At long last, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is getting round to providing one or two crumbs of comfort for the hard-pressed licensed trade.
Pushed to answer some searching questions from the MA news team, licensing minister Gerry Sutcliffe played a straight bat to most, as you would expect. But he did say that the department would be consulting on plans for electronic applications and notifications this autumn.
Now some people might ask what there is to consult about. Criticism about the failure to provide for computer applications has been around since day one. Many other Government departments already have it, notably the Inland Revenue, or Revenue and Customs, as I should call it. Certainly, it is built into the new gambling system, which is technically only two years behind the licensing changes. Yet paperwork and unnecessary duplication abound in the licensing system for no good reason at all. It has never been explained or justified.
As an example, we regularly send out temporary event notices from this office. We have yet to receive one back, acknowledged, within the statutory period for response, although the date given is always within the fixed limit. One London borough often nearly misses the date of the event, so tardy are they in responding!
The reason for this is that there are absolutely no sanctions for delay. They are answerable to nobody. Recently, I reviewed the handling of transition by local councils and rediscovered the joys of Allerdale and Berwick Councils, who took three years to issue their licences in some cases, and even now may not be fully up-to-date! Yet if you post your TEN application just one day out of time, they can refuse it, even if the police have no objection. It is both unreasonable and unfair.
One of the hurdles to be overcome in an electronic system is payment. Currently, an application is not considered "received" until the payment is made, and this means a physical payment of some kind. Electronic communication of applications and notifications will only work if the electronic receipt of the form is the moment of application, not the payment. This should be separated. It would also be helpful if the banks hurried up with their pledge to have BACS and other automated transfers done within hours rather than the three days it now takes in many cases. The banks have no excuse — after all, they are living off our money in more ways than one these days!
At the same time as changing the application system, the DCMS could take a long, hard look at the forms themselves, to see if the "one size fits all" regime is really necessary or advantageous, now that councils have got used to the workings of the Act. It is clear that a large number of applications hardly make use of more than one quarter of the long form, which may need to be sent to up to eight responsible authorities.
It is currently a waste of time and paper, and they could rework it to ensure that it was relevant. Electronic filing will save on the paper, but a better form will save on time and confusion.
The changeover would also be a useful time to remind some local councils of the DCMS advice to allow minor amendments and the correction of small factual errors, without sending the whole thing back for reapplication.
This petty bureaucracy, which is regrettably still present in local Government, is both unnecessary and antagonistic — concentrating on the formality rather than the practicality. But my message to Gerry Sutcliffe is a simple one — bring it on!