The Home Office Putting Victims First white paper proposes consolidating four different types of closure orders into a single order. These include Section 161 [licensed premises] Closure Notices and Crack House Closure Orders.
The paper essentially argues that the public makes no distinction between the different causes of anti-social behaviour, because the effects — “making the lives of those living nearby a misery” — are similar.
Ministers will claim there is nothing sinister for the pub sector to read into this reclassification, and that it is simply a streamlining exercise to rationalise a series of different closure powers into one measure.
But they are wrong. It is a pervasive and corrosive insult to hard-working licensees up and down the land that their pubs and bars should even be mentioned in the same breath as drug dens, let alone be subject to the same treatment by the authorities.
Some pubs inevitably attract an undesirable clientele. This week’s Big Interview with Mahdis Neghabian, the new BII Licensee of the Year, tells the story of her efforts to rid the Camden Eye of the pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers who inhabited the pub in the early days of her tenure. She now runs an establishment that the whole community can be proud of.
And this is the point. Heavy-handed, sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut treatment of the proportionately tiny troublesome element of the pub industry sends out confusing mixed messages about the pub’s role in society.
On one hand we have Prince Charles (via Pub is the Hub) promoting the pub as being the ideal institution to provide community services, and on the other we have the government casually (and causally) linking licensees with drug dealers.
Anyone who reads our national newspapers will be painfully aware that the health lobby, via its various pronouncements and initiatives, seems hell-bent on making alcohol the new tobacco — increasingly taboo and socially unacceptable.
Problem drinking is an issue for the few, not the many. Illegal drug dealing and consumption likewise. But the vast majority of pubs are responsible retailers providing legal enjoyment for all parts of society.
For the Home Office to claim that “responsible businesses have nothing to fear from our proposals” rings hollow, especially when leading lawyers and trade associations say the opposite. Legislation that is intended to curb the irresponsible can quickly become the bane of the responsible.
We must hope that this cynical closure order proposal becomes the next of many recent Government U-turns.