Punch hosts lose rights

in licence bids foul-up

by Tony Halstead

More licensees have been left without grandfather rights after councils rejected more than 100 licence applications from Punch lessees.

Local authorities knocked back 70 personal licences and 45 premises licence applications because of blunders on the forms.

Those without personal licences will now have to make new applications and take a training course and examination to ensure they can continue to run their pubs from next November.

Pubs whose premises licences were rejected will have to make new applications and forfeit all previous trading rights.

The Punch foul-up follows the failure of solicitors acting for another operator, the Union Pub Company, to submit applications for scores of houses within its estate.

The firm has promised to meet any costs involved and has vowed no licensee will end up out of pocket.

One Punch licensee said he began to worry when his premises licence application had not appeared in the local media by the end of July.

Host Alan Mayo, of the Eagle, Middlesbrough, was assured by his business retail manager everything was in order but was finally told two weeks ago there was a problem.

He said: 'It's very disappointing as we have lost our trading rights and now have to make a completely new application.

'I just hope the council is able to take a sympathetic view of something that is clearly not our fault.

'We only asked for an hour's extra opening, he said.

Punch took charge of licensing applications for the bulk of its licensees across the com-pany's 8,300-strong pub estate.

Customer relations director Francis Patton said less than 1% of its lessees were affected.

'The applications were refused for a variety of different reasons, such as queries on criminal record checks, photographs improperly endorsed and a host of other discrepancies, but every application went in by the 6 August deadline, he said.

Patton added: 'There were always going to be a number of applications that would be rejected and, given the scale of the exercise, less than 1% is not a bad figure, but obviously we are treating it as a priority.

Morning Advertiser legal expert Peter Coulson said: 'It was expected there would be many knock-backs, particularly from the more stringent local authorities.

'The sad thing for licensees is they are going to have to start from scratch to make sure they have a licence when the new system kicks in on 24 November.