MA legal expert Peter Coulson on the new Licensing Act

My abiding impression of the last year in licensing, which I have tried to reflect on this page, is the lack of consistency that has plagued the changeover of responsibility.

Yet consistency was trumpeted as one of the great benefits of the new system. Everyone would be treated in the same way, with the same set of rules.

Well, it hasn't happened and won't happen. It is in the nature of local government to go its own way, and the best endeavours of those in smart offices in central London will not change the spots on the leopard.

I am prompted to write by the arrival (at the start of June) of an uncontested licence originally applied for last summer, but varied in October, again without representation. It has, therefore, taken this particular authority a whole seven months to issue the paperwork on a fairly basic licence, with no complicated features.

However, it has been issued not only with drafting errors (which can be rectified, but shouldn't have been passed) but also with one or two contentious points that will take additional weeks to sort out, if we want the licence that was originally requested.

Senior council licensing ex-perts will tell me - as they often do - that as each licence is unique, it has to be hand-crafted with loving care.

I would be more sympathetic to that view if I felt that the licences I was seeing had been specifically tailored to the individual establishment. But they are patchworks of received wisdom, vague assumption and pre-prepared blocks of text. In many cases, there is no real evidence, that I have seen, of any attention to the implications of what is being written.

One of the aspects I warned of in the early days is certainly coming true: the composition of the operating schedule with regard to the promotion of the licensing objectives has left some people with strange conditions on their licences.

Many applicants resolved to be helpful by saying they would try to ensure that the premises were run in a certain way.

These have often been turned into conditions - an offer to ensure that customers will leave quietly has been turned into a requirement to place warning notices throughout the premises. A suggestion that entry to the pub will be monitored by staff has been turned into a condition requiring door supervision throughout the week.

There are many others. But there is no consistency of ap-proach between councils. It must be a nightmare for some of the larger operators, but then they have employed ranks of people to help them.

Pity the small, individual trader who cannot afford smart lawyers and probably assumes he will have to put up and shut up with a licence that does not quite correspond with what he requested.

One of the main gripes in some cases is the dictatorial approach. Letters accompanying licences are often couched in stern language, warning of dire consequences if any of the conditions are breached or illegal actions take place. No sense of partnership here.

There is also the continuing use of the term "permitted", suggesting that the authority is allowing you to continue trading. There is no doubt that many councils think they are stepping straight into the shoes of the justices and have just as much authority and discretion.

I have nearly given up hope of a Good Practice Guide and I do not hold my breath in anticipation that the promised rewrite of the Guidance will deliver clear and unambiguous versions of what councils should be doing. A long, hot summer of frustration looks on the cards.