Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coussins]

My Lords, I rise to add a few brief thoughts in relation to the provisions in Part 2 concerning the licensing offence of persistently selling alcohol to children. I will first declare some interests. I am a former chief executive of the Portman Group and a former member of the Alcohol Education and Research Council. I currently work as a paid adviser on corporate responsibility to two drinks companies, whose names are listed in the register. I emphasise that I provide them with non-parliamentary advice and that I have had no discussion about this Bill with either company.

The Bill would double the maximum fine imposed for persistently selling alcohol to children from £10,000 to £20,000. I have no problem in principle about a £20,000 fine for this crime. After all, it is perfectly easy to not break the law by always asking for reliable proof of age and refusing to serve any young person who does not have it. The problem is that, even if the fine were a million pounds, it would still be completely ineffective and meaningless unless the law were properly and rigorously enforced. There is no point in having a tough law if people think their chances of being caught are minimal. Under the Licensing Act 2003, the number of people taken to court for persistently selling alcohol to children has been minuscule. It was eight people in 2008, of whom seven were found guilty. In 2009, the last year for which figures are available, this fell to only four people prosecuted and convicted. There have been no occasions to date in which the full £10,000 fine has been applied, and the average fine is just £1,700, a very long way short of the proposed new maximum.

Could the Minister clarify the Government's objective in proposing this clause? If it is to deter people from the crime of selling alcohol to children, how do they expect to be taken seriously enough when the existing law is so feebly enforced? Would it not be a more effective strategy to ensure that the police, local authorities and trading standards officers have sufficient resources to conduct regular, rigorous and extensive test purchasing operations, accompanied by publicity and public education, so that licensees were in no doubt that selling to children would be extremely high risk, putting their licence, their livelihood and their reputation on the line? I am concerned that test purchasing is just the sort of multi-agency activity that will become vulnerable to budgetary cuts in the current economic climate. If the penalties, even if doubled, were never applied because the law is barely enforced, we could end up with neither the prevention that test purchasing provides nor the cure of the law for those who do offend.

I draw attention to another aspect of the existing licensing law, which is the offence of buying alcohol on behalf of children—often known as proxy purchase—where unscrupulous adults will buy alcohol to pass on to children, very often children who are not even known to them but who have stopped them in the street outside licensed premises. Even though the incidence of prosecution and conviction for this offence is still remarkably low, the numbers are much higher than for illegal sales directly to children. In 2008, 42 people were taken to court and 28 were convicted. In 2009, the figures were 29 prosecutions resulting in 25 convictions. This offence carries only a level 5 fine, which is a maximum of £5,000. Why is the Bill not also proposing to double the fine for this offence or to put it on a par with the offence of persistent direct sales to children? Many local authorities now recognise that the offence of proxy purchase is an increasingly significant source of alcohol for the under-18s and are working hard with retailers and the police in community alcohol partnerships to tackle it.

Also absent from the Bill is any proposal to increase the fine for serving customers who are already drunk. This has been an offence for years but, again, the law seems to be virtually unenforced. In 2008, 17 prosecutions were made, resulting in just seven convictions. In 2009, these figures fell to eight prosecutions and just six convictions. Most people in a town-centre pub on a Friday or Saturday night will probably have witnessed that many breaches of the law in 10 minutes. Perhaps the Minister could tell the House why the offence of serving children has been singled out for increased penalties but not the offence of serving drunks or of proxy purchase. Incidentally, I place on record my thanks to the Library researchers in your Lordships' House for providing me only yesterday with all the up-to-date figures that I have quoted this evening.

If the Government’s intention is to rebalance the Licensing Act, this must mean something in practice, not just in terms of the theory of what the law says, which remains meaningless if unenforced. Considerable rebalancing could be achieved by the effective enforcement of the existing law on selling to children and to drunks. But if more severe penalties are genuinely considered to be justified—and I am not sure yet that we have heard that convincing case—could the Government at least be even-handed and apply the penalty upgrade to all the relevant offences that I have mentioned?