Kelly's a hero in Oldham

It was right to describe licensee Patrick Kelly as a hero in his recent battle with Oldham Council over their 'blanket' review of licences.

It makes the likes of JD Wetherspoon and others who keeled over at the first hurdle look a little wimpish. There was a great deal of sabre-rattling by the big guns in the first instance, with talk of a High Court judicial review of the council's proposal to seek a review of no less than 22 licences at once. But in the end, it took an independent family licensee to stand up to the bullying and point out that the weights and measures department that brought the action did not have a leg to stand on.

I also have to ask the British Beer & Pub Association why they are so quick to hail victories and so slow to put their weight behind the trade when it matters. They did the same with the Hall & Woodhouse high court action, when that brewery was attempting to show that premises licence holders were not automatically responsible for actions taken by lessees. Once again they hailed the result, but had been very reluctant to offer support in the first instance.

Given the fact that there are few important trade legal issues that come before the High Court these days, it might give a better impression if trade leaders were seen in the forefront of the action, rather than bringing up the rear.

In the Oldham scenario, Mr Kelly's lawyer rightly questioned why the weights and measures department had brought an action for which they had no evidence against premises they had never visited and a licensee they had never communicated with. The plain fact was they had no evidence: they relied on general police complaints about the city centre that were not specific to premises and certainly did not involve Mr Kelly's pub. At one point the chief inspector of police rather desperately tried to claim that selling two bottles of Becks for £4 amounted to an 'irresponsible drinks promotion'. Who said that only politicians were economical with the truth?

What worries me about this particular situation is that the head of trading standards, whose department brought the action against the Mess House, is also the head of licensing. If he decides to appeal against the decision of the licensing committee not to take any action against Mr Kelly's licence, he will be appealing to the magistrates against himself! Is that really what the Government intended when it moved licensing over to local government — a cosy little stitch-up where one department becomes the front-man for a police-led initiative which is judged by another department in the same section? And we used to complain about Communist state dictatorship?

It was necessary for someone to stand up to this type of mass bullying. Oldham Council has, of course, stated that it did all this with the best possible motives. But that is a recipe for unfairness and restriction, similar in style to the Home Office proposals for mandatory conditions. The idea that you should face a set of rules of increasing burden to your business simply because someone thinks them up for a worst-case scenario is a totalitarian concept completely alien to the way we ought to run this country. This is why Mr Kelly's stance is more important than a simple refusal to accept a queuing system at his bar: it is an indication that blanket rules and systems should never be applied without a very good reason and that actions by responsible authorities of any kind should be targeted and proportionate.