It has occurred to me at various points over the last few weeks as we have been drafting the Noctis response to the mandatory code consultation, that we should simply refer all our answers to these principles of better regulation.
I won't be doing that because that would no doubt be misconstrued as apathy, but I am nonetheless incorporating many of the principles into the heart of our response.
The five principles of better regulation are: transparency, accountability, proportionality, consistency and to be targeted only at cases where action is needed.
Most of us in the licensed trade (or other external stakeholders) wouldn't have a problem with any of these principles.
To make these guidelines clearer we also have the Hampton principles to give further elucidation. Hampton states that "the few businesses that persistently break regulations should be identified quickly and face proportionate and meaningful sanctions."
Incidentally Hampton also says: "regulators should recognise that a key element of their activity will be to allow, or even encourage economic progress and only to intervene where there is a clear case for protection."
Set against these eminently reasonable principles we have a Bill which proposes a blanket imposition of "up to nine" national mandatory conditions on all licensed premises in England and Wales.
It also proposes a secondary set of 16 discretionary conditions which would be imposed a local level. Of these 16 conditions only one is specific to the off-trade, whilst 15 directly relate to the on-trade and only seven jointly with the off-trade.
Bizarrely four of the suggested seven joint conditions don't really relate to the off-trade at all - as if (perish the thought) they were simply tacked on as an afterthought to even up the numbers.
One condition relates to creating a dispersal policy, another to CCTV at times associated with alcohol related violence, a third to taxi numbers and a fourth to text/pager links to doorstaff!
To add insult to injury, I asked Licensing Minister Gerry Sutcliffe at recently why the code consultation was so skewed against the on-trade and he told me, it was a "compromise".
In other words, the government won't legislate against the supermarkets, but they will happily carry on beating up the on-trade.
If ever there was a time for our industry to have some of these better regulation principles properly applied, surely it is now.
Paul Smith is executive director of late-night operator trade group Noctis