Policing and Crime Bill

My Lords, the Government have brought forward Amendments 119A, 119B, 125C and 125D, which are necessary to ensure that the mandatory conditions in the code can allow other bodies to exercise some discretion over their implementation. This is necessary because it will allow the mandatory conditions to refer to other existing rules and regulations with which licensees already have to comply, such as advertising codes, and can therefore ensure that the conditions are not simply duplicating these rules and regulations nor that they are inconsistent with them. The amendments are also necessary so that the police and other authorities can be given some discretion over how particular conditions are implemented on the ground to ensure that the conditions are effective and that they can be tailored so as to not impose unfair burdens on premises and to ensure that such activity is within the scope of our powers. Amendments 120A and 125E ensure that if the mandatory licensing conditions set out in secondary legislation are varied or removed, the conditions are also varied or removed in the same way in the individual premises licences. That was always our intention, but as the Bill is currently drafted it is not clear that that would occur. It would seem unfair for Parliament to decide that a particular mandatory condition was no longer appropriate, but still require licensees to comply with it. Amendments 123B, 124A, 124B, 125A, 125B, 125F, 125G, 125H, 125J and 125K relate to the locally applied conditions and, as I said earlier, in considering whether licensing authorities should be able to act as interested parties, I shall also reconsider our position on these conditions and will return to this issue at Report. However, the amendments are all necessary to ensure that the locally applied conditions would be effective if implemented. Amendments 125B and 125K are necessary to ensure that the locally applied conditions could allow other bodies to exercise some discretion over their implementation, for the same reasons that I set out earlier. Amendments 123B, 124A, 124B, 125A, 125F, 125G, 125H and 125J all relate to the processes around the implementation of the local discretionary conditions. We have consulted widely on the process by which licensing authorities could impose these conditions and we are still considering over 7,000 responses to the consultation. The amendments ensure that we have the flexibility to implement whatever process emerges from the consultation. Similarly, the amendments allow us to clarify in regulations what happens if a licensing authority wishes to revoke the local discretionary conditions, what happens if the licence itself is varied, reviewed or revoked and what happens to premises that have had the local discretionary conditions imposed if those conditions could no longer be imposed. The responses to the consultation will help us to determine these processes and it is important that the regulations can clarify these matters to remove unnecessary uncertainty. I beg to move.