Licensing Act

No, it is not the responsibility of drug dealers that people take drugs. It is the responsibility of the people who take them. However, that is not to say that I am a supporter of drug dealers. Obviously, for people to take drugs they need a drug dealer; but I should be surprised if a Liberal, or someone who calls himself a Liberal, did not accept the idea of individual freedom and, therefore, individual responsibility. Blaming someone's actions on someone else is a senseless route to go down. They should be blamed on the person responsible, so let us target the offender. If we have a problem with alcohol-related violence, perhaps we should spend more time making sure that the people who commit it are arrested and locked up. If the punishment were harsher and those people had, for example, to spend a harsher time in prison, they might feel less inclined to come out and get drunk and go down the same path. Surely that would be a better way to tackle alcohol-related violence than penalising a supermarket that sells a bottle of wine for 10p less than someone else thinks it should. It is a futile exercise. I have been told of supposedly irresponsible promotions in which people can buy a ticket to something and drink as much as they like, for nothing—as part of the price. I do not know what happens at local Labour party functions, as the Minister has not yet invited me to one, although I look forward to such an invitation; nor do I know what happens at Lib Dem political events, but it is not uncommon—I do not know whether my hon. Friends have had this experience—for the price of a ticket to Conservative party events to include what people drink. The drink is free and the ticket price covers its cost. I have yet to see people leaving any of those functions legless. [Interruption.] I see from the reaction of my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon and East Chelmsford that he has; I do not know whether he means himself or someone else. I certainly have not seen people leaving legless because they have drunk as much as they could, just because they could. Just because people can drink as much as they can does not mean they will. People tend to take responsibility for their lives and actions. It is not the promotion in itself that causes a problem. It is the individual's reaction to the promotion that does it. If some people are determined to get drunk, whether there is a promotion or not, the likelihood is that they will do so. I hope that the Minister will explain that the Government have no intention of banning any drink promotions or pursuing the ridiculous idea of forcing supermarkets to charge their customers more for alcohol. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr. Vaizey) will give that commitment too, for what I hope will be a Conservative Government after the general election. The banning approach would be terribly misguided, and would punish decent law-abiding citizens, and it would make no difference to alcohol-related violence. I wholeheartedly endorse the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon and East Chelmsford about lap-dancing clubs, and I want to reiterate them. The issue is not whether the clubs are a good or bad thing; people can have their own view on that, and they may have moral objections. I tend to be a libertarian and if people want to work in those places and to go to them that is a matter for them—I do not want to stand in their way. The issue is one of natural justice. My hon. Friend made the powerful point that people who have invested considerable amounts of money, in good faith, in opening such establishments under the Licensing Act 2003, which the Government passed, may face the prospect of having them closed down under new licensing regulations imposed by the same Government, which they could surely never have envisaged when they made their investment. The Government are right to want to give residents more of a say about where such places should be, and about whether locations are acceptable. However, I hope that they will provide some protection—some grandfather rights—for businesses that were opened in good faith. It would be unacceptable and unfair for those businesses to be closed down within a year. The least that the Government can do is allow a decent transitional period to protect the rights of establishments that have been opened in good faith under the current licensing arrangements. As my hon. Friend said, the Committee recommended that that should be a period of five years. I should like to think that five years would be a minimum; a much longer time would be fairer. I hope that we shall not get bogged down in an argument about whether lap-dancing clubs are a good or bad thing. That is neither here nor there—the point is simply one of natural justice. When the Government legislated on the matter recently, I raised this subject and was told that the intention was not to close down lap-dancing clubs that had just opened, and that there were discussions with the Lap Dancing Association and other parties to work around some of the issues. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that some sensible progress is being made, so that people are not treated unfairly, and businesses are not put out of business, on a basis that they could not have predicted. I endorse the recommendations that the Select Committee made on other issues, including live music, a topic on which my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon and East Chelmsford concentrated. I hope that the Minister will be sympathetic to those other recommendations.