Licensing Act 2003: one year on

November 2006 saw the anniversary of the controversial new Licensing Act which abolished fixed pub closing times and was the subject ofmuch debate as to whether allowing longer drinking hours was a way of tackling the binge drinking culture or whether it wouldmake it worse.

Here Emilie Rapley reviews the evidence.

The Licensing Act 2003 came fully into force in England and Wales, on 24 November 2005, effectively combining seven licensing regimes into one, and transferring licensing responsibilities from the Magistrates Court to the Local authorities, in order to allow, in principle, a more comprehensive and localised approach to the issues of licensing and nighttime economy management.

The former licensing regime was often described by politicians and representatives of the alcohol industry as ‘outdated’ and ‘restrictive’, in imposing ‘artificially early closing times’ for pub goers, and, was blamed by them for binge drinking and alcohol related crime and disorder.The new regime allows a more ‘flexible’ system for licensed premises, and in theory, staggered closing times should in turn allow a more gradual dispersal of late night revellers, alleviating pressure on police resources in town and city hotspots during peak times.

However, in fashioning the Licensing Act 2003, the Government was accused of playing down warnings from police, senior judges, experts in the alcohol field, and of dismissing international scientific evidence showing that longer opening hours are not the panacea to solving the problems of binge drinking and alcohol related harm in Britain, now ranking as the third worst ‘binge drinking nation’ in Western Europe .

While critics of the Government’s original plans did succeed in bringing about substantial changes to the legislation as it went through Parliament, increasing the level of protection of the public against adverse consequences, there remained considerable anxiety about the impact of the new Act.

Year of transition

One year on, it is difficult to assess the impact of the Licensing Act on health, crime and disorder; indeed,many critics of the legislation have suggested it could take at least five years to see its true impact, and that any notable changes with regard to drinking behaviour and attitudes towards alcohol could possibly take up to a generation to emerge.

The first reason why it is difficult to assess the impact of the new Act and of the extended drinking hours it allows is that the introduction of the Act was accompanied by a range of other measures and initiatives also designed to have an impact on crime and disorder, most obviously the two high profile Home Office Alcohol Misuse Enforcement Campaigns, costing £2.5 million each. A smaller scale ‘underage sales crackdown’was also carried out in conjunction with Trading Standards over the first three weeks in October 2006.These two campaigns were carried out at pivotal times before Christmas, and during the summer, before the Football World Cup in Germany - periods known to be particularly problematic in terms of alcohol related crime.

In addition to these specific initiatives it is reported that the introduction of the new Act resulted in significantly increased spending on policing of the night-time economy. For example, in Brighton, extended drinking hours resulted in twice the number of police being on patrol in the city centre at weekends, at an additional cost in overtime of £170,000.

Secondly, evidence regarding the effect of the Act at a local level remains largely anecdotal, and, therefore, does not provide a national picture. For example, whereas the Broad Street area of Birmingham has been flagged as having successfully reduced the toll of alcohol related crime and disorder as a result of longer hours (although it should be noted that this area has received substantial funding for community safety initiatives- for example street wardens- through the ‘Business Improvement District Scheme’ ), reports from Brighton, on the other hand, remain dismal despite the extraspending on policing. Roger Rolfe, a Brighton resident, member of the Kingscliffe Society and of the Open All Hours? Network, claims that noise, nuisance and disorder has not diminished as a result of the Act, but instead, had been displaced later into the night: “Whereas before, noise and chaos outside my window occurred between 11 pm and midnight, now it just goes on until the early hours”. Lastly, a number of reports across the local and national media seemed to suggest that a year on, business was simply ‘going on as usual’; given that one of the clear mandates of the legislation is to reduce binge drinking significantly as well as alcohol related antisocial behaviour and disorder, these claims do clearly not translate into any kind of ‘victory’.

One year on… a confused picture

On the year anniversary of the Act, opinions were divided, as expected, leading to theunavoidable polarisation of the debate, increasingly centred upon the misguided notion of ‘24 hour drinking’. Indeed, on 24 November 2006, Licensing Minister Shaun Woodward claimed that there had not been an ‘explosion’ in all-night venues and there were ‘encouraging signs’ that the new laws were working. He said “only 3000 out of 200,000 licensed premises have applied for such licenses, [which] in effect equals to less than two per cent of licensed venues, and many of these stay open all night only on special occasions”.The Independent echoed this view by dismissing the forecasts of ‘peddlers of hysteria and fear’, suggesting that “the reality of the past twelve months has been very different from the cataclysmic picture conjured up by the opponents of the reform (…) Britain is finally beginning to see with a clear head”.The British Beer and Pub Association, in their press release ‘Whoops,No Apocalypse’ reported the findings of their poll carried out by YouGov showing that over 86% of people had not changed their drinking habits as a result of deregulation, and that alcohol consumption has seen a fall of 2%, the first decrease in six years.

These voices of early triumph were counterbalanced by the more guarded comments made by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), who suggested it was “far too early to assess the true impact of the act given that the night time economy is complex and there are number of variables at play (…) the police service will continue to work closely with local authorities and the trade to deal with the negative effects of a culture of excessive drinking that still exists in our society”. The British Association of Emergency Medicine reported that Friday and Saturday night alcohol related Accident & Emergency attendances had simply been displaced later into the night as a result of longer hours.The London Ambulance Service reported that alcohol related call-outs actually increased by 3 per cent in the year following the introduction of the Licensing Act, and that there was no indication of any change to the number of alcohol-related incidents occurring during the period 11pm to 2am, despite the Government’s hope that the new Act would reduce the ‘alcohol flashpoints’ around the old closing times.

Towards ‘diversity’ and the ‘café culture’?

The move towards liberalisation has been forecast by the Government to create a ‘continental café culture’ though the means of a diversification of the night-time economy, presently geared towards the 18- 24 year old age group, based upon the consumption of alcohol and exemplified in the emergence, over the last two decades, of chain pubs and themed bars now found in every town and city centre in Britain. Indeed, John Tierney, from the University of Durham, suggests that ‘diversity’ has become an ideal for which to strive, and that in some ideal futureaccording to Ministers- our presently saturated ‘monocultural’ night time economy ‘will be transformed into a multifaceted,multicultural and safe environment similar to that found in Europe’.

In 2005, the Institute of Alcohol Studies published a paper highlighting the international scientific evidence pertaining to the effect of increasing hours of alcohol sale, in other jurisdictions,with ‘similar’ drinking cultures - Ireland, the Netherlands, Latvia, Russia, Iceland,Australia and New Zealand - argued to be culturally ‘closer’ to Great Britain in terms of alcohol consumption patterns than Mediterranean countries .Generally, the evidence suggests that while increased hours of trading may not increase the overall level of alcohol consumption (at least where alcohol is already widely available), they do increase the problems associated with consumption. Overall, the large body of scientific evidence on this topic shows that “increases in hours of sale are consistently related to increases in alcohol-related harm, including traffic injury, street disorder and violence. Later and longer hours for alcohol sales contribute disproportionately to heavier drinking and drunken behaviour.”

Hazel Blears:
no café culture for the British

The Labour Government’s claim that the introduction of liberalised licensing laws would signal the end of British binge drinking by ushering in a continental-style cafe culture appears to have been rejected by one of the ministers responsible for the new Act.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, former Home Office Minister Hazel Blears, now the chairman of the Labour Party, said that she thought the licensing changes would not have the desired effect because the British were incapable of drinking in a more civilised way. She attributed this incapacity to their being Anglo-Saxon. Ms Blears said:

“I don’t know whether we’ll ever get to be in a European drinking culture, where you go out and have a single glass of wine.Maybe it’s our Anglo-Saxon mentality.

“We actually enjoy getting drunk. I think there is a bit about risk-taking — people want to push the limits of danger. So as a politician I don’t think there are any easy answers.” However,Ms Blears defended the new Licensing Act on the basis that it had not had the catastrophic consequences predicted by some police and opposition politicians.

“The 24-hour drinking was supposed to be the end of life as we know it. That hasn’t happened,” she said. But she added: “The health implications worry me. “People are getting quite serious health conditions earlier — things like liver problems in their twenties and thirties that perhaps before only came out in their forties and fifties.

“I think we’ve got to do more education now – that has to be the absolute priority.” She said alcohol manufacturers and retailers also had a duty to market their products more responsibly.

Alcohol Misuse Enforcement Campaigns

These enforcement campaigns, carried out by the Home Office in conjunction with Trading Standards, involving all 43 police forces in the country and costing £2.5 million each, form part of the Tackling Violent Crime Programme, a targeted programme focusing on alcohol related crime and domestic violence in high volume crime areas.The ‘crackdown operations’were carried out in the run up to Christmas and over the summer, in anticipation of the football World Cup; in addition to extra police powers embedded in the Licensing Act, these campaigns form an integral part of the Government strategy to counter the possible upsurge in alcohol related disorder resulting from theimplementation of longer hours. While the outcome of these campaigns on the toll of crime and disorder is difficult to measure, the Government’swillingness to release politically motivated misleading figures, and to downplay the gravity of the situation, remains of great concern.Results of the first AMEC were claimed to show a‘decrease in violent crime’, whilethe second uncovered alarming rates of failed test purchases,with one in threeunderage drinkers being able to purchase alcohol from licensedpremises; these findings were described by Shaun Woodward as ‘disappointing’.

Professor Mark Bellis, Director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool’s John Moores University, suggests that current indications of the effects of the legalisation have largely been based on police statistics and assessment of the effects of the Alcohol Misuse Enforcement Campaigns on the outcome of test purchasing . Indeed, in their report, the researchers from JMU highlightthat “police data have shown no indication of a rise in levels of violent offences as a result of the change in licensing legislation”. Evidently, this fact has been used to the advantage of the Government, keen to portray the liberalisation as a success, but also to that of the licensed trade. On 9 November 2006, the Publican reported that “first hard indications that the Licensing Act is having a positive effect on crime are emerging”; in effect the paper reports figures compiled from the Metropolitan Police suggesting that reports of common assault in the capital fell 13.4 % between December 2005 and September 2006; criminal damage fell by 10.4% over that period, and ABH fell 4.9 %; total crime was down 5.5%.However, a spokeswoman from the Metropolitan Police echoed these concerns and said “it was still to early to say what the full effects of the Act were”.The researchers further suggest that these evaluations are “inherently related to police activity and therefore cannot be considered an independent measure of intervention and legislative change on levels of violence”. Moreover, recorded crime statistics from 2004/2005 show signs of a fall in crime, prior to, and independently of the implementation of longer hours; also ONS figures show that the levels of men exceeding the government’s sensible drinking benchmarks began to decrease in 2003/2004, before the introduction of the new Act. On the other hand, alcohol related deaths and admissions to hospital have seen a steady increase since the 1990’s.

Evaluation of the Effects of the Act

The Government Evaluation of the impacts of the Licensing Act on crime and disorder is seldom referred to in any detail in press releases or statements made by Ministers; this apparently undisclosed process adds to the already well established doubts surrounding the Government’s alcohol policy agenda.The Crime Statistics for England and Wales, a compilation of Police recorded crime and British Crime Survey Data, were released in the summer of 2006; the graph above shows violent offences and criminal damage from October 2004 to March 2006 recorded in 23 police forces, between the hours of 11pm and 2 am.

As mentioned above, scientific evidence from around the world suggests that a consequence of longer hours of alcohol sale is a temporal displacement of offences, a situation which has already been confirmed by the British Association of Emergency Medicine.The Home Office response to this is the graph above,which is described as showing no indication of a rise in the overall level of offences or a shift in the timing of offences as a result of the change in the opening hours of licensed premises.The Home Office states that more detailed results will be published in due course.

However, the figures presented in this graph are ambiguous.Not only are they figures of offences recorded by police, and thus subject to the same difficulty of interpretation as all police figures in regard to whether they reflect actual levels of crime or, rather, levels of police activity, they also leave open the possibility that levels of crime increased after 2am, one of the issues at the heart of the debate.

The rather elusive Home Office Evaluation contains two strands; night-time economy modules added to the British Crime Survey (BCS) 2005/ 2006, and the Offending and Crime Justice Survey (OCJS). In addition to this, five Local Authority Areas have been selected as case studies,which will include a residents’ survey, focus groups with key stakeholders, and interviews with licensees and late night business owners.A research team at the University of Huddersfield will be carrying out additional quantitative analysis, measuring crime and disorder in and around licensed premises.

References

Anderson, P & Baumberg, B (2006) Alcohol in Europe:A Public Health Perspective, Institute of Alcohol Studies, London.

The Independent, 23 November 2006 ‘A Timely lesson in Trusting the People’

BBPA Press Release ‘Whoops,No Apocalyspe’, 24 November 2006) www.beerandpub.com

DCMS Press Release, ‘Licensing Act, One Year One’, 24 November 2006,De Haviland.

Spokesperson from the BAEM, Five Live, 14 November 2006)

Tierney, J (2006) ‘ We Want to be More European’, Social Policy and Society,

McNeill (2005) Binge Drinking, Crime and Disorder and the Licensing Act 2003, Occasional Paper, Institute of Alcohol Studies: London.

Belis,M,Anderson,Z and Hughes,K (2006) Effects of the Alcohol Misuse Enforcement Campaigns and the Licensing Act 2003 on Violence’ , Centre for Public Health, Liverpool John Moores University.

The Publican, 9 November 2006 ‘Crime Down Since Launch Of Licensing Act’

Office for National Statistics, 28 November 2006 www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget. asp?ID=1027&Pos=1&ColRank=2 &Rank=1000

Office for National Statistics, 7 November 2006, www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget. asp?ID=1091&Pos=1&ColRank=1 &Rank=192