LACORS seeks advice on lying
Local government chiefs are seeking the views of the Home Office before they chose whether to recommend children lie about their age in sting operations.
Advice on underage sales will be included in an updated guide for councils from local government co-ordinator LACORS, which is due at the end of March.
Children should lieThe Home Office is known to be sympathetic to the idea that children should lie about their age because it would make it easier to catch venues that are not vigilant.
However, LACORS' Board of Directors initially opposed the idea.
Wendy Martin, assistant director of the trading standards and registration group at LACORS, said today:
"The LACORS Board of Directors took an initial view that they were not minded to change the code to recommend that children should lie during the normal course of test purchasing.
"However a final decision will be made once the Board has considered the formal position of the Home Office. This should be by the end of March."
Councils splitCouncils across the country are said to be split on whether the current guidelines on test purchase operations should be altered.
Local authorities are not compelled to follow the code. Liverpool City Council is one council that advises children to lie about their age in sting operations. Your Comments
Nick Newman via emailAs a licensee (now DPS) of 20 + years experience, and Chair of Cardiff Licensees Forum, I take exception to the indiscriminate use of young people in test purchase operations. I use the term indiscriminate because I believe that the purpose of such visits was to (rightly) provide evidence of malpractice where the suggestion was that such malpractice was a regular occurrence. Test purchase operations are now carried out in premises that might be widely acknowledged to be well run and compliant in licensing matters, with no history of underage drinking. Yet servers and managers in such premises might still be caught out by young persons, reputedly selected from acting schools and, given that they are supported by officials, more confident than teenagers might otherwise be in attempting to be served in a pub.
Teams at responsible pubs and bars are trained at induction and reminded constantly by means of team meetings and regularly posted notices of their requirement to challenge anyone they consider to be under the age of
21 and request passport or driving licence evidence of their age. Up to now these teams have also had the comfort of knowing that the mere act of asking a potential test purchaser his or her age would prompt a truthful response and avoid incurring a fine of £80. Now, it is reported, the authorities (Trading Standards Officers and Police) want these youngsters to lie about their age if challenged. Whilst actively supporting any initiatives aimed at reducing alcohol-related crime, particularly if it involves minors, I believe that encouraging test purchasers to lie about their age is a step too far which, frankly, borders on the ridiculous.
The vast majority of pub managers (DPSs) are supportive of licensing compliance and do not want (unauthorised and unsupervised) underage persons in their premises - they have been willing to support many initiatives aimed at making villages, towns and cities safer places to eat, drink and relax. The suggestion that this record of cooperation and compliance be rewarded by sending young people in to our premises to lie about their age is, in my view, contemptible.
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