The '24 hour city' – condition critical?

Although many '24-hour city' strategies have been economically successful, they have often failed to meet the social needs and aspirations of local communities. Phil Hadfield, Stuart Lister, Dick Hobbs and Simon Winlow look at the problems now facing these night-time economies and examine some of the latest proposals for addressing them.

The concept of the '24-hour city' is not in good health. It's 2.15 on Saturday morning in an English city centre and the 'Mass Volume Vertical Drinker' has assaulted the concept and all its good intentions, leaving it for dead in streets splattered with blood, vomit, urine, and the sodden remains of take-aways.

In te May 1999 issue of T&CP, Peter Jones et al. challenged the 'popular and perhaps prejudiced' view that the '24-hour city' concept represents little more than a 'late-night pub/club drinking and dancing culture dominated by young people'.1

Without wishing to deny that the '24-hour city' concept encompasses much more than this, our own research, which has focused upon the situational outcomes of local '24-hour city' strategies, would suggest that all too often such 'narrow' interpretations do indeed have factual justification.2 Indeed, we would suggest that the gulf between the initial visions of a vibrant, urbane, and inclusive marriage of culture and commerce and the subsequent reality of almost exclusively alcohol- and youth-centred 'leisure zones' is so great that the concept is now facing something of a credibility crisis.

While the prophets of 'cultural regeneration' foresaw post-modern 'playgrounds', the market forces unleashed by the deregulation of alcohol-based night-time leisure have contributed to the creation of scenes more akin to the pre-modern battleground.

Jane Jacobs's famous arguments regarding the social and economic benefits of the populous after-dark street have been important theoretical cornerstones of the '24-hour city' concept, and also of official crime prevention policy guidance.3

However, the subsequent strategies of deregulation which have permitted the growth of a market-led monoculture of licensed premises and fast-food outlets are a corruption of Jacob's vision. Alcohol-based leisure now dominates the nightlife of our urban centres, and its expansion has become the gauge of post-industrial prosperity, yet Jacobs specifically warned against what she called this 'duplication of the most profitable use'.4

Although the relationship between alcohol outlet density/proliferation and alcohol-related violence is complex, evidence from deregulated leisure markets such as Manchester and Hull suggests that increases in the number of licensed premises are often accompanied by a rise in the number of assaults. For example, in Manchester city centre the capacity of licensed premises has increased by 240 per cent since 1998, while the number of assaults reported to the police has increased by 225 per cent since 1997.

Approximately 70 per cent of the local crime audits published in 1998 and 1999 identified alcohol as a public order issue. The majority of hot-spots for violence (in public spaces) were located in areas containing high concentrations of licensed premises, with the number of incidents peaking between 9.00pm and 3.00am on Friday nights/Saturday mornings and Saturday nights/Sunday mornings. Moreover, as the Home Office recently acknowledged, officially recorded incidents of alcohol-related crime and disorder represent merely the tip of the iceberg.

Young drinkers now 'own' many town and city centres at night. When such ownership is established, these areas become even more attractive to young people seeking a permissive leisure environment free from the supervision or censure of the older citizens with whom they share these spaces at other times.5

This 'honey-pot' effect produces social environments in which aggressive hedonism and disorder become the norm, creating nuisance and noise pollution for residents and generating fear, avoidance behaviour, and a loss of amenity for the majority of citizens and potential visitors.

The police are constantly juggling resources in an attempt to cope with the situation on the streets, and control duties within licensed premises continue to be performed by ineffectively regulated teams of bouncers. Yet since such central leisure zones now attract unprecedented numbers of young consumers they have become highly attractive locations for licensed trade investment.

The current path of night-time leisure development is also having adverse effects upon residential amenity. In addition to crime and disorder and the fear of crime, residents may face an almost intolerable range of problems, including late-night noise, vandalism of property, litter, and the fowling of pavements and doorsteps

These unpleasant experiences sit uneasily with the vision of 'urban renaissance' contained in the recent Urban White Paper, which seeks to encourage people to remain in, and return to, a 'compact' central core. As the deregulation of alcohol licensing continues, there is now an urgent need to reconcile these competing interests.

The Sunday Licensing De-regulation Order, recently passed by the House of Lords, has amended the 1964 Licensing Act to permit special hours certificates to be granted for late-night Sunday opening. More significantly, Time for Reform, the Home Office White Paper on alcohol licensing 6, has proposed radical changes to the existing system of control. Time for Reform has put forward plans to transfer the jurisdiction for liquor licensing from the magistracy to local authorities. The document also proposes that statutory trading hours be abolished and replaced by a more flexible system, with individual conditions imposed by local authority licensing committees. The new flexibility would, in principle, permit licensed premises to remain open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Time for Reform aims to balance its deregulatory stance with proposals to introduce a range of sanctions, including temporary restrictions on trading hours and the use of personal licences for licensees which could be endorsed and eventually forfeited (after three endorsements). It has long been argued that the introduction of variable trading hours will, in itself, serve to reduce crime and disorder on the streets by facilitating the dispersal of customers over a longer period. However, businesses trading in suburban or rural locations are unlikely to seek or obtain such operating terms, while in urban centres commercial pressures may force each outlet to maintain opening hours congruent with those of its neighbouring competitors, with large numbers of venues trading into the early hours of the morning.

It had been anticipated that a licensing bill, to implement the Time for Reform proposals, would be included in the 20 June 2001 Queen's Speech. However, the bill was dropped a matter of days before its scheduled launch, and responsibility for liquor licensing was transferred from the Home Office to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

The political reasoning behind these decisions can only be speculated, however, mounting criticism from within the licensed trade itself, together with the pressing need to conduct a more thorough evaluation of the legislation's likely impact may well have exerted some influence. Indeed, the strength of feeling among town and city centre residents' associations and other community groups was illustrated at the recent 'Open all hours?' conference, organised by the Marylebone Association and the Soho Society in association with the Central Cities Institute and the Civic Trust. Over 100 delegates from across Britain travelled to the University of Westminster to voice their concerns regarding the impact of licensing reform upon residential areas.

At a local level, the attempts by councils and other stakeholders to stretch the 'vitality' and 'viability' of urban centres into the evening and night, via deregulation, environmental improvement, place marketing and other forms of facilitation, have also been accompanied by new forms of control. A wide range of 'managerial' interventions are now employed, such as door supervisor (bouncer) registration schemes, 'pub and club watch' organisations, bylaws prohibiting the consumption of alcohol in public places, exclusion orders, CCTV (sometimes used in conjunction with on-street emergency 'help points'), and radio-link systems. These various, mostly 'multi-agency' initiatives and proposals should be understood as attempts to set rules and impose a degree of order within an often 'lawless' environment.

However, for the following reasons, many of these initiatives are having little effect:

  • Alcohol-related crime and disorder is by nature spontaneous and expressive rather than premeditated and acquisitive, participants often being oblivious to the presence of CCTV, for example.

  • The resources available for enforcement by the police and other agencies are often limited.

  • Although many of the initiatives seek to crack down on licensed trade 'bad apples', they do little to improve the problems in public space, thus leaving a 'rotten barrel' on the streets.

  • In many towns and cities, late-night transport services continue to be minimal or non-existent.

  • Survey upon survey has shown that despite the implementation of such measures, people who fall outside the 'target consumer group', particularly older people (i.e. those over the age of 30!) and women, regard these leisure zones as threatening and therefore seek to avoid them. The absence of these groups not only undermines informal processes of social control but also raises issues of social exclusion.

  • The initiatives have done little to improve the plight of central area residents, the poorer of whom are denied even the option of avoidance.

While the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 has increased police powers to order the immediate closure of licensed premises in the case of criminal activity and disorder, the pressures being placed upon police resources are also beginning to be acknowledged.

Some of the more recent initiatives and proposals are based upon the 'polluter pays' principle, with preventative measures being funded by the local licensed trade. In Westminster these include plans to introduce 'guardian angel' style private security patrols, and in Manchester there is a pilot scheme to provide two additional police officers in the Peter Street area during peak times. However, ingenious as such managerial initiatives may be, they should still be understood as little more than narrow attempts to ease the symptoms of the problems now faced by local '24-hour city' strategies, while offering little by way of a cure.

Perhaps the primary reason for such failure has been a willingness among 'civic entrepreneurs' to allow the direction of night-time leisure development to be determined almost entirely by market forces. In cities such as Manchester and Nottingham, licensed trade investment has created many new employment opportunities and played a crucial role in the regeneration of the built environment.

However, as PPG6: Town Centres and Retail Developments and the Urban White Paper have shown, economic development is only one of many material considerations to be taken into account by planners and other municipal regulators.

If the '24-hour city' vision of a high-density, mixed-use urban core featuring both a varied and economically prosperous nightlife and excellent residential amenities is ever to become a reality, a much more integrated and interventionist approach to municipal regulation will need to be adopted.

Licensed premises are subject to three forms of municipal control – planning, public entertainment licensing, and liquor licensing – yet there is often little co-ordination or consistency of practice between the various regulatory bodies. If, however, as seems likely, alcohol licensing powers are transferred to local authorities, councils will gain jurisdiction over all three forms of control, allowing, in principle, much greater scope for 'joined-up' thinking and integrated policy.

Under the Time for Reform proposals, each local authority would be given powers to develop a comprehensive licensing policy for its area, thus providing a framework within which the licensing committee's decisions on individual applications could be assessed. Applicants would be required to submit a proposed operating plan, setting out how the premises would be run. Applications would be considered on their individual merit and on their potential impact upon the locality.

Other issues surround planning regulation – specifically planning permission for changes of use and use classes. Owing to processes of decentralisation and rationalisation, many urban centres have experienced a loss of retail and financial service investment. This has had a profound effect upon the distribution of land uses, as successful applications to convert empty shops and offices into leisure-related businesses have begun to transform the commercial character of many central areas. As PPG6 notes, such changes of use can:

'...create new concentrations of single uses, such as restaurants and take-away food outlets, where the cumulative effects can cause local problems. Such proposals should be assessed not only on their positive contribution to diversification, but also on the cumulative effects on such matters as loss of retail outlets, traffic, parking and residential amenity. These issues should be resolved when making planning decisions, rather than permissions being un-implementable when licences are refused.' (para. 2.25)

Despite this policy guidance, planning permission for new 'food and drink' developments continues to be granted in areas where the major activity, particularly at night, has already become drinking alcohol and eating fast food. Other problems surround the issue of use classes.

The Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) Order 1987 allocated a standard (A3) land use classification to all types of business selling food or drink for consumption on the premises or hot food for consumption off the premises. This has had a considerable deregulatory impact, as changes of use to other purposes within this category are no longer taken to involve development. Thus cafes and take-aways can turn into restaurants and then into wine bars and pubs (often with public entertainment licenses), without requiring further planning consent.

Special conditions with regard to issues such as 'trading hours' and 'the adverse effects of concentration' can be imposed upon the use class as a whole in the form of supplementary planning guidance or through changes to the local or unitary development plan. Yet although such measures provide a degree of flexibility, given the breadth of class A3 and also that of class D2 (which incorporates nightclubs), planners are still left with a very blunt instrument with which to control the environmental impact and cumulative effects of a market-led 'destruction of diversity'.

In response to such problems, the London Borough of Ealing made representations to the National Planning Forum (NPF) in 1996 urging a review of class A3. The Ealing submissions were subsequently reflected in the final report by the Forum, which is being considered by Government. The NPF report recommends that class A3 be divided into three subclasses:

  • A3(i) – sale of food for consumption on the premises;

  • A3(ii) – sale of hot food for consumption off the premises, including mixed uses where part of the premises is for consumption of food on the premises; and

  • A3(iii) – public house, wine bar, and other establishment for the consumption of drink on the premises.

The report also suggests revised wording to control changes of use within A3:

'Where permission is given for use as a restaurant, specific consent will be required for any other future use, including bar use and the sale of hot food for consumption off the premises, if this may adversely affect the amenity of residential and any other uses in the local area.' (section 18)

These recommendations for planning policy, together with the aforementioned government proposals for alcohol licensing suggest that opportunities are finally being created for strategic liaison in the realm of municipal regulation. The co-ordination of planning and licensing policy is now of the utmost importance to public safety and to the preservation and promotion of economic diversity and residential and visitor amenity. More specifically, there is an urgent need to develop new holistic frameworks for local municipal regulation within which both planning and licensing decisions can be made.

These processes will need to be accountable to local stakeholders, reflecting the wishes, concerns, and needs of residents, the licensed trade, visitors, the police, and other interested parties. Only then might the '24-hour city' concept begin to recover from its existing credibility crisis.

Phil Hadfield is a Research Fellow and Dick Hobbs is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Durham. Stuart Lister is a Research Officer in the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies at the University of Leeds, and Simon Winlow is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Teesside.

Notes

1 P. Jones, D. Hillier, and D. Turner: 'Towards the '24 hour city'.' Town & Country Planning, 1999, 68, May, pp.164-165

2 This article draws upon the findings of a two-year research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (award no L133251050), involving interviews with a range of city-centre stakeholders and extensive periods of observation

3 See Planning Out Crime. Circular 1994/5. Department of the Environment and Welsh Office. HMSO, London, 1994

4 J. Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jonanthan Cape/Penguin, London, 1962, p.259

5 D. Hobbs, S. Lister, P. Hadfield, S. Winlow, and S. Hall: 'Receiving shadows: governance and liminality in the night-time economy'. British Journal of Sociology, 2000, 51 (4), pp.701-717

6 Time for Reform: Proposals for the Modernisation of Our Licensing Laws. Cm 4696. Home Office. The Stationery Office, London, Apr. 2000

This article first appeared in the November 2001 issue of Town & Country Planning