Screwed up' reform hits B&Bs hard

I have just returned from an out-of-season trip to Blackpool, which greeted me with sunshine and another victim of the bold new licensing reforms ­ the seaside landlady.

I am very surprised that the guest-house lobby hasn't pelted Richard Caborn with bread rolls and chip butties before now. Many of Blackpool's finest will be clobbered with a huge financial burden this year, which they never asked for and do not deserve.

Instead of the £30 licence fee every three years, boarding houses and small hotels with inoffensive residential licences dating back many years will have to fork out £190 for transition and a cool £180 every year thereafter. Two barrels of beer to the Government and nothing for the landlady! This is just another example of why the new legislation has been widely criticised for being bred in a think-tank unrelated to the real world.

The headline-grabbing aspects of binge drinking have completely submerged the day-to-day realities of licensing, which the justices, the police and local lawyers know well.

What could have been achieved, with a little more thought, was a system that did not bear hard on the small and medium-sized businesses, which form the bedrock of alcohol retailing, but which addressed the problem areas of high-street excesses and late-night disturbance.

I do not think that most local authorities want to impose themselves on boarding houses, corner shops, social clubs and circuses. But they have a job to do, and that involves a convoluted exercise in form filling, rubber stamping, compliance, plans and operating schedules.

At any stage, the amateur landlady can trip up, or find that through ignorance she has landed herself in trouble. Come November, I predict that there will be several thousand folk on the wrong side of the law through no real fault of their own, all because some jumped-up civil servant decided to introduce a "simpler" system of licensing that turned out to be far more complicated than the existing one.

I would welcome the chance to debate with him exactly why he was wrong and misguided in the way he went about it. Why to deliver this package was about the worst thing that could happen to both sides ­ the trade and the local councils. I am sure he has his defences and plausible reasons all lined up. But as far as I am concerned, he has screwed up. And that's official!