Punch opts for court to fight council rejections

by The PMA Team

Punch Taverns is expecting to appeal to magistrates in respect of conditions set on licensing applications at around 150 pubs across the country.

The company, which has handled licensing applications at 6,500 of its 7,200 pubs, has had 1,200 applications go to full local authority hearings.

'A small minority' of local authority rejections - around 150 - will be appealed at magistrates courts. Punch will be paying for the cost of a barrister to act on behalf of each of the pubs going to appeal.

One such pub is the Crown & Thistle in Carlisle, which saw an application to serve alcohol between 10am and 1am Thursday to Saturday and until 2am on Bank Holidays turned down.

The city's licensing panel ruled against the hours on the basis that people living nearby would suffer extra noise nuisance.

Punch's Deborah Kemp, who is operations director (south), has overseen the application process. She said appeals were mostly on legal interpretations or conditions attached to applications.

Kemp added that currently Punch and its licensees had a success rate of about 98% from the 50% of applications that have so far been processed by local authorities.

Punch's applications were processed by two law firms, Warren and Ford in Leeds and TLT in Bristol, each firm of solicitors handling about 3,000 applications each. She said: 'I think everybody underestimated the bureaucracy involved in all this.' The biggest challenge now was whether local authorities could process applications before the 24 November deadline, she added.