blow his own trumpet, as a member of the jazz group, we had to throw him out because he would have been the third person to take part in a performance, which would have been illegal. Of course, we did not get much publicity because it happened to be the same night that the noble Lord, Lord Archer, received his four-year holiday from the House and the press seemed to be rather more interested in that. I could never understand that. It was an issue that we then took into the debate on the Licensing Act because we thought that the "two in a bar" rule was unfair. It stifled a great deal of creativity. We thought that the Licensing Act would give us great freedom and the rules would be opened up. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh of Haringey, said: ""What the Bill does is to make it much cheaper and easier to get a licence where one is needed".—[Official Report, 3/7/03; col. 1050.]" He went on to say that there would be a great explosion of live music, which did not turn out to be the case. I have talked to many publicans and the amount of red tape and bureaucracy, and the difficulty of understanding the regulations, mean that nolicensing will go forward. This morning on the radio there were some buskers playing in a square, which was against the Licensing Act. I am sure that nobody at the radio station understood that. There was that large spontaneous dance at Liverpool Street, which was totally against the Licensing Act. There are many examples, which people laugh off, but a publican faces large amounts of regulation and could lose his licence— and therefore his income and livelihood—or even face six months in prison or a £20,000 fine over this. I find such penalties incredible. If you said that this was a law passed by a one-party state, I could understand it, but it was passed by the Government, claiming that they are doing something to increase the amount of live music. I find it almost laughable that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport can hold its head up and call itself cultural. We fought very hard for live music. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, is taking a personal pop because I was the one who had to stand down. People tend to forget that we took this to a record number of Divisions. I never get the credit for this so I am going to say it now and blow my own trumpet in the same way that the noble Lord has done many times. If we had taken it to a further vote, it would have stood as a record for the number of times that we have ping-ponged a single issue between the two Houses. It was at that point that the Secretary of State in another place, the right honourable Tessa Jowell, offered me morris dancing. I had 600 morris dancers dance in honour of the DCMS in Trafalgar Square. The Act would have killed morris dancing. At the last minute, when the Secretary of State offered me morris dancing on the phone, I said, "Excellent. You are offering morris dancing. You have got your Bill". She thought that she had gone too far and said, "It does not include cloggers". There was an intake of breath from another DCMS official on the line; I had not realised that it was a conference call. Another voice on the line said, "Secretary of State, it does include cloggers". That is so good, because clogging would have been killed as an art form in this country. I take this opportunity to hope that the Minister will back morris dancing at the Olympic opening ceremony, to show that the DCMS backs culture in this country. The problem with the amendment is that it sounds as if the Minister has suddenly spotted a slight problem with the way in which the Licensing Act has been dealt with. The Act has been a massive constraint on live music in this country and has destroyed a vibrant and economic area of the country. Large numbers of bands that have made great wealth for the country started in the pubs and clubs, and they are being denied that opportunity. If we can have live-screen TV—we know that there has been disorder because of live-screen TV, even though it was denied that that would happen—but we cannot have live music when people playing in a pub tends to calm the situation rather than causing violence, we must address the situation. I hope that the Government do not use this as an opportunity to bring something forward and then not keep their eye on the ball, so that we end up with a bureaucratic mess that causes so many problems.