Question
Wokingham Town has been experiencing a considerable amount of Anti-Social behaviour revolving around people leaving the bars that have a late licence. This can be as simple as noisy behaviour and broken glass around the town from people heading home to fighting and a recent stabbing incident.
Wokingham Borough Council has the power to recover a late licence levy on premises that have a late licence – essentially to cover the cost of extra policing and support from problems that arise from late licences.
Is this something that we can ask the licencing team to consider?
Minutes:
Question
Wokingham Town has been experiencing a considerable amount of Anti-Social behaviour revolving around people leaving the bars that have a late licence. This can be as simple as noisy behaviour and broken glass around the town from people heading home to fighting and a recent stabbing incident.
Wokingham Borough Council has the power to recover a late licence levy on premises that have a late licence – essentially to cover the cost of extra policing and support from problems that arise from late licences.
Is this something that we can ask the licencing team to consider?
Answer
Licensing authorities have (since 2012) had the power to introduce a “late night levy” on premises licensed to sell alcohol after midnight. The levy must cover the whole of an authority’s area, although the Government is considering amending the rules so that just a part of the Borough can be subject to a levy, e.g. a town centre, but it has not done so yet.
The Council cannot set its own levy – the amount of the levy is prescribed nationally based on the rateable value and varies from £299 for the smallest premises up to £4,440 for the largest premises in which the primary business is the sale of alcohol. There would be costs to the Council to conduct consultation and administer the scheme.
The revenue raised, after deduction of costs, goes towards the costs of policing the late-night economy and must be split between the Council and the police. At least 70% of the revenue must be given to the police and the Council can retain up to 30% to fund the services it provides to manage the night-time economy. Examples of using the levy around the country are:
The Government estimated that about 94 licensing authorities had enough late opening premises to generate sufficient revenue from the levy to make it worthwhile to implement it but in the 9 years since it came in very few Council areas have put a levy in place. The number is about 10 or 12 and are mostly large towns like Newcastle, Nottingham and Liverpool and urban Boroughs like Hackney, Camden and Islington,
Cheltenham introduced a levy in 2014, but scrapped it in 2017 as the Council had not received the income it had expected from the levy.
Late night levies are strongly opposed by the licensed trade who believe them to heap financial pressure onto venues that are already contributing financially to the success of their areas, and to be a blunt tool that penalises well run businesses, as well as those which might be causing problems. This is because there are only a few exempt premises allowed – the levy would apply to all on and off sales premises with a late licence in the Borough, even if they are not actually open at those times.
In conclusion, the main concern is that levies in a Borough like ours would not be financially viable, as the revenue raised would be small in comparison to the cost of implementing the scheme.
Coupled with likely opposition from the licensed trade which has suffered financially for two years, I would prefer to tackle any problems which arise in another way.
For example,
However, our Statement of Licensing Policy (which is due for renewal in 2023) states that late night levies could be considered if the need arises. So, I see no reason why a late-night levy could not be at least considered in the review of the Licensing Policy, in the light of whether there is enough evidence of need and whether the levy scheme would be financially viable.
Supplementary question
Considering that in Wokingham town the bulk of the antisocial behaviour that we get from the late licences happens between 2 and 4 am, I understand that Wokingham Town Council has CCTV around the Town Hall and we get to see, we know when the trouble happens, and particularly the recent stabbing happened after 3 o’clock when the individuals left the Gig House, left the pub. And I know, a lot of the trouble we get around there, when I talk to residents around there, it is, you know, at 3.30 early hours of the morning. What you are talking about, the antisocial behaviour team there, they finish work at 2 o’clock, which is not, it is too early to tackle this problem. So, my question is what are we going to do to tackle this problem? People are having to walk their dogs with broken glass in the morning, we get broken windows around the town, things like our Christmas trees and hanging baskets and stuff around the town are getting vandalised in low level ways but we also get broken windows and occasionally we get severe things like the stabbing we had a few weeks ago. We also had another stabbing near the station last year as well. I want to know what is Wokingham Borough Council going to do to tackle this problem, particularly when the problem happens when the pubs are closed, after the pubs closed. It seems that the antisocial behaviour service has shut shop by then.
Supplementary Answer
Yes, I think as I mentioned we are reviewing the Licensing Policy and the item on the agenda which relates to the return of the licensing functions from the Public Protection Partnership is going to actually look at that. I think there might be some information in there that you might find helpful with regards to that in the way it is going to be organised, because there are plans to actually put people in place to that are going to be around until 2 o’clock in the morning but they may well even be able to extend that, (“but as I said 2 o’clock is too early, late licenses end at 3 o’clock” said Councillor Imogen Shepherd-DuBey) yes, we can feed that back to them, this is not cast in stone yet, we can probably make some proposals for that, and with regards to that I suggest you perhaps wait until you received that and make some comments with regards to that.
Councillor Soane confirmed that the Antisocial Behaviour Team did finish at 2 o’clock and that could be revised. However, the cost involved would be considerable. The need for increased hours of work would be monitored.
With regards to the stabbings, Councillor Soane stated that they were a matter for the police and the Antisocial Behaviour Team would not be dealing with them anyway.