Festive licensing advice

It is significant to note that both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day fall on a Wednesday and therefore, stating the “bleeding obvious” Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve fall on a Tuesday.

• Check your Premises Licences because often the hours permitted for licensable activities (sale of alcohol, provision of entertainment and provision of hot food and drink) are shorter during the week than they are at weekends, and you may get a nasty shock that the permitted hours on your Premises Licence for a Tuesday are significantly shorter than at the weekend.

• Having checked what your hours are on a Tuesday, check your Premises Licence carefully to establish whether or not you have any “special extensions” to your hours on Christmas Eve into Christmas Day, and / or New Year’s Eve into New Year's Day.  There is no legal right to trade any later on these evenings, but extensions are often built into Premises Licences to avoid the requirement to apply for a Temporary Event Notice.

• If you are looking at providing any entertainment or late night hot food or hot drink after 23:00 on these evenings, again check the hours that you are permitted to provide entertainment to on these evenings and hot food and drink because, again, these could be shorter than at the weekend.  Generally, due to the deregulation of regulated entertainment, you can provide recorded and live music inside to 23:00 for up to 500 customers if your bar is open without any express permission on your Premises Licence or a Temporary Event Notice.

• If you find that the hours on Tuesdays into Wednesdays are shorter than you would like for Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, then you are either faced with applying for a full variation to your Premises Licence (which you are still in time to do).  That is time consuming, complicated and should any objections be raised to a full variation the council may not be able to hold the hearing in time.

• On the other hand, a Temporary Event Notice is much simpler and cheaper to issue and would permit you to extend the hours for your licensable activities on the Tuesday into Wednesday on both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, but do remember you cannot have more than 499 people present at any one time covered by a Temporary Event Notice, and that number includes any staff or performers.

• Check you have not exceeded the number of Temporary Event Notices you can issue in a calendar year for the area in question (15) nor the number of days you can have in a calendar year covered by a Temporary Event Notice (21).

• The deadline for submitting an application for a Standard Temporary Event Notice for Christmas Eve is 9^th​ December 2024, and the deadline for a Late Temporary Event Notice is 16^th​ December 2024.

• It is always better to issue an application for a Standard Temporary Event Notice because should Environmental Health or the Police object to your application for a Late Temporary Event Notice then such an objection acts as a “veto” and there is no opportunity for a hearing to be convened to consider the objections.

• It is worth liaising at this stage with your local Police Officer to advise what your plans are on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve because there are likely to be a lot of premises looking for extensions on these evenings, and it is always good to pre-warn the Police and let them know what your plans are.

• Consider by way of a risk assessment (ideally recorded in writing) whether or not you need to take any particular special measures on these evenings, for instance do you require door staff, limit the time that people should be outside when you are extending hours or do you need to consider the use of any plastic glasses should you be providing entertainment where you don’t normally provide it.

• Jonathan Smith​ is a partner at Poppleston Allen​​​