Policing and Crime Bill

Clause 28 : Selling alcohol to children Debate on whether Clause 28 should stand part of the Bill. In opposing the Motion that this clause should stand part, I am afraid that I am not much more kindly disposed towards the second clause in this part of the Bill than I was to the first. Here we are looking at a change to the offence of persistently selling alcohol to children, lowering the bar from three occasions to two within three consecutive months. Again, I would have welcomed a provision that played part of a meaningful policy addressing the growing problem of underage drinking. We all know about the damage alcohol can cause to young people, not only to their health but to almost every aspect of their lives. Shops that deliberately or recklessly sell to minors should be pursued. However, why have the Government suddenly decided that the number of strikes is a problem. The current system has been in place for less than two years, and what hard evidence is there that it is failing? In the debates in another place, the Government indicated that the police would welcome the opportunity to escalate the penalties more rapidly where they believe premises were wilfully relaxing their checks until they had received two warnings. Does the Minister have any statistics on the number of penalties and fines that have been issued to these premises for failing a test purchase? We have had a partial response to that already. Presumably there must be evidence of lots of £80 penalty notices on bar staff and £10,000 fines on licensees for the first two offences that the Government are failing to act as a sufficient deterrent. I look forward to hearing the figures. The Government also claimed in another place that they were working with licensees to tackle underage drinking together, yet in this clause they seem to have disregarded their concerns entirely. Large retailers are worried that their high numbers of sales mean that they will rapidly hit the two-strike barrier even when taking all possible care, while small retailers are worried about the difficulty of training their staff to recognise the multitude of IDs that they are expected to vet, and all retailers are struggling to keep up with the ever-changing legislation and regulation they have to operate under. I have yet to hear or see any compelling evidence that this change will make any difference to the problem at hand. I hope that the Minister will be able to do better than his colleagues in another place in explaining just why we need this clause.